No More Learning

By the middle of the seventh century China was a dynamic, cosmopolitan Empire, trading internationally, with an ordered agrarian population benefiting from land-share, two massive capitals, an educated, artistic and creative elite, and strong borders. Towards the later part of the century the Court was under the dominance of the Empress Wu, who began her career as a concubine of the Emperor. She is an example of those women in Chinese Imperial history who from the role of concubine exerted tremendous influence over the reigning monarch, and who gained power for themselves and through the promotion of their families. The monarchy was always vulnerable to the power group from within.
She controlled the monarchy and the succeeding reigns of her two sons, whom she deposed, proclaiming herself Emperor of a new dynasty in 690AD and claiming to be a
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? reincarnation of the Buddha Maitreya as a female ruler. Tough and uncompromising she maintained a robust foreign policy and quelled internal dissent until she was finally deposed in 705 when over eighty and in ill health. The Ti? ang was immediately restored and in 712 her grandson Hs ? ang Tsung, Ming Huang the Glorious Monarch, came to the throne.
For fifty years, in a history that spans four thousand years, Chinese civilisation achieved a peak of cultural sophistication. Ti? ang China is the land of peonies and plum-blossom, moonlight and green jade, where dragons live in the lakes and turn into pine trees, where gauze- sleeved dancing girls glance from beneath green painted willow eyebrows, where peach-trees and mulberries talk to cedar and bamboo. It is the land of silk and cinnabar, cassia and pearl, a country, perfect in the mind, which the West could not have invented if it had not already existed. Tea, fine rain, lake views, gardens with curious rocks, girls with gauze veils and gowns,
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? boxes of tortoise-shell and gold, and also, behind the Imperial splendour, a vast country of villages and farms, mountains and rivers littered with the remnants of earlier dynasties. A land where Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism blended in the civilised mind in complementary subtlety. A land of technology without science, of the seismograph and the armillary sphere, magnetism and the compass, the continuous bellows and steel-making, paper and printed books, the movable stern-post rudder and vast sailing ships. A land of ? ? 907,9? ? and connoisseurs, of painters and poets, of courtesans and concubines, of lute and zither, pipe and drum.
The core Ti? ang territories were in Central China. They lay between the Wei and Yellow (Hwang Ho) Rivers in the north and the Yangtse River in the south. These are the two great water systems that cross China from the high mountains of the west to the eastern seas. On the western side of this central box, the Kialing River runs southwards from hills below the Wei
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? to meet the Yangtze at Chungking. In the centre the tributaries and lower reaches of the Han River also run southeast reaching the Yangtze near Hankow. The Han River therefore marks out the highlands of the west from the flood plains of the east. On the eastern side of the box are the provinces of Shantung and Kiangsu and the Yellow Sea.
While the centres of administrative power lay to the north and west in the two capitals of Ch'ang-an and Loyang, and the great rivers had many obstacles to navigation, it was still possible to travel extensively across eastern and southern China. Imperial roads and canals could be used wherever they existed, as well as the open stretches of the rivers. Li Po in his wanderings visited many of the towns of the north-eastern, eastern and southern provinces, Peking and Kai-feng in the north, Yangchow, Nanking, Kuikiang and Hankow in the south. Routes led to the West also. From Ch'ang-an in Shensi, the western capital on the Wei River, ran
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? the route to Central Asia to the northwest. Across the mountains and rivers to the southwest lay Szechwan and the headwaters of the Yangtze, often a place of exile. The capital of Szechwan, ChI? ng-tu, Brocade City, though it was difficult of access from Chi? ang-an, lies in the Red Basin, immensely fertile land surrounded by hills and mountains. The e? bread- basketi? of China, the Red Basin, was an ancient inland-sea. The Yangtze tributaries were canalised and cleared by Chi? in engineers and labour in 250BC. Canals, dykes and dams regulated the mountain waters to build the silt layers that fertilise the Basin. ChI? ng-tu was later the capital of the Kingdom of Shu (221- 263AD). Li Po, who as a child was brought up northeast of ChI? ng-tu, wrote a poem about climbing the high passes to reach it from the north-east. e? Shu Way is hard! Shu Way is high! Like climbing to Heaven, climbing the Szechwan Road. i?
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? Chi? ang-an the western capital had been the capital of the Han from 202BC, sited a few miles from the previous Chi? in capital burnt to the ground during the rebellion that brought the Han to power. To look back from Sui and Ti? ang to Chi? in and Han was to look back to a time of greatness, to the time of the building of the Great Wall and the expansion of the borders. In Han times Chi? ang-an provided a concentration of rich and influential families, with a common Chinese language and culture, living within a stable centralised system, and the Ti? ang Renaissance recreated this.
Chi? ang-an, (modern Xian or Sian), was sited on the banks of the sluggish Wei River, fifty miles from the junction of the Wei and the Yellow River, north of the Chi? in-ling Mountains and with the Ti? ai-hang mountains to the east. Its periods of stability and continuity were punctuated by the tremors of war and rebellion. Sacked in 26AD by the Red-Eyebrow guerrillas it was re-established in 191AD to be sacked
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? again in 311 and was rebuilt by the Sui Dynasty in 583.
In Ti? ang times the rectangular walled city, its sides oriented to the points of the compass, was laid out like a giant chessboard, a grid of a hundred and eight walled wards closed at night, with markets, Buddhist and Taoist monasteries, and Manichean, Mazdean and Nestorian temples. The outer walls, entered and exited through great gates with flanking towers, were made of pounded earth sixteen metres thick at the base and eight metres high. The rectangle of the city extended over eight kilometres north to south and over nine kilometres east to west, to cover over eighty square kilometres containing a population of a million people. The Imperial City with lakes and pools extended south from the northern wall. Its position placed the apartments of the consorts and concubines in the Yin north. It faced the Yang south and the administrative city that in turn looked out to the city wards. To the northeast of the city was the
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? Ta Ming palace and the Imperial Park. To the northwest of the city was the Emperori? s summer palace. In the southeast corner of the city were the Hibiscus Garden and the e? Serpentinei? Lake. Outside the Western Wall was the Shang-lin complex designed in Han times with gardens, halls and palaces. In one of the ornamental lakes Emperor Wu of Han had built a model of the mythical Pi? eng-lai Palace on the Islands of the Blessed in the Eastern Seas. The southern gate opened out on to a broad avenue that, like others of the cityi? s great avenues, was edged by ditches planted with trees. The Great and Little Swallow Pagodas towered into the sky. In the Ki? un-ming Pool near the city, constructed for Naval exercises was a famous statue of a whale, and near it statues of the Weaver Girl and the Herdboy, whose annual meeting in the starry sky guaranteed the cyclic movement of the cosmos.
The Wei River valley past Chi? ang-an was the main trade corridor from China to Central Asia, a continuation of the Yellow River route
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? from Honan province. Trade goods flowed to and from India and the West along the line of towns and oases forming the Silk Road. Caravans heading west from Chi? ang-an travelled the Kansu e? long corridori? , the great e? valleyi? where the Han race originated, skirting the Gobi Desert to the north and the Nan Shan mountains to the southwest. The Jade Gate, at the old town of Yumen, piercing the Great Wall, allowed them exit to Tun-huang on the edge of the Tarim Basin.
Back through the gate passed high quality raw jade, from the mountains further west, down into China. From Tun-huang they entered the hostile and arid Basin where a number of alternative routes ran west along the northern and southern edges of the Basin's barren Taklamakan Desert. There they skirted the eight- hundred-mile sea of sand dunes, lying between the Tien Shan (Celestial Mountains) range to the north and the Kunlun range to the south. One route passed by Lop Nori? s lake to reach Loulan,
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? where the caravans could provision before heading west along the Tarim River system. Reaching Kashgar at the other end of the Tarim Basin, travellers could then cross the northern edge of the Pamirs via the Terek and other passes to Fergana. Then along the chain of oases, Samarkand, Bokhara, Merv, and on to Baghdad, the Middle East and Europe. This was the trade corridor between Rome and the Han Empire.
Itinerant Buddhist monks joined the caravans along the Silk Road bringing their literature and way of life, creating the Buddhist cave complexes at Tun-huang and K'u-ch'e. They could reach Khotan in the Tarim Basin from the Indus valley to the south by crossing the Hindu Kush, over the frozen eighteen thousand-foot heights of the Karakoram Pass. This route along the south of the Tarim Basin between Khotan and Loulan was the path taken by Hs ? an-tsang the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim in 629AD, who spent sixteen years travelling from China through India and returned bringing
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? copies of key Buddhist texts. His experiences are the theme of one of Chinai? s few long novels, e? The Journey to the Westi? (Xijouyi). Travelling to the south of the Taklamakan, he no doubt experienced the ? ,7,-:7,3 or black hurricane, a dark storm of pebbles and sand lasting for hours. e? At times you hear melancholy wails and pitiful cries, and, between the sight and sounds of the desert, men are confused and lost. So many people die on the way, the work of evil spirits and demons. i?
Manicheanism, Nestorian Christianity, Judaism, Mohammedanism, and Zoroastrianism entered China along the Silk Road. Envoys from Sassanid Persia, Byzantium, and Arabia had reached Chi? ang-an by the seventh century. And as well as the traffic to the west, there was extensive sea-trade with Japan, and coastal traffic with Korea and South-East Asia. China absorbed immigrants and refugees, Arabs and North Africans, pilgrims from India, Turkoman nomads, Jewish and Muslim merchants. Chi? ang-
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? ani? s cosmopolitan population imported foreign jewels and silver, horses and textiles, raw materials and ceramics. It copied foreign fashions in clothing and hairstyles, furniture and art-objects, song and dance. New instruments and musical forms changed the Chinese native models. The Uighurs, the Turkomans of Urumqui and Turfan, produced famous wine, sending the ice-packed golden grapes called e? mares teatsi? and the best musicians and dancers of Asia to Chi? ang-an. Wealth and leisure demanded performing artists in dance, mime, music and song, and Asian songs and ballad forms stimulated new poetic patterns in the works of the intellectual elite.
The rich officials and aristocrats of the city also had second homes in the country. To the south east of the capital was the Lanti? ien (Indigo Fields) prefecture where the wealthy had their extensive retreats in the Chungnan (South Mountain) foothills and along the Wang River. Wang Wei the poet painter had a famous estate
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? here. It was a pleasant place for weary officials to escape to, where they could satisfy the desire to be close to Naturei? s force and beauty amongst relaxing scenery.
Lo-yang the eastern capital, two hundred miles from Chi? ang-an, also had its lakes and palaces, gardens and temples. With a population of three-quarters of a million it stood at the gateway to the great flood plains of the Yellow River. Less well-defended and smaller than Chi? ang-an, but with better water supplies, it was sited on the north bank of the Lo River and south of the Yellow River in Honan province. Built by the Chou it was the Eastern Han capital from 25AD and was sacked along with Chi? ang-an in 311AD though rebuilt in the 490i? s. It too was re- established by the Sui Dynasty. When Empress Wu came to the Ti? ang throne she had a Hall of Light, a Ming-ti? ang built there, to symbolise the power of the dynasty. Three tiered, its lowest tier symbolised the four seasons, the second tier the twelve double hours with a dish-shaped roof
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? supported by nine dragons, and the highest tier symbolised the twenty-four fortnights of the year.
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The Chinese poets give glimpses of the life of Chi? ang-ani? s Imperial Palace. The beauty of Hibiscus Park, with its memories of the Han consorts. The crystal blinds, embroidered curtains, silk and mica screens of the Imperial apartments and terraces. The lakes and pools with their stone ornaments, fish and dragons. Lutes and pipes sounding through the gardens. The flowered skirts, the jade pendants, the gauze and crimson silks, the slender waists and green- painted willow eyebrows, of girls dancing. Wine drinking in the moonlight. Candles and silk fans, kingfisher covers and carved mirrors. Midnight visits and the exchange of poems. Scented robes and letters on coloured paper. Water clocks and chiming bells. Lacquered trays and cups. Gardens of bamboos and cassia, willows and chrysanthemums, orchids and pear trees. Mandarin ducks and lotus flowers are on the
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? ? waters, orioles are in the trees, butterflies over the grasses. The cry of the phoenix sounds, and eyes are filled with tears. There is a coolness of jade and pearl. There is a rustle of silk over dew- white steps.
Chang HI? ng describes the dancers of Huai- nan. e? Delicate snapping waists, a glow of the lotus flower, shedding crimson flame.
Languid hesitant eyes, suddenly blaze with light, skirts fluttering, birds in flight. Gauze sleeves whirl falling snow, weaving the dancing hours, till white powder and willow brows are gone, flushed faces, tangled hair, gathered and held with combs. Gowns of gossamer trail. Perfect the harmony, sound, figures and dress. i? e? Music that falls from the white cloudsi? says Li Po. e? The sound of the flutes drifting from shore to shore. i?
Ti? ang Chinai? s immense influence on Japanese culture echoes in the Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibui? s poetic novel set sometime in the Heian period of the ninth and tenth centuries AD. Picking up the theme of the Emperor
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? captivated by a concubine from the Ti? ang, the Tale of Genji enters a similar world of midnight assignations, neglected women, aesthetic appreciation, and reticent, subtle feeling. e? What men wanted was women not of high station but with true and delicate sensibilities who would hint to them of their feelings through poems and letters as the clouds passed and the blossom and grasses flowered and faded. i? To the Buddhists, Confucians and true Taoists this was a marred world of sensuality and attachment, of foolish intoxication and dangerous refinement. It is a world which the Ti? ang poets move in, and whose passing, with all its faults, they regret. The aesthetic easily slips into the sensual. Beauty appreciated in flowers, rivers, trees and mountains, in moonlight and stars, is also appreciated in women and wine, music and dance. Courtesans and dancing girls are the subject of many delicate poems that often stress loneliness and neglect, misplaced affection and fading beauty. Li Po e? would take his singing
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? girls Chin-ling and Chao-yang with him on his journeysi? . And e? when he was drunk his page boy Cinnabar would play the Waves of the Blue Oceani? , the tune that Genji danced to in front of the Emperor so that he e? seemed not of this worldi? . It is a beautiful, wasteful, clinging, suspect atmosphere, seductive and delightful, but confusing the mind and absorbing the senses. It entices with the joy of youthful faces and deludes with the transience of passing things.
In Ti? ang China the intoxicating beauty and subsequent neglect of women is a charged theme. A social role based on sexual availability and feminine beauty and talents did not carry the stigma of the West but equally did involve the risks and uncertainties of a precarious life. Concubines of the Emperor or a wealthy lord might see him seldom if at all and be effectively imprisoned within the life of the harem. It was often seen as an immoral practice by sections of the educated classes, being unnatural and dangerous to good government while
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? condemning the girls to a life of loneliness and neglect. Dancing girls might attract a man of wealth and become entangled only to see him vanish again. Taoism provided a refuge for daughters of high officials or these concubines put away by their lords. Many Taoist nuns were just such women, while others used their education, talents and connections to pursue a life as high-class courtesans.
Sexuality in itself carried no stigma but the predilection of the men for very young girls and the natural intensity of relationships still brought with it all the complexities, confusions and heartbreak of the transient or clandestine liaison. There is ambivalence about the stories of the obsessions of older men with young women. Were they in themselves pernicious relationships that in the case of the Emperor and high officials damaged the State, or could a private love matter more than the ruin of a kingdom?
There were many concubines and courtesans who were famous for their beauty and
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? their relationships with the powerful, and their situation echoes through later Chinese and Japanese literature so that the names of the one evoke the other. There are therefore many analogues for Yang Kuei-fei. In the Han Dynasty there is the concubine of Emperor Chi? eng-ti, Lady Pan, put aside because of her humble birth and slanders spoken against her, in favour of the consort Fei Yen, or Flying Swallow, who was said to be so light and delicate she could dance on a mani? s palm. Lady Pani? s fate was the subject of many poems including her own. Wang Weii? s e? Three Songs for Lady Pani? is a set of variations on the theme. There is Hsi Shih, the most beautiful of women, legendary consort of King Wu, referred to by Li Po in e? The Roosting Crowsi? . There is Lu-chu, Green Pearl, Shih Chungi? s concubine in the third century AD who sang and danced for him at his famous estate at Golden Vale. There is Wang Chao-ch ? n, concubine of Emperor Y ? an of Han who gave her as wife to a Tartar Khan, and on whose tomb
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? ? ? ? the grass was always green, or that earlier Chinese princess sent to a Tartar chieftain who yearned e? to be the yellow swan that returns to its homei? . And in the Japanese Tale of Genji who follows e? the way of lovei? there is Genjii? s cluster of consorts, the Akashi Lady, the Lady of the Evening Face, the Safflower Lady, and the child Murasaki, e? the lavender that shares its roots with anotheri? si? . Li Poi? s poems e? Jade Stairs Grievancei? and e? Yearningi? capture the sadness, regret and longing of a frequently disappointed love. Emperor Wu-ti of the Liang Dynasty, he who invited the Buddhist Bodhidarma founder of the Chi? an (Zen) school to China, writes a love poem as if from the woman, as was the poetic convention. e? My dress fragrant still with the perfume you wore. My hand still touching the letter you sent. i?
e? Silk robes rustled as her women moved softly about. i? The wind was rising. i? says the Tale of Genji, e? The perfumed mystery of dark incense drifted over the blinds to mix with the
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? ? ? ? faint altar incense and the fragrance of his own robes bringing intimations of the Western Paradise. i? e? With the blinds still lifted the delicate scent of the plum blossoms blew in. i?
Courtesans and concubines were often skilled in music. The Ti? ang poets generally used the verse form known as 8? ? ? , basically five or seven syllable lines in paired couplets with the even lines rhyming. The five- syllable line is made up of two plus three syllables with a caesura or pause (a sigh) between them. The seven-syllable line is made up of four and three. These forms appeared in Chi? ang-an round about the first century AD introduced from the song and dance rhythms of professional girls, possibly from Persia and Central Asia. Li Poi? s e? Yearningi? displays a courtesan who is also a skilled musician.
? The old-style 8? ? ? poems developed into the highly regulated new style verse, the eight-line form with internal balancing and alternation of characters and tones. There were also four line
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? e? stop-shorti? poems, the ? Q0? ? 1: ballad forms, and traditional songs. Poets were among those who frequented the entertainment quarters of the city like Heng-ti? ang, entering the e? floating worldi? of the e? blue housesi? . The singing and dancing girls, the female musicians and courtesans composed songs and lyrics and sang and played the compositions of the educated men who visited them. Music and poetry were intermingled. In the case of Wang Wei his musicianship may have been on a par with both his poetry and his painting.
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Wang Wei was born in 699AD in Shensi province. His father was a local official, his mother a member of a distinguished literary family. He and his brother were introduced to society in the Capital when he was about sixteen years old. An early poem e? Words for the Mica Screeni? already shows the acute sensibility and light, quiet touch of the poet and painter. The transparent screen reveals the landscape as though it was a painting made by Nature. Behind the artifice is the reality that obviates the need for artifice. Nature is a better painter than humanity. Through art Nature can be shown and enhanced, but Nature is always beyond art as the greater existence that can only be reached by simplicity, sensitivity and attentiveness. This tension remains throughout Wangi? s work, the desire for expression and realisation
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? ? ? counterbalanced by the knowledge that Nature should be sufficient. That feeling for the profundity of reality, that renders art superfluous and unnecessary, was a factor in Wangi? s attraction to Buddhism and led to a perpetual dissatisfaction with his artistic achievement that perhaps made him a greater poet and painter.
His lines e? Written on the Wang River Scrolli? acknowledge the e? errori? of any perception of him as purely an artistic surface, and point to the elusiveness of the true self that is beyond art. He was drawn to the pleasures of art and creation, but also understood the Taoist ideal of non- action and a more profound passivity. Equally he is full of feelings, not expressed or inexpressible, below the surface of the poems, while trying to follow the Buddhist path to extinction of desire and self.
This early period also produced the poem on e? Peach Blossom Springi? , a retelling of Ti? ao Chi? ieni? s famous story. Here is the Taoist theme, of a truer life that can be achieved outside or
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? ? ? beyond the contemporary world, a life that is found and too easily lost again, that is deep in the Yin reality symbolised by peach blossom and clouded woods, by the green stream and bright moon. There, human beings are free of intrusiveness, forget time, achieve simplicity, and become e? Immortalsi? . There, they cultivate their gardens outside the mainstream of events. As against the Confucian ideals of rational and benevolent engagement with the world this is escapism, and the land of Peach Blossom Spring is a e? refugei? from the unacceptable and inhuman world. But from a Taoist or Buddhist perspective it is a transcendence of the inhuman, a deeper existence. Since the goal human beings chase after is merely a transient illusion, then what is it an escape from, what is it an escape to?
In Wangi? s life and that of the other great poets, there is the tension between engagement and disengagement, between living in the suffering and feeling world, and living in the Vortex or the Void, between being a part and
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? entering the mountains without looking back. From the perspective of the world, the Way is an escape, a turning away from what drives human affairs. From the perspective of the spirit however it is a realisation, an awakening, as in Chi? an (Zen) Buddhism, or a more gradual realisation of and eventual existence in harmony with the Tao, or a progression towards that extinction of the Self that is the Buddhist Nirvana.
When he was twenty-three in 722AD Wang Wei passed the .