MEI YAO-CH’EN

(1002 to 1060)

MEI YAO-CH’EN WAS tall and good-natured, with bushy eyebrows, large ears, and red cheeks. This odd character, poor and faltering in his career, came to be called the great “mountain-opening patriarch” of Sung Dynasty poetry. Mei summarized his poetics in the term p’ing-tan, which became a touchstone for Sung poetry. P’ing-tan translates literally as “even and bland,” and as a spiritual disposition, p’ing-tan extends to other possible translations of the two terms: “ordinary/tranquil” and “blank/thinned-out-and-flavorless” (for the philosophical sense of tan, see poems here and here, where it is translated as “blank”). It is an extension of T’ao Ch’ien’s “idleness” (see Key Terms: hsien) via Po Chü-i’s “idle and bland” (hsien-tan), for a p’ing-tan poem enacts the spiritual posture of idleness in the movement of the poem rather than merely taking it as the subject of the poem. This is something Mei and other Sung poets recognized in the poems of T’ao Ch’ien, Wei Ying-wu, Po Chü-i, and others, but they made it the primary criterion for poetic insight. A p’ing-tan poem takes experience as it is, without straining to extract from it profound emotional or philosophical insights, and so tends to be realistic, plainspoken, free of exaggerated poetic sentiment, calm and subdued whatever the topic, descriptive, socially engaged.

Central to Mei’s p’ing-tan poetics is his realism. Poetry in China, as in any other culture, traditionally functioned as a privileged realm containing only the most essential of human utterances: the most complex or intense thoughts or emotions, reflections on spirituality or urgent social issues, and so on. One compelling poetic strategy is to bring seemingly unworthy material into this privileged realm, for this gives a certain eminence to the seemingly unworthy and, at the same time, challenges the idea that some things are loftier than others. In Taoist terms, this means that one is beyond choosing what to value and not value, an act that separates a person from the indifferent unfolding of tzu-jan (see Key Terms). Earlier poets (especially Tu Fu) had played on this tension to a certain extent, but Mei Yaoch’en took it as the very heart of his poetics, including the most mundane aspects of experience in his poems. This opened his poetic vision to everything equally, the lofty realm of mountain peaks and Ch’an (Zen) insight together with the unsavory everyday realm of lice and latrines.

By replacing the striving for profound and exquisite effects typical of serious poetry with an artless simplicity, Mei elevated that simplicity into complex wisdom. P’ing-tan as the embodiment of profound spiritual insight echoes back through the tradition to Chapter 35 of the Tao Te Ching (here), where tan (“bland”) appears:

Music and savory food

entice travelers to stop,

but the Way uttered forth

isn’t even the thinnest of bland flavors.

So p’ing-tan means moving in profound harmony with the unfolding of Way (natural process) in a poem: already being Way, rather than writing poems that try to make one a part of it. And as in the work of T’ao Ch’ien, whom Mei and later Sung poets recognized as the first master of p’ing-tan, however unassuming this poetic Way may appear, it reflects a deep wisdom that comes only after long cultivation.