China and the West

Po, Chü-i [Bo, Juyi]. The selected poems of Po Chü-i. Transl. by David Hinton. [ID D32251].
Introduction : On Po Chü-i. [Auszüge].
In The Analects, Confucius says: "There are three hundred songs in The Book of Songs, but this one phrase tells it all: thoughts never twisty " (II.2). The Book of Songs is the ancient source from which the Chinese poetic tradition flows, and thoughts never twisty may very well describe the essence of the entire tradition as well, for it is a tradition that consistently valued clarity and depth of wisdom, not mere complexity and virtuosity. In this, Po Chü-i (772-846 C.E.) is the quintessential Chinese poet, for although it deeply informs the work of all the major ancient poets, Po makes that sage clarity itself his particular vision.
Po Chü-i was a more serious student of Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism than any mainstream poet up to his time, and it was Ch'an that gave much of the clarity and depth to his life and work. Po's poems often include the explicit use of Ch'an ideas, indeed he is the poet who really opened mainstream poetry to Buddhist experience, his work becoming a major source of information on Buddhist practice in his time. But it is in the poetics shaping Po's poetry that Ch'an is more fundamentally felt. In Ch'an practice, the self and its construc¬tions of the world are dissolved away until nothing remains but empty mind or "no-mind". This empty mind is often spoken of as mirroring the world, leaving its ten thousand things utterly simple, utterly themselves, and utterly sufficient. That suggests one possible Ch'an poetry: an egoless poetry which renders the ten thousand things in such a way that they empty the self as they shimmer with the clarity of their own self-sufficient identity. Po wrote a num-ber of poems in this mode, but the great master of this poetics was Wang Wei (701-761), whose brief poems resound with the selfless clarity of no-mind:
DEER PARK
No one seen. In empty mountains,
a hint of drifint voice, no more.
Entering these deep woods, late sun-
light ablaze on green moss, rising.
The other possible Ch'an poetry is that of an egoless ego. Empty mind would seem to preclude the possibility of a personal poetry such as Po's. The quiet response of even the most reticent poem is still a construction, as Po knew well: he playfully says numerous times that his Ch'an practice has failed because he could not overcome his "poetry demon", his "word-karma". Po's response to experience seems to have been quite passionate—whether the experience was as monumental as poverty and war, or as ordinary as tea and an afternoon nap—and this full heart was of course the engine driving his prolific output as a poet. Po had hoped that Ch'an practice might quell his passionate responses, and this certainly did happen to some extent, but it seems he came to realize that the self is also one of those ten thousand things that are utterly themselves and sufficient. Taoist thought would describe this insight rather differently, as the realization that self is always already selfless, for it is but a momentary form among the constant transformation of earth's ten thousand things. This is a crucial conjunction of Ch'an and Taoist philosophy, and no doubt a major reason Po considered them to be two aspects of the same system. In any case, this insight results in a poetry quite different from Wang Wei's. Rather than Wang Wei's strategy of losing the self among the ten thousand things, this poetics opens the poem to the various movements of self, and Po Chü-i was a master of its subtle ways. In a culture that made no fundamental distinction between heart and mind, he inhabited everyday experience at the level where a simple heart is a full heart and a simple mind is an empty mind, endowing thoughts never twisty with new depths. Such is his gentle power: the sense in his poems of dwelling at the very center of one's life, combining the intimacies of a full heart and the distances of an empty mind.
Po found his full heart and empty mind most completely realized in the practice of idleness. This idleness is also central to the work of T'ao Ch'ien (365-427), the poet who originated the poetic world which defines the Chinese tradition. Etymologically, the character for idleness which T'ao Ch'ien used (hsien) connotes "profound serenity and quietness", its pictographic elements rendering a tree standing alone within the gates to a courtyard, or in its alter-nate form, moonlight shining through an open door. Po Chü-i often uses this character as well, but he also uses another character: lan. The pictographic elements of this character are equally revealing: it is made up of the character for "trust" (lai) beside the character for "heart-mind" (hsin). Hence, the heart-mind of trust, the heart-mind of trust in the world. But this is trust of truly pro-found dimensions, for "idleness" is essentially a lazybones word for a spiritual posture known as wu-wei. Wu-wei is a central concept in Taoism, where it is associated with tzu-jan, the mechanism of Tao’s process. Tzu-jan's literal meaning is "self-so" or "the of-itself" or "being such of itself", hence "spontaneous" or "natural". But a more descriptive translation might be "occurrence appearing of itself", for it is meant to describe the ten thousand things unfolding spontaneously, each according to its own nature. For Taoists, we dwell as an organic part of tzu-jan by practicing wu-wei, which literally means "nothing doing", or more descriptively, "selfless action": acting spontaneously as a selfless part of tzu-jan, rather than with self-conscious intention. Hence, idleness is a kind of meditative reveling in tzu-jan, a state in which daily life becomes the essence of spiritual practice.
Like T'ao Ch'ien's, Po Chü-i’s idleness often takes the form of drinking. Drunkenness for Po means, as it generally does in Chinese poetry, drinking just enough wine to achieve a serene clarity of attention, a state in which the isolation of a mind imposing distinctions on the world gives way to a sense of identity with the world. And so again, idleness as a kind of spiritual practice: an utter simplicity of dwelling in which empty mind allows a full heart to move with open clarity. Indeed, Po Chü-i half-seriously spoke of wine rivaling Ch'an as a spiritual practice.
Given his devotion to idleness and the poetics of idleness, Po tends to avoid the kind of imagistic compression more typical of Chinese poetry. For him, the poem is generally a kind of relaxed rambling, open to all thought and experience, whether petty or profound. And not surprisingly, poems are written in exceptionally clear and plain language. Indeed, there is a story that Po always showed his poems to an uneducated old servant-woman, and anything she couldn't understand he rewrote. This poetics also allowed Po to write easily: he wrote a very large number of poems (2,800 survive, far more than any poet before him), and the vast majority of them appear plain and unaccomplished, no different from the work of countless other poets. His poetics suggest that for him such poems would be the most authentically accomplished, for it no doubt reverses the normal criterion for poetry, making poems that are simple and unaccomplished valued above those that push to extremes in shaping experience. But Po doesn't resist the insight that makes striking poems. Surprising insight comes to some of his poems and not to others, and it makes sense that Po doesn't choose among them. So there is a body of poems which walk the fine line where a poem is effortlessly plain and yet surprising and insightful, revealing the profound dimensions of Po’s trust in the simple and immediate.
Po Chü-i wrote during the T'ang Dynasty, the period during which Chinese poetry experienced its first great flowering. This renaissance began during the High T'ang period (712-760) in the work of such poets as Wang Wei, Li Po, and Tu Fu, and continued through the Mid-T'ang period (766-835) during which Po Chü-i wrote. Though it hardly ignores life's hardships, the Chinese tradition is grounded in a poetry of balanced affirmation, its great poets speaking primarily of their immediate experience in a natural voice.
But while Po Chü-i was cultivating his pellucid sensibility into the quintessence of this mainstream tradition, a group of poets was experimenting with an alternative poetics which became the most distinctive development during the Mid-T'ang—a poetics of startling disorientations and dream-like hermeticism. This alternative tradition began in the dark extremities of Tu Fu's later work. This work extended the mainstream tradition to its limit, and the stark introspective depths of Meng Chiao's late work (807-814) mark a clear break. Indeed, Meng Chiao's quasi-surreal and symbolist techniques anticipated landmark developments in the modern Western tradition by a millennium, and it is interesting to reconsider the modern avant-garde in light of the alternative Mid-T'ang movement. After Meng Chiao, this movement included a number of major poets and at least two great ones: Li Ho and Li Shang-yin. But its vitality proved rather short-lived, ending with Li Shang-yin's death in 858, though its preoccupations remained dominant for another century, through the feeble Late-T'ang period (836-907), and the reverence accorded its major poets didn't begin to wane for another two centuries. The alternative tradition of Meng Chiao and his heirs made the Mid-T'ang (766-835) an especially rich poetic period, rivaling even its predecessor, the illustrious High T'ang. But Po Chü-i's unassuming poetics proved more enduring than the experimental alternative, for although such poetics result in a modest poetry, it reflects a deep wisdom that was always more admired in China than mere virtuosity and innovation. It was largely through the work of Po Chü-i and other more "conventional" Mid-T'ang poets that the tradition's mainstream was passed on to the next great period of Chinese poetry: the Sung Dynasty, a period in which Ch'an's widespread influence led to a poetry that continued to deepen and expand the possibilities of thoughts never twisty.