China and the West

Snyder, Gary. Wild in China [ID D29194].
Hsie's shoes.
The people of mainstream China call themselves "Han" people, even today. The term is contrasted with any and all "ethnic" groupings—such as the people of the south known as the Yiieh (modern Viet of Vietnam), who "cut their hair short and tattooed themselves". (These days, cadres organizing and educating in Tibet who are too grossly contemptuous of local customs might be sent back labeled "Han chauvinists".)
Even in the fourth century A.D. we can assume that the forests and agriculturally marginal areas of greater China were inhabited, even if thinly, by either backwoods Han people or tribal people.
The post-Han "Six Dynasties" period witnessed a flourishing back-to- nature movement from within die ruling gentry class, a "nature" that extended from the fields and gardens of the suburbs to the really deep hills. Many people who might in less turbulent times have exercised their class prerogative of administrative employment turned instead toward an idea of purity and simplicity. Not all were wealthy or self-indulgent. The poet Tao Yuan-ming (Tao Ch'ien) (365-427) was a minor official whose early retirement to a small farm was his own choice. His poems are still the standard of a certain quietness, openness, emptiness, and also human frankness and frailty in the confusions of farm, family, and wine, that much later Chinese poetry aspires to. The Taoist idea of being nobody in the world, "behind instead of in front", gave strength to those who often must have missed the social life of their urban literati friends as they sat up late reading and drinking alone in their estates or homesteads out amongst the peasants.
Some of the Han Dynasty poems portray the wild mountain world as horrible and scary. As Burton Watson points out, a gradual shift in the mode of seeing nature took place. In the songs of die Classic of Songs, which reflect so much of the life of the people, plants were named specifically; die scene was the ground and brush right before one—where one danced or harvested. By the Six Dynasties, the view moved back and became more panoramic. A case in point in the work of the poet Hsieh Ling-yün (385-433)—who has only a few rare poetic ancestors in earlier China. His aristocratic family had moved south, and he grew up in a biome that would have been considered exotic and barbarous by Confucius.
Hsieh was a lover of mountains. His fascination with the densely wooded, steep hills of South China (peaking between 4,000 and 6,000 feet) took him on long climbs and rambles, including one month-long trail-cutting exploration. He combined in himself would-be Taoist recluse and vigorous wilderness adventurer. An early follower of Buddhism (a new thing at that time, limited to upper-class circles), he wrote an essay expounding "instant enlightenment".
Hsieh's ambivalent pursuit of success in politics ended when he was ban-ished to a minor position in a remote south coast town; he soon resigned totally from the administration and moved to a run-down family estate in the hills southeast of present-day Hangchow. The place and life there is detailed in his long fu ("prose poem") called Living in the Mountains. The farther and nearer landscapes are described in detail. The fish, birds, plants, and mammals are listed. The whole is seen as an ideal place for pursuing Taoist and Buddhist meditations. Thus,
I cast no lines for fish.
I spread no nets for hare.
I have no use for barbed shafts.
Who would set out rabbit snares or fish traps?
And he says he "awoke to the complete propriety of loving what lives". Later in the poetical essay he describes his workers, "felling trees; they clear the thorns and cut bamboo", and sundry bark and reed and rush gathering activities; and charcoal-making. This faint contradiction, intensified later in history, can become a major problem: individual animals' lives are carefully spared, while the habitat that sustains them is heedlessly destroyed.
Hsieh is a puzzle. Arrogant and overbearing at court, he made enemies there. Intensely intellectual as a Buddhist, and careless of the needs or feelings of local people, he managed to get intrigued into a charge of rebellion, and was beheaded in the marketplace. Hsieh was probably already out of place in China—he should have joined the Rock Mountain Fur Company and gone out to be a trapper. He was "wild", and as an aristocrat that took some contradictory and nasty turns. But he opened up the landscape—"mountains and waters"—to the poetic consciousness for all time, and he was a fine poet.
Mountains were always foci of spirit power in China, beginning perhaps as habitat for the hsien, a shaman who gained "power" in the hills. Later they became a place of retreat for the Taoist practitioner of "harmonizing with the Way" and again as sites for Buddhist monasteries. Hsieh Ling-yün plunged into the watercourses and thickets, camped in the heights alone, walked all night in the moonlight. These years and energies lie behind what we now take to be the Chinese sense of nature as reflected in art. Hsieh is also remembered as the inventor of a unique mountaineering shoe or clog—no one is quite sure how it looked.

Oxchead Mountain
Buddhism began and remains (at center) a set of ethical observances and meditation disciplines by means of which hard-working human beings can win through to self-realization and understanding of the way of existence. This effort is instructed by the content of Shakyamuni's enlightenment experience: a realization that all things are co-arising, mutually causing and being caused, 'empty' and without 'self'.
In the time of the historical Buddha Gautama Shakyamuni, the community or Sangha of Buddhists was an order of monks and nuns who had renounced the world. It was held that one could not really achieve enlightenment as a householder. Laypersons might build up a store of good merit by helping the Buddhist Order, and living virtuous lives, but the deeper experiences were not for them.
The expansion of the concept of Sangha, or Community, is a key theme in the history of Buddhism. In the Mahayana, or 'Great Vehicle' branch, lay¬men and women are also considered worthy aspirants and almost equal practicers with monks, or, at the very least, theoretically capable of achieving enlightenment while living the householder's life. The inherent capacity to achieve enlightenment is called 'Buddha-nature'. At one stage in Buddhist thought (second century AD India roughly), it was held that not quite all human beings had the capacity. Those excluded, called 'icchantikas', were (to judge by description) tribal and aboriginal people who live by hunting.
Some early Chinese Buddhist thinkers were troubled by this. In another century or so, other Indian Buddhist texts were brought to China that taught that salvation was accessible not only to all human beings but to all sentient beings, vindicating the Chinese thinkers. This was commonly understood to mean that animals and even plants are part of the Mahayana drama, working out their karma through countless existences, up to the point of being born into a human body. It was popularly assumed that a human body was a pre-requisite to Buddhist practise.
The eighth century monk Chan-jan, of the T'ien T'ai sect, was one of the first to argue the final step. He concluded that non-sentient beings also have the Buddha-nature. 'Therefore we may know that the single mind of a single particle of dust comprises the mind-nature of all sentient beings and Buddhas' and 'The man who is of all-round perfection, knows from beginning to end that Truth is not dual and that no objects exist apart from Mind. Who then, is 'animate' and who 'inanimate'? Within the Assembly of the Lotus, all are present without division'.
The Chinese philosophical appreciation of the natural world as the visible manifestation of the Tao made a happy match with Indian Mahayana eschatology, Chinese Buddhists could say, these beautiful rivers and mountains are Nirvana in the here and now. Buddhists located themselves on famous old numinous mountains, or opened up wilderness for new monasteries. In Ch'an (Zen) the masters were commonly known by the name of the mountain they lived and taught on. An early line of Ch'an, which died out in the eighth century, was called the 'Oxhead mountain' sect. These monks did more than just admire the scenery — they were on intimate terms with the local wildlife, including tigers. The Oxhead Master Tao Lin built a nest in a tree for his meditation. Sitting up in it, he once had a conversation with the poet Po Chü-i : 'Isn't it dangerous up there ?' Po asked, in his Government Official's robes. 'Where you are is far more dangersou' was Tao-Lin's response. In this branch of Ch'an (and no other ever) when monks died, their bodies were left out in the forest for the animals to consume. It's also said, they had a great sense of humour.

The Chase in the Park
By Shang dynasty times hunting had already become an upper-class sport. The old hunters' gratitude for the food received, or concern for the spirits of the dead game, had evaporated. Hunting had become 'the chase'—an expensive group activity requiring beaters who drove the game toward the waiting aristocrats who pursued and shot it with bows from chariots or horseback. Large-scale exercises of this sort were considered good training for warfare. They were followed by feasts with musicians, and slender dancers wearing diaphanous gowns. Warfare and hunting are popularly thought to be similar in spirit, and in post-civilized times this has often been the case. In hunting and gathering cultures the delicacy of preparation, and the care surrounding the act of taking life, puts hunting on a different level.
Chinese culture is strikingly free from food taboos, and the upper-class cuisine is the most adventurous in the world. Even so, from Shang times on, meat was a luxury that the common people could seldom afford. Furs and feathers of animals were vastly used in the costuming of officials. Idealized instructions can be found in the Li Chi or 'Collected Rituals', which was put together in the Han dynasty.
When a ruler wore the robe of white fox fur, he wore one of embroidered silk over it to display it. When the guards on the right of the ruler wore tigers' fur, those on the left wore wolves' fur. An ordinary officer did not wear the fur of the white fox. Great officers wore the fur of the blue fox, with sleeves of leopard fur, and over it a jacket of dark-colored silk to display it; with fawn’s fur they used cuffs of the black wild dog, with a jacket of bluish yellow silk, to display it. . .
Han dynasty ritualism has an oddly alienated quality. The nature phi losophy and the plant and mineral experimentation of the Taoists, or the direct knowledge of the natural world necessary to the life of working people, is far from the highly ordered ceremoniousness that surrounded government bureaus and the court. The Han upper class did admire those who were skilled and bold in gambling for power, but always against a background of strict propriety. Taking animal lives is easier for those accustomed to taking human life. Respect for nature comes with knowledge and contact, but attention to the observable order of nature is rarely practiced by those who think that wealth is purely a creation of human organization, labor, or ingenuity.
Still, all through history, the emperor continued to offer sacrifices to the Earth, to Heaven, and to the great mountains and rivers of the land. Calamitous floods, or prolonged drought, would bring the state up short, and the emperor himself would have to ask if he had somehow offended heaven. Whatever these offenses might be, it doesn’t seem that destruction of wildlife habitat or waste of animal or human lives, or deforestation, was perceived as a possible offense against the unearthly power of T'ien (sky or heaven). The wealthy governors and emperors thus maintained large hunting parks. Edward Schafer’s study of 'Hunting Parks in China' (the source for all this information) suggests that they evolved from Bronze Age preserves established originally to continue supplying certain wild species for the periodic state sacrifices; species whose use had been established when their numbers were far greater. By the Chou dynasty such preserves were a place for sport and recreation that might contain exotic species as well as native animals, with artificial lakes and ponds, stables, hunting lodges, and pleasure pavilions. They were an ideal 'Beheading, or being boiled alive, was the fate of those who lost in the game of power.
place to lodge and entertain visiting heads of state. The park of the Han emperor Wu Ti, 'The Supreme Forest', was about forty by twenty miles in size and contained thirty-six detached palaces and lodges. Within its varied terrain it contained both native and exotic species of fish, birds, amphibians, and mammals. Rivers were stocked with giant softshell turtle and alligator as well as sturgeon and other fish. Caribous, sambars, rhinoceroses, and elephants were symbolically (and perhaps practically) located in the 'south' of the preserve, and wild horses and yaks in the 'north'. 'The ground of the Supreme Forest was prepared for the great winter hunt by the royal foresters. They burned clear a large open space and cut away brambles. Beaters, hunters, and athletes readied themselves for the onslaughts of wild beasts and forest demons with spells and peri¬apts. When the royal party arrived, the birds and beasts were driven into the cleared areas, and the slaughter began:
A wind of feathers, a rain of blood,
Sprinkled the countryside, covered the sky.
Some advisors openly criticized parks as wasteful and politically inexpedient. In Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju's fu on 'The Supreme Forest' the Emperor is urged to terminate the park and open it to the people for cultivation and firewood and fishing. It's interesting to note that no middle course is considered, such as keeping a wildlife preserve for its own natural, nou-menal, or scientific interest. The virtuous alternative is to turn it over entirely to human use.
(No comparison could be made between Chinese hunting park wantonness and the destruction of animal, not to mention human, life that took place in the Roman Arena. There thousands of animals might be destroyed in a few days. The constant supplying of animals to the Arena made extinct numerous species throughout the Mediterranean basin.)
Hunting parks survived into T'ang times and later, but new ideas from Buddhism or old ideas revived from Taoism stressing compassion for all creatures enveloped them in a mist of moral doubt. T'ang was the high point of much poetry, and of Ch'an Buddhist creativity, but it must be remembered that it was not peopled by effete scholars in flowing robes who detested violence. It was a time of hardy Northern-derived gentry who were skilled horsepersons and archers and falconers, hard drinkers and fighters. Women were much freer then, and the custom of bound feet was yet to come. These aristocrats backed Buddhism, in part from a cos¬mopolitan interest in the cultural and trade exchanges possible with the little nations of Central Asia, but they kept their robust habits. An aristocratic maiden was once sought out by a suitor who was told by her parents she'd gone out hunting on horseback. That probably never happened again after T'ang.

Empty mountain.
China is wide. Travel was mostly on foot, maybe with a packhorse, sometimes also a riding horse. In the lowlands a network of canals provided channels for slow-moving passenger boats as well as freight barges. Travelers moved by boat on the big rivers, slowly and laboriously upstream, pulled by men on shore, and swiftly and boisterously back down. Boats sailed across the lakes and slow-moving lower river reaches. Horse and ox carts moved men and materials in the alluvial plains and rolling hills. In the mountains and deserts, long caravans of pack animals moved the goods of empire.
Government officials were accustomed to traveling weeks or even months to a new appointment, with their whole family. Buddhist monks and Taoist wanderers had a tradition of freely walking for months or years on end. In times of turmoil whole populations of provinces, and contending armies, might be tangled in frenzied travel on the paths and waterways. It was said, "If a man has his heart set on great things 10,000 li are his front yard". So the people of the watersheds of the Yang and Huang rivers came to know the shape of their territory.
The officials and monks (and most poets were one or the other) were an especially mobile group of literate people. Travelers' prose or rhymed-prose descriptions of landscapes were ingenious in evoking the complexity of gorges and mountains. Regional geographies with detailed accounts of local biomes were encouraged. Hsieh Ling-yün’s fu on his mountain place is descriptive and didactic—but his poems in the shih (lyric) form already manifest the quiet intensity that becomes the definitive quality of Chinese shih poetry in its greatest creative T'ang and Sung Dynasty phases.
The Chinese and Japanese traditions carry within them the most sensitive, mind-deepening poetry of the natural world ever written by civilized people. Because these poets were men and women who dealt with budgets, taxes, penal systems, and the overthrow of governments, they had a heart-wrenching grasp of the contradictions that confront those who love the natural world and are yet tied to die civilized. This must be one reason why Chinese poetry is so widely appreciated by contemporary Occidentals.
Yet it's hard to pin down what a "Chinese nature poem" might be, and why it is so effective. They are not really about landscapes or scenery. Space of distant hills becomes space in life; a condition the poet-critic Lu Chi called "calm transparency". Mountains and rivers were seen to be the visible expression of cosmic principles; the cosmic principles go back into silence, non-being, emptiness; a Nothing that can produce the ten thousand things, and the ten thousand things will have that marvelous emptiness still at the center. So the poems are also "silent". Much is left unsaid, and the reverberation or mirroring—a flight of birds across the mind of the sky—leaves an afterimage to be savored, and finally leaves no trace. The Chinese poetic tradition is also where human emotions are revealed; where a still official can be vulnerable and frail. Lu Chi [Lu Ji] says poetry starts with a lament for fleeting life, and regard for the myriad growing things—taking thought of the great virtuous deeds of people past, and the necessity of making "maps" for the future. Chinese poetry steps out of narrow human-centered affairs into a big-spirited world of long time, long views, and natural processes; and comes back to a brief moment in a small house by a fence.
The strain of nostalgia for the self-contained hard-working but satisfying life of the farmer goes along somehow with delight in jumbled gorges. Nature is finally not a "wilderness" but a habitat, the best of habitats, a place where you not only practice meditation or strive for a vision, but grow vegetables, play games with the children, and drink wine with friends. In this there is a politics of a special order—the Chinese nature poet is harking back to the Neolithic village, never forgotten and constantly returned to mind by the Taoist classics—as a model for a better way of life. Sectarian Taoism and its secret societies fermented a number of armed peasant uprisings through history that unwittingly had "Neolithic" on their standards. "Playing with your grandchildren"—"growing chrysanthemums"—"watching the white clouds"—are phrases from a dream of pre-feudal or post-revolutionary society.
Chinese poets of these centuries were not biologists or primitive hunters, though, and their poetics did not lead them to certain precisions. What they found were landscapes to match inner moods—and a deep sense of reverence for this mystery of a real world. In Burton Watson's analysis of nature imagery in T'ang poems he finds more references to non-living phenomena than living, and more than half of those looking upward to sky, weather, wind, clouds, and moon. Downward, rivers, waters, and mountains predominate. Among living things willow and pine are the most-mentioned trees, but the specific names of herbaceous plants and flowers are few—with "flowers" usually meaning the blossoms of trees like cherry or peach. Wild goose is the most common bird associated with being separated from a friend; and monkey the most common mammal—because of its mournful cry. Cicada and moth are the most common insects. Many natural references, then, are used for their symbolic or customary human associations, and not for intrinsic natural qualities. No doubt the oral poetry of a pre-literate people will have more acquaintance with the actual living creatures as numinous intelligences in furry or scaly bodies. But this does not detract from what the Chinese poems are, highly disciplined and formal poems that open us to the dilemma of having "regard for the myriad growing things" while being literate monks or administrators or wives of officials in the world's first "great society". The reign of the Emperor HsuanTsung [Xuanzong] (712-756) is considered one of the high points of Chinese cultural history: the poets Wang Wei, Li Po [Li Bo], and Tu Fu [Du Fu] were at the height of their powers during those years, and so were the brilliant and influential Ch'an Masters Shen-hui, Nan-yüeh, Ma-tsu, and Po-chang. The national population may have been as high as 60 million.
I first came onto Chinese poems in translation at 19, when my ideal of nature was a 45-degree ice slope on a volcano, or an absolutely virgin rain forest. They helped me to "see" fields, farms, tangles of brush, the azaleas in the back of an old brick apartment. They freed me from excessive attachment to wild mountains, with their way of suggesting that even the wildest hills are places where people, also, live.
Empty mountains:
no one to be seen,
Yet—hear—
human sounds and echoes.
Returning sunlight
enters the dark woods;
Again shining
on green moss, above.
Wang Wei