T’AO CH’IEN

(365 to 427)

T’AO CH’IEN (T’ao Yüan-ming) was the first writer to make a fully achieved poetry of his natural voice and immediate experience, thereby creating the personal lyricism that became the hallmark of Chinese poetry. So T’ao Ch’ien effectively stands at the head of the great Chinese poetic tradition like a revered grandfather: profoundly wise, self-possessed, quiet, comforting.

Born into the educated aristocracy, T’ao was expected to take his proper place in the Confucian order by serving in the government. Accordingly, he held a number of government positions. But he had little patience for the constraints of official life, and little interest in its superficial rewards, so he finally broke free and returned to the life of a recluse-farmer on the family farm at his ancestral village of Ch’ai-sang (Mulberry-Bramble), just northwest of the famous Thatch-Hut (Lu) Mountain (see note here). It should be noted, however, that this was not a romantic return to the bucolic but the choice of a life in which the spiritual ecology of tzu-jan (“occurrence appearing of itself”; see Key Terms) is the very texture of everyday experience, as he says at the end of the first section in his “Home Again Among Fields and Gardens,” one of several poems about quitting his job and returning home.

That outline of T’ao Ch’ien’s life became a central myth in the Chinese tradition: artist-intellectuals over millennia admired and imitated the way T’ao lived out his life as a recluse, though it meant enduring considerable poverty and hardship (one poem tells of him going into a village to beg for food). And indeed, T’ao’s commitment to the recluse life went so deep that he chose Ch’ien (“concealed,” “hidden,” and so “recluse”) as his literary name: Recluse T’ao.

This commitment, so common among China’s poets, was the one honorable alternative to government service for the artist-intellectual class. Already an ancient tradition by T’ao Ch’ien’s time, it was a complex political and personal gesture. Politically, it represented a criticism of the government in power, a model of authenticity and simplicity for those in government whose vanity and greed were so destructive, and a kind of solidarity with their victims among the common people. Personally, retirement represented a commitment to a more spiritually fulfilling life, in which one inhabited the Taoist/Ch’an wilderness cosmology (see introduction) in the most immediate, day-to-day way. Such a recluse life did not normally mean enduring the Spartan existence of an ascetic hermit: it was considered the ideal situation for living a broadly civilized existence and typically included, along with the wonders of mountain wilderness, a relatively comfortable house, a substantial library, family, friends. And finally, this personal fulfillment had its political dimensions, for the wisdom cultivated in such a life was considered essential to sage governing.

The landscape tradition in Chinese poetry is sometimes divided into two branches: fields-and-gardens, which emphasizes the more domestic aspects of landscape, and rivers-and-mountains, which emphasizes the wilder aspects. T’ao Ch’ien is traditionally spoken of as the founder of fields-and-gardens poetry, in contrast to his contemporary Hsieh Ling-yün, founder of rivers-and-mountains poetry. But there is no fundamental distinction between the two: both embody the Taoist cosmology that essentially is the Chinese wilderness, and as rivers-and-mountains is the broader context within which fields-and-gardens operates, it seems more accurate to speak of both modes together as a single rivers-and-mountains poetry. And this rivers-and-mountains framework is at the heart of virtually all poetic thinking in the centuries to follow. The more domestic feel of T’ao Ch’ien’s poems is simply a reflection of his profound contentment. Unlike Hsieh Ling-yün, whose poems are animated by the need to establish an enlightened relationship with a grand alpine wilderness, T’ao effortlessly lived everyday life on a mountain farm as an utterly sufficient experience of dwelling.

T’ao’s poems initiated the intimate sense of belonging to natural process that shapes the Chinese poetic sensibility. And though this dwelling means confronting death and the existential realities of human experience without delusion, a central preoccupation in T’ao Ch’ien and all Chinese poets, the spiritual ecology of tzu-jan provided ample solace. If T’ao’s poems seem bland, a quality much admired in them by the Sung Dynasty poets, it’s because they are never animated by the struggle for understanding. Instead, they always begin with the deepest wisdom.