WANG AN-SHIH

(1021 to 1086)

WANG AN-SHIH WAS a remarkable figure—not only one of the great Sung Dynasty poets but also the most influential and controversial statesman of his time. The deep commitment felt by intellectuals in ancient China to both the Confucian realm of social responsibility and the Taoist realm of spiritual self-cultivation gave rise to a recluse ideal that answered both of these imperatives. In one mythic version of this ideal, a sage recluse living contentedly in the mountains recognizes that the nation is in crisis and needs his wisdom. He reluctantly joins the government after being summoned by the emperor, resolves the crisis, and then, having no interest in the wealth and renown associated with that life, returns to cultivate his simple life of spiritual depth in the mountains. This ideal was enacted by countless intellectuals in ancient China, though in a more realistic form. They devoted themselves to public service, always watching for a chance to spend time in mountain seclusion, often at Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist monasteries, and then at some point retired permanently from government service to live as recluses. Wang An-shih was one of the great exemplars of this recluse ideal. A devoted civil servant, frugal almost to a fault and completely immune, even hostile, to the grandeur of high office and political power, Wang rose to no less a rank than prime minister. As prime minister, he instituted a controversial system of radically egalitarian social reforms in an effort to improve the lives of China’s dispossessed peasants. And once these reforms were securely in place, he left the government in the hands of trusted compatriots and retired to a reclusive life in the countryside near Chiang-ning (River-Serene), on the south shore of the Yangtze River.

It was after his retirement that Wang wrote the poems on which his reputation is based. He spent those later years practicing Ch’an Buddhism and wandering the mountains around his home, a Taoist/Ch’an cultivation of the rivers-and-mountains realm that shapes his poems. But however profound the Ch’an wisdom in Wang’s late poetry, it was haunted by the failure of his political dream. Wang’s compatriots eventually lost power in government, and he had to watch helplessly as conservative elements dismantled the social reforms he had worked so hard to put in place.

In dramatic contrast to his stature as the most powerful statesman in China, Wang’s position as one of the Sung Dynasty’s greatest poets is largely based on the short landscape poems that he wrote during these years, most notably quatrains (chüeh-chu), and it is those poems that are represented in this selection. The quatrain form was ideal for the Sung’s poetics of artlessness. The larger the poem, the larger the interpretive structure it imposes on the landscape of reality. Such is the case in the West, where a human-centered culture has meant that great poems tend to be large, even epic, in their proportions. In contrast, China’s great poetry tends to be quite short. As the briefest of China’s poetic forms, the Ch’aninspired quatrain does not impose a structure on the world so much as open an emptiness, a place in consciousness to let that world enter. And the fact that a man of such majestic public stature would focus on quatrains is an indication of the grandeur inherent in that humble gesture.