He
respects
personal friendship before community.
Like-Water-or-Clouds-The-Tang-Dynasty
Sub-atomic entities have no meaningful existence or properties except as we perceive them in observation.
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? The e? reali? mirror is empty. The universe that exists beneath, beside, beyond our observations and our names is visible to us as, at best, a shadow, or a brilliance. Within it there are no names and no forms. e? At root there are no things. i? That is why the universal Tao is nameless, and the eternal Way cannot be told. The Tao is the unknowable matrix of energies. It creates the Vortex of the visible and named. It is the Void of the invisible and unnamed. The reality is that we cannot escape the e? observeri? , cannot escape ourselves. In order to live with the e? observeri? , live with ourselves, we can only attempt to know the unknowable, be in harmony with the non-existent. That means that we must embrace the non-analytic, non-verbal emptiness, and vanish into the Vortex. What cannot be understood, what cannot be measured, what cannot be analysed, what cannot be grasped, can still be lived. The Universe does not understand the mathematical equations of its own existence. e? Entering the wildi? says a Master about the
159
? enlightened ones e? the grass does not move. Entering the river, the water is not stirred. i?
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? ? ? ? ! 4
Li Po the elusive and fascinating. Li who is like Mozart. The precocious talent, the deeply serious artist, the effortless creator, the romanticist in perfect control blended with the effervescent personality of a Taoist e? childi? . There is the same social e? irresponsibilityi? combined with intense artistic responsibility, spontaneity and creative perfection. There is the same need for freedom, resentment of authority, disdain for accepted forms and constraints. The same enchantment with magical rituals (The Magic Flute, and Freemasonry parallel esoteric Taoism and Buddhism) and the colours of what is most alive. There is the same deep sensitivity and aesthetic subtlety combined with tensile strength and sexual vigour. There is the same ability to play every note of the scale, from the powerful and masculine to the tender and feminine. There is the same susceptibility to
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? ? ? drink, e? entertainmenti? and pretty women as a means to release creative tension, escape constraint, and achieve spontaneity. The same inability to hold an official post for long. The same generosity, or carelessness about money, so that it flows through his fingers. The same roaming between cities, and wandering between lodgings. The same consciousness of and pride in his own genius. Underlying everything the same deep humanity. The same fluidity, the same enigmatic invisibility behind, or rather transparency in front of, his creations.
Sometimes he appears to be nothing more than his creations. That is the achievement of harmony. Not through meditation, but through being. Li does not seek or require e? approvali? . Social commitment and integration are irrelevant to the Tao. Equally humanity, empathy, sensitivity are deep components of his Taoist awareness. Li is the essentially lovable, gifted human being who challenges the leaden conventionality of society, and in some respects
162
? is punished for it, by a self-created isolation, through the inability of the world to understand inspiration or achieve the artisti? s paradise of a continuous and genuinely creative endeavour.
Like a child, like Mozart, he can betray a childi? s faults and a childi? s emotional and behavioural extremism. He could be hostile and then overly generous, proud, boastful and then subdued, irresponsible and then deeply serious, rude and then sensitive. It is easy to condemn such a personality as immature or over-sensitive, as egocentric or rebellious. It is equally easy for the artist to react with irony or indifference, pride or disdain, to devalue others efforts, to attack as a means of defence, to ignore as a means of self-protection, to be e? irresponsiblei? to hide deep hurt. Like Mozart, he is in his art both romantic and classical, concerned with form but aspiring to a world that is more than this world, more satisfying, more beautiful, and more harmonious.
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? If the pliant, bowing and modest bamboo represents Confucianism, and the scented solitary ancient pine-tree represents meditative Buddhism, it is the plum-branch that represents Taoism. It is the tree of winter whose blossoms burst from the branch, whose sexual essence is the life and sadness of the transient world, whose flowering is spontaneous and free, whose roots are deep and resilient, but whose beauty is evanescent and delicate. Li is the sparkle on the water, the moonlight on the leaf, the flashes of light that contemporaries claimed to see in his eyes, the wild, unkempt, energised lightnings of nature.
Li was born in the west of China, possibly over the border in Turkestan. Family traditions claimed descent from Li Kao who created his local dynasty centred on Tun-huang the gate to the Silk Road. The Ti? ang Emperors claimed the same line of descent and that enabled Li to address the Imperial family as though they were distant cousins. Li Kao was himself a descendant
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? of General Li Kuang (d. 119BC). Ssu-ma- Chi? ien, the great Han Dynasty biographer, brilliantly relates Li Kuangi? s story in his $? ? ? ? . ? ? , or Records of the Grand Historian. Li Kuang is an archetype of the honest, unassuming, courageous, but unlucky military man. He was named the e? Flying Generali? by the Huns, the Hsiung-nu, and fought more than seventy actions against them, his successes and failures sadly cancelling each other out, so that he never achieved high honours. Though judged too old he fought a last campaign, taking the blame for a failure to carry out the questionable orders of his superior Wei Chi? ing. Committing suicide, he was mourned throughout the Empire for his integrity, his courage and the sincerity of his intentions. A famous archer with the crossbow, Li Kuang gave rise to a Zenist anecdote illustrating the power of Taoist spontaneity and harmony. Mistaking a rock in the long grass for a tiger he was said to have pierced it effortlessly
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? with an arrow. Trying to repeat the feat consciously he failed.
Li Poi? s e? Turkishi? ancestry provided an exotic element to the self-image that appears in his poetry, and perhaps made him particularly receptive to the Persian and Central Asian influences on Chinese culture. The family history suggests that a later ancestor was in fact banished to the far west around Lop Nor, and drifted further west still. Li Poi? s father returned to China when Li was a small child, and he was brought up in the southwest, in Szechwan, some distance from the local capital Chi? I? ng-tu. He was precocious. e? Already, at fourteen, I was reading strange books and writing verse to rival the masters. i? e? Already I was seeking the favour of great men. i?
As a young man he lived for a time as a Taoist recluse, with a Master, somewhere in the western mountains. e? For several years I never went near a town, and the wild birds ate from my hand without fear. The Kuang-han governor
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? came to see us, offering to send us to the capital as persons of unusual ability but we refused. i? It is the image of the adolescent Yeats climbing up to his cave above the sea, or sleeping among the rhododendrons and rocks, playing at being a sage, wizard or poet. It is a young Alastor-like Shelley meditating among the ruins of Rome or making poetry by the Italian seashore. And Li became a ? 8? 0? ? a swordsman, one of those commissioned to seek revenge on behalf of people who could not gain redress. He wandered away from Szechwan and then across eastern China, perhaps supported by relatives, many of them wealthy officials. He certainly scattered money freely.
He also met the great Taoist Master Ssu-ma Chi? I? ng-cheng, and the desire is visible, that imbues many of his later poems, for spirit journeys into the realms of the Immortals. It aligns him with the shamanistic traditions of ancient China, and with the poetry of the dream- state in East and West. Dream, drink, meditation,
167
? immersion in natural beauty, and aesthetic sensitivity were all ways to free the mind and e? flyi? through the inner space-time of the creative imagination. Li was capable of composing poetry as Mozart composed music, fluently and spontaneously, with a speed and facility that amazed his contemporaries. Genius can manifest itself as an almost magical flow, an innate harmony with the Tao. Lii? s qualities were said to be the spontaneity (9? :? ? ,3) of natural forces and energies, and the life-breath (. ? ? ? ) of the deep psyche.
When he was about twenty-five Li made the first of his four marriages to a granddaughter of a former Chief Minister. He lived in Hankow at his wifei? s family home, seeking recommendations, now and then, for official employment but basically unemployed and remote from the capital. At this time he studied Ch'an Buddhism, practising Dhyana (meditation) 'with a white-eyebrowed monk' at Ju-ning not far from his wife's home, achieving the stage of
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? enlightenment of 'The Wind Wheel Samadhi' where the mind can wander through space. To Li this was no doubt an analogue of the Taoist shamanistic spirit journey that was a determinant of his creative imagination.
He made friends with MI? ng Hao-jan who also knew Wang Wei. MI? ng was a much- admired poet, with a Taoist indifference to office, and a sensitive love of the elusive e? dreami? world reached through drink or natural beauty. Lii? s poem to him celebrates MI? ngi? s fragrant closeness to the Tao, and Wang Weii? s wistful tribute nevertheless points up the Buddhist void that Mengi? s poetry touched on. One of his poems that influenced Lii? s poem e? Winei? shows a subtle parallelism and a sensitivity to the free energies and transient forms of the Tao, in storm winds, e? randomi? birdsong, the chance patterns of fallen blossom, and in the contrasts of sound and silence. The Vortex is all these things. Life is a dream whose contents evade us. Time past scatters round us
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? the results of our dreaming. e? In Spring asleep, lost to morning. i? he writes e? wake, hearing, everywhere, birds singing. Through Nighti? s deeps what storm winds sounded. Now, petals, who knows how many, grounded. i?
Li already exhibits characteristics of the Taoist attitude. Though Confucian values influence him, he is an individual rather than a social conformist.
He respects personal friendship before community. He recognises the ephemeral and transient rather than the permanent. He is for sensitivity not power, beauty not dominance. He is fascinated by the magical though he is conscious of the mundane. He loves personal freedom rather than artificial constraint. He inhabits the elusiveness, and purity of Nature. His mind responds to the deep and the feminine. He loses himself in the dream and the song. Bash? , the great Japanese ? ,? ? : poet talks about those who have achieved excellence in art being in harmony with nature. e? Whatever they see is a flower, and whatever
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? they dream is the moon. Only a mind without sensibility cannot see the flower. Only a mind without refinement does not dream the moon. i?
The flavour of Lii? s life in his thirties is captured in e? The Exilei? s Letteri? that finds him travelling to, and living in, the north perhaps soon after his first wifei? s early death. He drifted to Shantung where he knew three scholars who lived as recluses by the Bamboo Stream. In 738 he was in Yangchow. In 742, aged forty-one he climbed Ti? ai-shan the sacred mountain of eastern China. He described ascending it, also, in imagination, riding a white deer, and meeting the faery maidens who smiled and stretched their hands out to him, offering him liquid mist that he was not adept enough to accept. He received writings he could not read, in bird-track script, falling from Immortals concealed in the clouds. And he was mocked, by a child, dressed in green, because of his age and lack of Tao. It is Li growing older, conscious of a yearning he has not satisfied.
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? ? At this time he befriended Wu Y ? n the Taoist and writer who was at the Court early in 743 as Taoism gained Imperial favour. Either Wu or the Emperori? s sister Y ? -chI? n recommended Li Po for a post, and so Li in his forties joined the Han- lin Academicians as a Court poet. Belatedly he had arrived in Chi? ang-an, where he felt he belonged. Yet he had never deigned to enter for the Civil Service examinations, as Wan Wei, Tu Fu and MI? ng Hao-jan had. Had he feared failure, resented conformity, felt himself a e? free spiriti? or a genius making his own rules, or did he perhaps know he could never fit in to the sober rigidity of the Civil Service? He remained a e? person in plain dressi? as a result, and never achieved high social status. But then neither did Mozart who also longed for a Court post, remuneration, and social recognition. Li stayed as a e? Lost Immortali? , a stray genius banished to and confined on earth, one of those creative minds that are loved and recognised in their own domain, but looked askance at in worldly terms.
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? The drunken, e? irresponsiblei? Li only too conscious of what he believed his own talents deserved prevented the profound, brilliant Li from achieving that recognition He spoke of himself later as an unsuccessful seeker after some position where he could be of influence and utilise his talents.
From his time at Chi? ang-an come the e? Three Poems on Winei? in which feelings of isolation, sadness, and yearning are expressed. It is the mood of silence, moonlight, fallen flowers, the mystery and depth of the unknowable universe, the strangeness of life, and its incommunicable essence. Transience, Nature, the Void, the pain of consciousness and the joy of escaping consciousness in natural harmony, being drunk on nature, and in nature, are his subjects. This is the Li of lightness, loneliness, sadness, soft quizzicality, even ironic self-mockery. The same mood is caught in e? Waking from Drunken Sleep on a Spring Dayi? , and e? Drinking in the Mountainsi? . With gentle, slender touches he
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? ? ? ? ? ? ? creates reflective depth where a subtle and remote troubling disturbs the mirrori? s surface. Like Mozart he creates harmony and then disturbs it with dissonance. Death and transience are present below the surface of the pastoral. ? 9? ? 3? ? 7. ,/? ,? 0? 4? ? ?
He wrote poems at Ch'ang-an that express desire for escape. Perhaps a pose, perhaps frustration at his talents not being properly applied, perhaps an inability to settle into the rigid framework of the Court, and amongst those he considered inferior to himself. He wanted to follow the clouds, vanish into the mountains, see the blossom overhanging the waters, fly with the wild geese. Within a couple of years he was gone, departing around the time in 744 when Yang Kuei-fei was establishing her position at Court prior to her becoming consort. Li fell foul of Chang Chi son of an ex Chief Minister, perhaps through indiscretion and a fondness for drink that did not directly affect his work but made him a risk in terms of official position,
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? leading others to believe he might be unreliable or outspoken. Chang Chi is reputed to have cancelled a promised appointment for Li as a member of the Civil Service. Li's Taoism was also a source of friction with the Buddhist and Confucian trained inner circles. But deeper than that is the temperamental restlessness that he struggles to contain. He achieves peace with himself only with great difficulty. His poems display a yearning for states of illumination and tranquility that he himself has not attained. He looks with longing at the state of grace that others have reached and knows that a component of his own personality will always prevent the spiritual journey being an easy one. There is sadness and self-irony in his attempts to escape the earthbound reality through drink, or suppress the self in stupor. Poems like 'Lu Mountain', 'Reaching the Hermitage', and 'Hard Journey' are expressions of an internally rather than an externally imposed inability to rest. 'I set off by myself into the deep mountains. ' said Bash? ,
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? ? ? ? 'White cloud layers lay across the peaks and the valleys were full of the smoking mist and rain. ' Li Po understood what Bash? felt at being 'tempted by the wind that blows the clouds, filling me with the desire to wander. ' 'He knew again' says the Tale of Genji, 'how hostile the world could become. '
Leaving Ch'ang-an, his hopes dashed, angry at the humiliation of his perceived waste of his time and talent, portraying himself in an Asiatic manner as a caged tiger or a tethered hawk, he knew that time was slipping by and the chances of an official career were becoming remote. He wandered for a while before heading north- eastwards. He reached Peking where he saw An Lu-shan's massed troops, a sign of the gathering power available to a frontier General who was also to become a Court favourite. Soon travelling south again he headed for Honan and there first met Tu Fu, still a young unknown poet, eleven years Li's junior. Tu Fu had attempted the Civil Service examination but failed, and would later
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? try again. He admired the famous Li, and despite the difference in their personalities, the sober and committed Tu Fu no doubt recognised Li's spiritual yearning and the sensitivity that gave Li pain.
At Ch'ang-an perhaps Li had made a second marriage that soon broke up. He now married for a third time to a lady from Lu (Shantung), and they had several children who Li writes about with affection. It is not clear whether the two children from his first marriage survived. He made a home, in Shantung perhaps where his new wife's family lived. Here he went through the Taoist religious ceremony of purification at the Lao Tzu temple at Chi-nan Fu, and received a Taoist diploma, a piece of exquisite calligraphy, as a token of his stage of knowledge, and as a talisman. Tu Fu had a brother in Shantung and met Li again before leaving for Ch'ang-an to attempt the examination. Tu Fu wrote poems about or to Li
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? over the next few years of which 'To Li Po' is a simple example.
The years of Li's late forties and early fifties were years of further wandering and poetic production. He never seemed able to settle with a family, or in any one place for long, perhaps because he was always seeking a position or being financed by relatives, perhaps because he was constitutionally unable to find satisfaction in home life. He travelled now around eastern China, living for a time near Kaifeng in Honan, with occasional visits to Shantung, and also at Hs ? an-chou (Suancheng in Anhwei), Yangchow and Nanking. He finally paused at Ch'ih-chou on the Yangtze south west of Nanking in about 754. During this period he studied Taoist alchemy based on the ancient text the Ts'an Tung Ch'i. Once again there is the yearning for the Taoist paradise, to touch the sun and moon and fuse with the elemental Tao. Perhaps he hoped to become an adept, one of the Fang Shih, or Masters of the Formulae of the Kun Lun sect
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? ? who drew heavily on the Tantric magic of Buddhism, imported from Tibet. One poem, that draws together alchemy the wild scenery of the mountains and the sensation of a spirit journey, describes a vision of the Faerie Goddess in her mountain Paradise. The poem is a ? Q0? ? 1:, a reworking of an old ballad or folksong form, allowing irregular line lengths, and freer metres. In it Li once more dreams of a place outside the demands of formal life, where he can display his 'true face'. 'At night I flew over Mirror lake', he writes, 'the moon on the water chased my shadow'. Reaching the high mountains, lost amongst the wild flowers, he leans on a rock as darkness falls. Then in a sudden storm lightning splits the peaks, and reveals a fathomless space. 'Over the blue Void's groundless deep, moon and sun fuse silver and gold, Cloud Princesses slant down the air, with Rainbow skirt and misted cloak. White-tigress lutes strike crystal sounds. Drawn by Phoenix birds' flying traces, Heaven's Queen spans the magic spaces, the faerie fields
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? all full of folk. ' But his vision once more forces a return to the normal world. 'My mind was stunned, my senses shaken, dazzled by light I cried out loud, and wake to find the empty pillows. All things vanish in mist and cloud. '
Li Po is forever the Chuang Chou of his 'Old Poem' who is caught between dream and dream, the Taoist dream and the dream of life. His Taoist poems are not merely playing with a graceful mythology of exciting imagery, but like Keats's 'Belle Dame sans Merci' and his vanishing nightingale, they are an expression of a deep unrest, an unrequited yearning that is beyond the physical and could never be satisfied within the physical. In that sense, in the restricted sense of his affinity with Keats, Li Po is a 'Romantic'. There is a sweetness there of sensibility. Where Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan' is a vision of an (opiate) Paradise lost, and Shelley's visionary poetry is an attempted, often repeated, assault on the unknowable, Keats and Li Po yearn for something glimpsed but never
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? ? ? achieved, a veil that can never be touched or lifted. Reality is a transience that cannot be frozen, captured, held, possessed, or ever fully comprehended. It is a 'bright star'.
Li at this time was described as having 'the flashing eyes of a hungry tiger'. He sometimes wore the green silk hood of the Taoist initiate. His true friends are 'mountains and rivers, moonlight and clouds'. By 756 he was no longer with his third wife. Presumably she and his children remained in Shantung, perhaps at her family home near Sha-ch'iu, nor far from the Tortoise Mountain. He married again, into the Tsung family. At Ch'ih-Chou he saw himself not as the 'Great Roc' of his youth, or the caged falcon, or the quiescent tiger, but as an ageing human being who in his own eyes had failed to realise his dreams.
He stares into Time's glass. 'My white hairs have grown so long. Thirty thousand feet of grieving. In my bright mirror, I cannot understand. Where does it come from all this
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? autumn frost? ' In 755 he sent a letter on behalf of the Governer of Hsuan-chou to the Chief Minister Yang Kuo-chung, which thanked him for previous favours and hinted that the Governor, Chao Y ? eh would like a position at Court. Perhaps Li also hoped that if Chao succeeded he might still have a chance himself of a post. But this was the eve of the An Lu-shan rebellion, and the Empire was about to be thrown into confusion.
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? ? 431:. ? ,3? 82
In theory Confucian ideals guided the Emperor and his government. While Taoism and Buddhism inspired personal and cultural goals, the influence of Confucius was core to public life. Confucius (K'ung Fu Tzu) was born in 551BC in Shantung during the Spring and Autumn period of the Chou Dynasty. A complex and subtle man, his character and sayings, captured in The Analects, exemplify the life of virtue. He showed sincerity and modesty, courage and conscientiousness, based on restraint and respect. 'In your personal life be courteous, in business be serious, with everyone be sincere. '
Above all he exemplified practical morality, avoiding extremes and rigidity, with humour and wit. Confucian virtue is the fitting of the individual into the social order while benefiting society and the self. At the heart of his practical
183
? ?
158
? The e? reali? mirror is empty. The universe that exists beneath, beside, beyond our observations and our names is visible to us as, at best, a shadow, or a brilliance. Within it there are no names and no forms. e? At root there are no things. i? That is why the universal Tao is nameless, and the eternal Way cannot be told. The Tao is the unknowable matrix of energies. It creates the Vortex of the visible and named. It is the Void of the invisible and unnamed. The reality is that we cannot escape the e? observeri? , cannot escape ourselves. In order to live with the e? observeri? , live with ourselves, we can only attempt to know the unknowable, be in harmony with the non-existent. That means that we must embrace the non-analytic, non-verbal emptiness, and vanish into the Vortex. What cannot be understood, what cannot be measured, what cannot be analysed, what cannot be grasped, can still be lived. The Universe does not understand the mathematical equations of its own existence. e? Entering the wildi? says a Master about the
159
? enlightened ones e? the grass does not move. Entering the river, the water is not stirred. i?
160
? ? ? ? ! 4
Li Po the elusive and fascinating. Li who is like Mozart. The precocious talent, the deeply serious artist, the effortless creator, the romanticist in perfect control blended with the effervescent personality of a Taoist e? childi? . There is the same social e? irresponsibilityi? combined with intense artistic responsibility, spontaneity and creative perfection. There is the same need for freedom, resentment of authority, disdain for accepted forms and constraints. The same enchantment with magical rituals (The Magic Flute, and Freemasonry parallel esoteric Taoism and Buddhism) and the colours of what is most alive. There is the same deep sensitivity and aesthetic subtlety combined with tensile strength and sexual vigour. There is the same ability to play every note of the scale, from the powerful and masculine to the tender and feminine. There is the same susceptibility to
161
? ? ? drink, e? entertainmenti? and pretty women as a means to release creative tension, escape constraint, and achieve spontaneity. The same inability to hold an official post for long. The same generosity, or carelessness about money, so that it flows through his fingers. The same roaming between cities, and wandering between lodgings. The same consciousness of and pride in his own genius. Underlying everything the same deep humanity. The same fluidity, the same enigmatic invisibility behind, or rather transparency in front of, his creations.
Sometimes he appears to be nothing more than his creations. That is the achievement of harmony. Not through meditation, but through being. Li does not seek or require e? approvali? . Social commitment and integration are irrelevant to the Tao. Equally humanity, empathy, sensitivity are deep components of his Taoist awareness. Li is the essentially lovable, gifted human being who challenges the leaden conventionality of society, and in some respects
162
? is punished for it, by a self-created isolation, through the inability of the world to understand inspiration or achieve the artisti? s paradise of a continuous and genuinely creative endeavour.
Like a child, like Mozart, he can betray a childi? s faults and a childi? s emotional and behavioural extremism. He could be hostile and then overly generous, proud, boastful and then subdued, irresponsible and then deeply serious, rude and then sensitive. It is easy to condemn such a personality as immature or over-sensitive, as egocentric or rebellious. It is equally easy for the artist to react with irony or indifference, pride or disdain, to devalue others efforts, to attack as a means of defence, to ignore as a means of self-protection, to be e? irresponsiblei? to hide deep hurt. Like Mozart, he is in his art both romantic and classical, concerned with form but aspiring to a world that is more than this world, more satisfying, more beautiful, and more harmonious.
163
? If the pliant, bowing and modest bamboo represents Confucianism, and the scented solitary ancient pine-tree represents meditative Buddhism, it is the plum-branch that represents Taoism. It is the tree of winter whose blossoms burst from the branch, whose sexual essence is the life and sadness of the transient world, whose flowering is spontaneous and free, whose roots are deep and resilient, but whose beauty is evanescent and delicate. Li is the sparkle on the water, the moonlight on the leaf, the flashes of light that contemporaries claimed to see in his eyes, the wild, unkempt, energised lightnings of nature.
Li was born in the west of China, possibly over the border in Turkestan. Family traditions claimed descent from Li Kao who created his local dynasty centred on Tun-huang the gate to the Silk Road. The Ti? ang Emperors claimed the same line of descent and that enabled Li to address the Imperial family as though they were distant cousins. Li Kao was himself a descendant
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? of General Li Kuang (d. 119BC). Ssu-ma- Chi? ien, the great Han Dynasty biographer, brilliantly relates Li Kuangi? s story in his $? ? ? ? . ? ? , or Records of the Grand Historian. Li Kuang is an archetype of the honest, unassuming, courageous, but unlucky military man. He was named the e? Flying Generali? by the Huns, the Hsiung-nu, and fought more than seventy actions against them, his successes and failures sadly cancelling each other out, so that he never achieved high honours. Though judged too old he fought a last campaign, taking the blame for a failure to carry out the questionable orders of his superior Wei Chi? ing. Committing suicide, he was mourned throughout the Empire for his integrity, his courage and the sincerity of his intentions. A famous archer with the crossbow, Li Kuang gave rise to a Zenist anecdote illustrating the power of Taoist spontaneity and harmony. Mistaking a rock in the long grass for a tiger he was said to have pierced it effortlessly
165
? with an arrow. Trying to repeat the feat consciously he failed.
Li Poi? s e? Turkishi? ancestry provided an exotic element to the self-image that appears in his poetry, and perhaps made him particularly receptive to the Persian and Central Asian influences on Chinese culture. The family history suggests that a later ancestor was in fact banished to the far west around Lop Nor, and drifted further west still. Li Poi? s father returned to China when Li was a small child, and he was brought up in the southwest, in Szechwan, some distance from the local capital Chi? I? ng-tu. He was precocious. e? Already, at fourteen, I was reading strange books and writing verse to rival the masters. i? e? Already I was seeking the favour of great men. i?
As a young man he lived for a time as a Taoist recluse, with a Master, somewhere in the western mountains. e? For several years I never went near a town, and the wild birds ate from my hand without fear. The Kuang-han governor
166
? came to see us, offering to send us to the capital as persons of unusual ability but we refused. i? It is the image of the adolescent Yeats climbing up to his cave above the sea, or sleeping among the rhododendrons and rocks, playing at being a sage, wizard or poet. It is a young Alastor-like Shelley meditating among the ruins of Rome or making poetry by the Italian seashore. And Li became a ? 8? 0? ? a swordsman, one of those commissioned to seek revenge on behalf of people who could not gain redress. He wandered away from Szechwan and then across eastern China, perhaps supported by relatives, many of them wealthy officials. He certainly scattered money freely.
He also met the great Taoist Master Ssu-ma Chi? I? ng-cheng, and the desire is visible, that imbues many of his later poems, for spirit journeys into the realms of the Immortals. It aligns him with the shamanistic traditions of ancient China, and with the poetry of the dream- state in East and West. Dream, drink, meditation,
167
? immersion in natural beauty, and aesthetic sensitivity were all ways to free the mind and e? flyi? through the inner space-time of the creative imagination. Li was capable of composing poetry as Mozart composed music, fluently and spontaneously, with a speed and facility that amazed his contemporaries. Genius can manifest itself as an almost magical flow, an innate harmony with the Tao. Lii? s qualities were said to be the spontaneity (9? :? ? ,3) of natural forces and energies, and the life-breath (. ? ? ? ) of the deep psyche.
When he was about twenty-five Li made the first of his four marriages to a granddaughter of a former Chief Minister. He lived in Hankow at his wifei? s family home, seeking recommendations, now and then, for official employment but basically unemployed and remote from the capital. At this time he studied Ch'an Buddhism, practising Dhyana (meditation) 'with a white-eyebrowed monk' at Ju-ning not far from his wife's home, achieving the stage of
168
? enlightenment of 'The Wind Wheel Samadhi' where the mind can wander through space. To Li this was no doubt an analogue of the Taoist shamanistic spirit journey that was a determinant of his creative imagination.
He made friends with MI? ng Hao-jan who also knew Wang Wei. MI? ng was a much- admired poet, with a Taoist indifference to office, and a sensitive love of the elusive e? dreami? world reached through drink or natural beauty. Lii? s poem to him celebrates MI? ngi? s fragrant closeness to the Tao, and Wang Weii? s wistful tribute nevertheless points up the Buddhist void that Mengi? s poetry touched on. One of his poems that influenced Lii? s poem e? Winei? shows a subtle parallelism and a sensitivity to the free energies and transient forms of the Tao, in storm winds, e? randomi? birdsong, the chance patterns of fallen blossom, and in the contrasts of sound and silence. The Vortex is all these things. Life is a dream whose contents evade us. Time past scatters round us
169
? the results of our dreaming. e? In Spring asleep, lost to morning. i? he writes e? wake, hearing, everywhere, birds singing. Through Nighti? s deeps what storm winds sounded. Now, petals, who knows how many, grounded. i?
Li already exhibits characteristics of the Taoist attitude. Though Confucian values influence him, he is an individual rather than a social conformist.
He respects personal friendship before community. He recognises the ephemeral and transient rather than the permanent. He is for sensitivity not power, beauty not dominance. He is fascinated by the magical though he is conscious of the mundane. He loves personal freedom rather than artificial constraint. He inhabits the elusiveness, and purity of Nature. His mind responds to the deep and the feminine. He loses himself in the dream and the song. Bash? , the great Japanese ? ,? ? : poet talks about those who have achieved excellence in art being in harmony with nature. e? Whatever they see is a flower, and whatever
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? they dream is the moon. Only a mind without sensibility cannot see the flower. Only a mind without refinement does not dream the moon. i?
The flavour of Lii? s life in his thirties is captured in e? The Exilei? s Letteri? that finds him travelling to, and living in, the north perhaps soon after his first wifei? s early death. He drifted to Shantung where he knew three scholars who lived as recluses by the Bamboo Stream. In 738 he was in Yangchow. In 742, aged forty-one he climbed Ti? ai-shan the sacred mountain of eastern China. He described ascending it, also, in imagination, riding a white deer, and meeting the faery maidens who smiled and stretched their hands out to him, offering him liquid mist that he was not adept enough to accept. He received writings he could not read, in bird-track script, falling from Immortals concealed in the clouds. And he was mocked, by a child, dressed in green, because of his age and lack of Tao. It is Li growing older, conscious of a yearning he has not satisfied.
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? ? At this time he befriended Wu Y ? n the Taoist and writer who was at the Court early in 743 as Taoism gained Imperial favour. Either Wu or the Emperori? s sister Y ? -chI? n recommended Li Po for a post, and so Li in his forties joined the Han- lin Academicians as a Court poet. Belatedly he had arrived in Chi? ang-an, where he felt he belonged. Yet he had never deigned to enter for the Civil Service examinations, as Wan Wei, Tu Fu and MI? ng Hao-jan had. Had he feared failure, resented conformity, felt himself a e? free spiriti? or a genius making his own rules, or did he perhaps know he could never fit in to the sober rigidity of the Civil Service? He remained a e? person in plain dressi? as a result, and never achieved high social status. But then neither did Mozart who also longed for a Court post, remuneration, and social recognition. Li stayed as a e? Lost Immortali? , a stray genius banished to and confined on earth, one of those creative minds that are loved and recognised in their own domain, but looked askance at in worldly terms.
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? The drunken, e? irresponsiblei? Li only too conscious of what he believed his own talents deserved prevented the profound, brilliant Li from achieving that recognition He spoke of himself later as an unsuccessful seeker after some position where he could be of influence and utilise his talents.
From his time at Chi? ang-an come the e? Three Poems on Winei? in which feelings of isolation, sadness, and yearning are expressed. It is the mood of silence, moonlight, fallen flowers, the mystery and depth of the unknowable universe, the strangeness of life, and its incommunicable essence. Transience, Nature, the Void, the pain of consciousness and the joy of escaping consciousness in natural harmony, being drunk on nature, and in nature, are his subjects. This is the Li of lightness, loneliness, sadness, soft quizzicality, even ironic self-mockery. The same mood is caught in e? Waking from Drunken Sleep on a Spring Dayi? , and e? Drinking in the Mountainsi? . With gentle, slender touches he
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? ? ? ? ? ? ? creates reflective depth where a subtle and remote troubling disturbs the mirrori? s surface. Like Mozart he creates harmony and then disturbs it with dissonance. Death and transience are present below the surface of the pastoral. ? 9? ? 3? ? 7. ,/? ,? 0? 4? ? ?
He wrote poems at Ch'ang-an that express desire for escape. Perhaps a pose, perhaps frustration at his talents not being properly applied, perhaps an inability to settle into the rigid framework of the Court, and amongst those he considered inferior to himself. He wanted to follow the clouds, vanish into the mountains, see the blossom overhanging the waters, fly with the wild geese. Within a couple of years he was gone, departing around the time in 744 when Yang Kuei-fei was establishing her position at Court prior to her becoming consort. Li fell foul of Chang Chi son of an ex Chief Minister, perhaps through indiscretion and a fondness for drink that did not directly affect his work but made him a risk in terms of official position,
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? leading others to believe he might be unreliable or outspoken. Chang Chi is reputed to have cancelled a promised appointment for Li as a member of the Civil Service. Li's Taoism was also a source of friction with the Buddhist and Confucian trained inner circles. But deeper than that is the temperamental restlessness that he struggles to contain. He achieves peace with himself only with great difficulty. His poems display a yearning for states of illumination and tranquility that he himself has not attained. He looks with longing at the state of grace that others have reached and knows that a component of his own personality will always prevent the spiritual journey being an easy one. There is sadness and self-irony in his attempts to escape the earthbound reality through drink, or suppress the self in stupor. Poems like 'Lu Mountain', 'Reaching the Hermitage', and 'Hard Journey' are expressions of an internally rather than an externally imposed inability to rest. 'I set off by myself into the deep mountains. ' said Bash? ,
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? ? ? ? 'White cloud layers lay across the peaks and the valleys were full of the smoking mist and rain. ' Li Po understood what Bash? felt at being 'tempted by the wind that blows the clouds, filling me with the desire to wander. ' 'He knew again' says the Tale of Genji, 'how hostile the world could become. '
Leaving Ch'ang-an, his hopes dashed, angry at the humiliation of his perceived waste of his time and talent, portraying himself in an Asiatic manner as a caged tiger or a tethered hawk, he knew that time was slipping by and the chances of an official career were becoming remote. He wandered for a while before heading north- eastwards. He reached Peking where he saw An Lu-shan's massed troops, a sign of the gathering power available to a frontier General who was also to become a Court favourite. Soon travelling south again he headed for Honan and there first met Tu Fu, still a young unknown poet, eleven years Li's junior. Tu Fu had attempted the Civil Service examination but failed, and would later
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? try again. He admired the famous Li, and despite the difference in their personalities, the sober and committed Tu Fu no doubt recognised Li's spiritual yearning and the sensitivity that gave Li pain.
At Ch'ang-an perhaps Li had made a second marriage that soon broke up. He now married for a third time to a lady from Lu (Shantung), and they had several children who Li writes about with affection. It is not clear whether the two children from his first marriage survived. He made a home, in Shantung perhaps where his new wife's family lived. Here he went through the Taoist religious ceremony of purification at the Lao Tzu temple at Chi-nan Fu, and received a Taoist diploma, a piece of exquisite calligraphy, as a token of his stage of knowledge, and as a talisman. Tu Fu had a brother in Shantung and met Li again before leaving for Ch'ang-an to attempt the examination. Tu Fu wrote poems about or to Li
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? over the next few years of which 'To Li Po' is a simple example.
The years of Li's late forties and early fifties were years of further wandering and poetic production. He never seemed able to settle with a family, or in any one place for long, perhaps because he was always seeking a position or being financed by relatives, perhaps because he was constitutionally unable to find satisfaction in home life. He travelled now around eastern China, living for a time near Kaifeng in Honan, with occasional visits to Shantung, and also at Hs ? an-chou (Suancheng in Anhwei), Yangchow and Nanking. He finally paused at Ch'ih-chou on the Yangtze south west of Nanking in about 754. During this period he studied Taoist alchemy based on the ancient text the Ts'an Tung Ch'i. Once again there is the yearning for the Taoist paradise, to touch the sun and moon and fuse with the elemental Tao. Perhaps he hoped to become an adept, one of the Fang Shih, or Masters of the Formulae of the Kun Lun sect
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? ? who drew heavily on the Tantric magic of Buddhism, imported from Tibet. One poem, that draws together alchemy the wild scenery of the mountains and the sensation of a spirit journey, describes a vision of the Faerie Goddess in her mountain Paradise. The poem is a ? Q0? ? 1:, a reworking of an old ballad or folksong form, allowing irregular line lengths, and freer metres. In it Li once more dreams of a place outside the demands of formal life, where he can display his 'true face'. 'At night I flew over Mirror lake', he writes, 'the moon on the water chased my shadow'. Reaching the high mountains, lost amongst the wild flowers, he leans on a rock as darkness falls. Then in a sudden storm lightning splits the peaks, and reveals a fathomless space. 'Over the blue Void's groundless deep, moon and sun fuse silver and gold, Cloud Princesses slant down the air, with Rainbow skirt and misted cloak. White-tigress lutes strike crystal sounds. Drawn by Phoenix birds' flying traces, Heaven's Queen spans the magic spaces, the faerie fields
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? all full of folk. ' But his vision once more forces a return to the normal world. 'My mind was stunned, my senses shaken, dazzled by light I cried out loud, and wake to find the empty pillows. All things vanish in mist and cloud. '
Li Po is forever the Chuang Chou of his 'Old Poem' who is caught between dream and dream, the Taoist dream and the dream of life. His Taoist poems are not merely playing with a graceful mythology of exciting imagery, but like Keats's 'Belle Dame sans Merci' and his vanishing nightingale, they are an expression of a deep unrest, an unrequited yearning that is beyond the physical and could never be satisfied within the physical. In that sense, in the restricted sense of his affinity with Keats, Li Po is a 'Romantic'. There is a sweetness there of sensibility. Where Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan' is a vision of an (opiate) Paradise lost, and Shelley's visionary poetry is an attempted, often repeated, assault on the unknowable, Keats and Li Po yearn for something glimpsed but never
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? ? ? achieved, a veil that can never be touched or lifted. Reality is a transience that cannot be frozen, captured, held, possessed, or ever fully comprehended. It is a 'bright star'.
Li at this time was described as having 'the flashing eyes of a hungry tiger'. He sometimes wore the green silk hood of the Taoist initiate. His true friends are 'mountains and rivers, moonlight and clouds'. By 756 he was no longer with his third wife. Presumably she and his children remained in Shantung, perhaps at her family home near Sha-ch'iu, nor far from the Tortoise Mountain. He married again, into the Tsung family. At Ch'ih-Chou he saw himself not as the 'Great Roc' of his youth, or the caged falcon, or the quiescent tiger, but as an ageing human being who in his own eyes had failed to realise his dreams.
He stares into Time's glass. 'My white hairs have grown so long. Thirty thousand feet of grieving. In my bright mirror, I cannot understand. Where does it come from all this
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? autumn frost? ' In 755 he sent a letter on behalf of the Governer of Hsuan-chou to the Chief Minister Yang Kuo-chung, which thanked him for previous favours and hinted that the Governor, Chao Y ? eh would like a position at Court. Perhaps Li also hoped that if Chao succeeded he might still have a chance himself of a post. But this was the eve of the An Lu-shan rebellion, and the Empire was about to be thrown into confusion.
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? ? 431:. ? ,3? 82
In theory Confucian ideals guided the Emperor and his government. While Taoism and Buddhism inspired personal and cultural goals, the influence of Confucius was core to public life. Confucius (K'ung Fu Tzu) was born in 551BC in Shantung during the Spring and Autumn period of the Chou Dynasty. A complex and subtle man, his character and sayings, captured in The Analects, exemplify the life of virtue. He showed sincerity and modesty, courage and conscientiousness, based on restraint and respect. 'In your personal life be courteous, in business be serious, with everyone be sincere. '
Above all he exemplified practical morality, avoiding extremes and rigidity, with humour and wit. Confucian virtue is the fitting of the individual into the social order while benefiting society and the self. At the heart of his practical
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