Tang Poetry Masters Series – Wang Wei and his Moment of Zen

Today, the podcast gets to Wang Wei and a Buddhist poem he wrote with the eye of a painter. Wang Wei is the least popular of the three High Tang poets, at least, since the Song Dynasty, but, back in the day, he was the most popular, more popular than Li Bai and Du Fu. We’ll travel to his empty mountain and see if we aren’t too disturbed by women doing the laundry to learn a bit about Chinese poetry. 

My Translation:

Living in the Mountains on the Cusp of Fall

Empty mountain after a new rain, 

The air is late, fall is coming

The bright moon shines amid the pines,

the clear stream’s water flows over a rock. 

Hubbub in the bamboo, the washing lady returning

the fishing boat pushing through lotuses. 

And then it happens that the flowers of spring die,

Me, a hermit, I can hang here for a while.

Original

山居秋暝

空山新雨後，天氣晚來秋。 明月松間照，清泉石上流。 竹喧歸浣女，蓮動下漁舟。 隨意春芳歇，王孫自可留。

Show Transcript (AI Generated)”

 My name is Lee Moore and this is the Chinese Literature podcast. Okay. Last time I did a poem from Levi, the Greatest Tongue Dynasty poet. Arguably, there’s a debate we talked about that debate, that poem by Levi was featured in my book, China’s Backstory, the History Beijing doesn’t want you to read. I’m sure y’all are getting tired of me promoting the book.

Sorry about that. Today we’re going to look at Wong Way, another tongue poet. It’s been almost five years since the podcast took on Wong Way on March 19th, 2021. Me and Rahm, the podcast co-founder who’s now living in France. We did a podcast related to Wong Way. I think that’s been long enough. We really need to do another episode on Wong.

So as a part of this series on the three Greatest Tongue poets, here is a little bit about Wong Way. One of his poems. So today, when Chinese folks talk about tongue dynasty poetry, WWE is usually considered the third poet, and he’s a distant third behind Levi and Dufu. No one today is saying WWE is the greatest tongue poet ever.

No one says that today. But during their lifetimes, Wong wayI was actually more famous than either Levi or Dufu Wong wayI. He was born in six ninety nine ad he died in 7 61. Ad Levi is almost exactly the same. He’s born in seven oh one ad dies in 7 62. Ad Dfu is a little bit younger. He is born in seven 12 ad and dies in seven 70 a d.

While these three figures were alive, you could have done a straw poll amongst Tong Dynasty poetry readers and Wong wayI would’ve won the straw poll. Every time. It really wasn’t until about a century after they were at their prime, sometime in the middle of the eight hundreds ad that two literary critics, Hannu and y, uh, canonized, Levi and Dufu as the greatest poets of.

The Tong Dynasty, Wong wayI. Today. He’s regarded as not as cool as Levi and not as great as Dufu. But I don’t know, having done the research for this podcast, I actually think he’s pretty cool. And he’s obviously very in influential. A little bit about Wong Way’s background. He was born in a very upper class situation in Xi.

He became famous, fairly young for his poetry and his musical. Ability. He passed the civil service exam in 7 21 at the age of 22 with a top score. And like everybody in tongue China, the an Luan rebellion starting in 7 55 ad influence Wong Way profoundly WWE was in the Capitol Chang. When the rebels captured the city, Wong Wei himself was captured and he died before the rebellion fizzled out.

Wong Wei is known for two things. First that he was. In addition to being a great poet and a good musician, he was also a great painter. As far as I know, we don’t today have any of his paintings, but he was regarded as a master painter. In the T dynasty and when we read his poetry, you can feel the painter in his poetry, something that’s gonna be true in the the poem that we’re gonna get into in a minute.

His poems are almost imagistic. There’s a temptation to read them as if nothing’s happened. They’re just these still images where we see a moment in time and very. Little action. There is action in Wong Way’s, poetry, even if it’s a bit understated compared to Levi and Dufus poetry. But that view, that Wong Hui is, this Masistic poet is very influential.

Uh, it actually influenced, uh, the art theories of Ernest Osa. Uh, who’s this, who’s this American art historian who’s a specialist on Japanese art, but he also loved one way. Wong Wei is very influential in Japanese art, and Ernest Osa wrote a lot about Wong Wei and his poetry and artistry. So thing number one, you need to know about Wong Hui.

He’s a great painter and his poetry kind of reads like a painting thing. Two, you need to know. Wong Way is known for his distinctly Buddhist outlook. His poetry has this very zen feel to it. He’s been called the Poet Buddha. Again, that’s. True of this poem that we’re gonna look at today. Now, let me say something about the word zen.

So Zi is of course a Japanese word, but it’s just the Japanese pronunciation of a word that in Mandarin today is pronounced chan. So in Japan you have Zi Buddhism. In China, you have Chan Buddhism and Chinese nationalists would say that we should say Chan Buddhism and not Zen Buddhism, but they’re very similar.

You have two separate. But very closely connected discussions of Buddhism going on in Chan circles in China and zen circles in Japan. They’re feeding off of each other. Japan initially, all of its ideas about Zen from Chan Buddhist discussions going on in China. They build upon those and they build their own ideas, but they’re still connected to the Chinese ideas, which is a long way of saying Chan Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, basically the same thing, just.

Different pronunciations are the same word in Mandarin and Japanese. So Wong Way’s poetry has this very meditative zen sense to it. This plays into this imagistic tendencies of Wong wayI. There’s this lingering to much of Wong Way’s, Ooh, where it feels like we’re just in this poem, watching, observing, meditating on an image.

And that’s a great place to turn. Today’s poem, the title of today’s poem is Living in the Mountains. On the cusp of fall. It was probably written in 7 36 ad, and here is my translation of that poem. Empty Mountain. After a new rain, evenings coming, it feels like fall is coming. The bright moon shines amid the pines, the clear streams water.

Flows over a rock noise in the bamboo, the washing lady returning the fish boats drift through lotuses, and then it happens that the flowers of spring die me a hermit. I can hang here for a while. My translation. I’ll post the translation along with the original poem on the podcast website, chinese literature podcast.com.

Let’s see if we can break this poem down. The first couplet, that is the first two lines. When I read that first line, empty mountain after a New Rain. My first question is, what is an empty mountain? The word here is Khun. Uh, those are the first two words of the poem in Chinese. What does it mean to have an empty mountain?

Empty of what? Empty of trees. Empty of people. Empty of noise. Based on the rest of the poem. I think any of these are interpretations of what empty mountain means. What it is empty of. They’re viable. They could be what he is going for. Another way to interpret the phrase empty mountain is that the mountain is empty of mountainous.

That this is not a real mountain, but an imagined mountain. Remember, one way he’s heavily influenced by Zen Buddhist thinking, Sunata is the Indian concept in Buddhism that all things in the world are empty, that all things are devoid of inequalities, and your perception of anything other than emptiness is an illusion.

What’s the Chinese word for the Buddhist concept of sunata? That is empty. The word that’s used right here by won way. So maybe he’s talking about empty of trees. Maybe he’s talking about this mountain being empty of people. But another way to think about it is just in a zen way. This mountain is. Empty of mountainous Wong Way is considered number three in the top three tongue poets.

But even in these first two words, we haven’t done anything other than the first two words of the poem. Even in these first two words, there’s a lot to unpack. So pretty cool poet. Let’s keep going. So this empty mountain, empty of whatever it is, we don’t know. We have this rain that comes. Then we are looking on the scene afterwards as if everything is washed clean, it’s a clean slate, the air is late, fall is coming.

And I have to say this line was the hardest line to translate. I read some of the commentaries on it. I looked at some translations of this line from classical Chinese into modern Chinese and also from classical Chinese into English. And I’m still struggling with my translation of this, but I think that the translation that I have comes closest to won way’s original.

Evenings coming. It feels like fall is coming. Of course, fall is the season when things die, leaves fall, crops are harvested. Winter the killing season is coming. There’s something ominous about this line. It feels like fall is coming, evenings coming. It feels like fall is coming. But then we have lines three and lines four of the poem, which are really quite bright and strong.

The bright moon shines amid the pines. The moon is penetrating the pine trees, and you should know whenever you see pine trees in a Chinese painting or in a Chinese poem, they’re probably symbols of resiliency. The pine trees keeps its leaves even as other trees give up their leaves. Something similar is going on in line four.

The clear streams, water flows over a rock. So this rock seems to be resisting the punching erosive force of the water flowing over it. Now again, these first four lines, nothing has happened. It’s all just image. We’re seeing something that looks like a painting. That’s been written down. Nothing happens, nothing occurs, but we have this scene, the scene is set.

There’s this theological question that’s put out there. What does emptiness mean in this setting? And it seems like the fact that nothing happens in the first half of this poem. May relate to that question of what is empty about the empty mountain. That all changes at the beginning of the second half of the poem.

The emptiness disappears. You have this hubbub in the bamboo, the washing ladies are returning. Then you have fishing boats pushing through lotuses. Lotuses are important. Flowers and Buddhism symbolizing purity and divinity. So clearly more symbolism going on here. These fishermen who are just going after their catch are.

Pushing these lotus flowers, these symbols of, of. A good Buddhist around. Something’s happening here. I’m not sure how to interpret it, but I’m gonna say that this is clearly a Buddhist image. So these two lines, line lines five and six, there’s the sense that this tranquil scene where the hermit came out of his HUD after the rain, nothing says that, but that’s just kind of the image that I get of this hermit coming out of the mound after the rain and seeing the empty mound.

All that tranquility has been interrupted in lines five and line six, the world. Has entered and is distracting. The poet, narrator, whatever you wanna call him from his tranquility. Line seven. We circle back to that earlier theme of death in autumn. The poet says that the flowers of spring are dying. And then there’s that last line, the poet says.

He can stick around here for a while. When I first tried to translate this poem, I had no idea what this line was getting at until I posted my translation on a subreddit. So if, if, you know, uh, the, the internet platforms, reddit.com, they have a subreddit called r slash classical Chinese, where I posted my translation, and in it someone pointed out.

That this is actually an illusion to Chua or the songs of Chu. The songs of Chu is the second great Chinese poetry collection. The first being the Book of songs. The book of poems, something like that. And that’s really the first collection of, of Chinese poetry that we have. The Chua, the songs of Chu is the second collection, and it embodies this.

Other tradition, this alternate tradition of Chinese poetry, and someone who read my poem on the that subreddit, which is a great place to go if you’re interested in doing high level ch classical Chinese work. It’s basically like having a PhD level seminar with about 2000 people, some of whom are willing to check your translations and provide you with advice.

So one of the people who read my poem pointed out, this is an allusion to the songs of Chu and in the songs of Chu after the Flowers. Of Spring die off. The poet says, Hey, I’m gonna take off here. Wong wayI is actually taking that verdict and reversing it. He’s saying, actually, I’m gonna hang out here for a little while.

I’m good with hanging out here. So there’s also this generations long conversation going on in this poem. Wong wayI is actually reversing. What the poet narrator of the songs of Chu did. Okay? So that’s a kind of line by line analysis of what’s actually going on in the poems. Back to broader questions. My question, reading this poem, and I’m, I’ll just put my cards on this table.

I’m reading this poem as a Buddhist poem, though you don’t have to do that. You could read this ignoring the Buddhist elements, and still not be too far off the mark. If you take me seriously, which you shouldn’t, but let’s pretend like you are. Try and imagine this is a primarily a Buddhist poem. You have this sense in the first half of the poem of tranquility.

There is this recognition that the mountain is empty, a mountain, it’s empty of people, it’s empty of noise. There’s no hubbub. Maybe it’s even empty of the mountainous itself. It’s evacuated of all things of this world. The poet here finds tranquility and the coolness of air, the moonlight. Penetrating these long suffering pines and the spring water flowing over rocks, but that tranquility is interrupted and washing.

Women come in making a ruckus in the bamboo. The fishermen is sailing through the lotus’s. When the poet says he’s fine hanging out here for a while, is he saying he’s okay with his tranquil scene of the first half of the poem, or is he okay with the fact that his tranquility and the meditation that we assume he’s doing is being interrupted by these things of this world?

I don’t think the poem offers a clear answer. Instead, it leaves both interpretations open to the reader. Okay, I think this is a good place to call it. Let me know what you think of the poem. Email me at Chinese literature podcast@gmail.com. If you’re interested, check out my book, China’s backstory, the history of Beijing.

Doesn’t want you to read. There are lots of poems in there. This one’s not in there, but lots of other good ones are. And of course, along with this is the history behind the four most important topics in China related news. Taiwan Xinjiang, the Chinese economy in Hong Kong. And I think that’s enough of me banging on.

I’m gonna go off to my Hermitage in the mountain for a couple of weeks, hopefully not as long as the previous break I took over the new year. And when I return, the rain will wash everything away and hopefully the washing women won’t be. Distracting me from the work that I should be doing on the podcast.

My name is Lee Moore and this is the Chinese Literature podcast.