HSIEH LING – YÜN

(385 to 433)

AS A PATRIARCH in one of China’s wealthiest and most powerful families, Hsieh Ling-yün was deeply involved at the highest levels in the turbulent political world for decades, but he was a mountain recluse at heart. When he was eventually exiled, finding himself in a period of quiet reflection at Yung-chia (Prosper-Perpetual), a beautiful site on the mountainous seacoast in southeast China, he underwent a Buddhist awakening (here). As a result, he abandoned politics and retired to his family home high in the mountains at Shih-ning (Origin-Serene)—a move that he speaks of like T’ao Ch’ien in his “Home Again Among Fields and Gardens,” as a return to tzu-jan (see Key Terms) when he speaks of “choosing the sacred beauty in occurrence appearing of itself” (here). There he created a revolutionary body of work that marked the beginning of the rivers-and-mountains tradition in Chinese poetry, in contrast to T’ao Ch’ien’s more domestic fields-and-gardens poetry.

The influx of Buddhist thought from India had started nearly two centuries earlier, and by Hsieh’s time it had begun intermingling with Taoist thought, a process that eventually gave rise to Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism. At the time of his awakening, Hsieh wrote an essay that is considered the earliest surviving Ch’an text in China, and its ideas provide a framework for his poetry, and for much of the rivers-and-mountains poetry to follow. It describes enlightenment as becoming the emptiness of absence (wu: see Key Terms) and, as such, mirroring presence (yu: see Key Terms) as it unfolds according to the inner pattern (li), a key concept that recurs often in Hsieh’s poetry and throughout the wilderness tradition. The philosophical meaning of li, which originally referred to the veins and markings in a precious piece of jade, is something akin to what we call natural law. It is the system of principles according to which the ten thousand things burgeon forth spontaneously from the generative void. For Hsieh, one comes to a deep understanding of li through adoration (shang), another recurring concept in the poems (here, here). Adoration denotes an aesthetic experience of the wild mountain realm as a single overwhelming whole. It is this aesthetic experience that Hsieh’s poems try to evoke in the reader, this sense of inhabiting that wilderness cosmology in the most profound way.

As with China’s great landscape paintings, Hsieh’s mountain landscapes enact “absence mirroring the whole” (Hsieh’s description of empty mind mirroring the whole), rendering a world that is profoundly spiritual and, at the same time, resolutely realistic. Here lies the difficulty Hsieh’s work presents to a reader. It is an austere poetry, nearly devoid of the human stories and poetic strategies that normally make poems engaging. You would never know from the poetry that Hsieh led a rebellion against the central government and was finally exiled to the far south, the very outskirts of the Chinese cultural sphere, where he was eventually put to death for his continuing criticism of the government. In the poetry, Hsieh’s central personal “story” is the identification of enlightenment with wilderness, and this is precisely why he has been so admired in China.

Rendering the day-to-day adventure of a person inhabiting the universe at great depth, Hsieh’s poems tend more to the descriptive and philosophical, locating human consciousness in its primal relation to the cosmos. In so doing, they replace narrow human concerns with a mirror-still mind that sees its truest self in the vast and complex dimensions of mountain wilderness. But as there was no fundamental distinction between mind and heart in ancient China (see Key Terms: hsin), this was a profound emotional experience as well, and it remains so for us today. With their grandiose language, headlong movement, and shifting perspective, Hsieh’s poems were celebrated for possessing an elemental power that captures the dynamic spirit and inner rhythms which infuse the numinous realm of rivers and mountains, and reading them requires that we participate in his mirror-still dwelling. Hsieh’s poems may seem flat at first, and very much alike—but in that dwelling, each day is another form of enlightenment, and each walk another walk at the very heart of the cosmos itself.