He is the last
survivor
of the three great poets.
Like-Water-or-Clouds-The-Tang-Dynasty
He draws an analogy between Yang Kuei-fei and her sisters and the Han consort, Flying Swallow, enjoying the flower-filled gardens and sending men to execution with a glance and a cruel smile.
Her fate is also the fate of Chi?
ang-an, trampled into the dust.
The remaining representative of the Tang Empire is Su-tsung the son of the Emperor, Hs ?
an-tsung having abdicated, who is at Feng-hsiang about 100 miles to the west.
He is now e?
The Emperor in the Northi?
Tu Fu was still in the capital in early 757, separated from his family who he had left at Fu-
203
? ? chou in the north. e? Spring in Chi? ang-ani? is a poem of resignation to fate, but also one of hope since even in a fallen Empire and an occupied city nature remains inviolable. The ambiguous grammatical construction of the second couplet identifies his tears of separation and painful memory with the dew spilling from the flowers, and his own fears for his family with the secret anxieties of the wild birds caught in the turmoil of the capital. The beacons on the hills are burning month after month signalling the continuing civil war, and news from home is scarce. e? Moon at Night in Chi? ang-ani? is another poem of separation and absence, belying any view that Tu Fu lacks the deeper emotions. On the contrary the feelings are the more profound for being directed towards his wife and children. It is in a poem like this, in the steadiness of his gaze, that Tu can make Li Po seem superficial and disengaged, and Wang Wei seem pliable and low-profile.
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? ? ? In the previous autumn of 756, Prince Lin, a son of the emperor had command of a southern army based on Chiang-ling on the Yangtze. Lin began to build forces and supplies out of proportion to his role, and a nervous Su-tsung ordered him to report to the ex-Emperor in his refuge of Chi? I? ng-tu. Prince Lin ignored the order and his flotilla set off down the Yangtze. Lin apparently intended to set up an alternative government in the Yangtze delta.
Li Po meanwhile had taken refuge in the Lu Shan mountains south-east of Kiukiang on the Yangtze. His wife joined him from Kweiteh (near Kaifeng), in the north, after a long separation. She was accompanied by her brother, to whom Li confessed himself a less than an ideal brother-in-law. He said that he was ashamed to be waited on by his distinguished sister. At Kiukiang his wife visited Li Lin-fui? s daughter who was living as a Taoist nun on the Lu Shan. Li writes a poem to her there in e? that
205
? ? refugei? . e? You follow the Tao, seek out Immortals, catch the blue clouds in your white hands, trail your skirt of gauze through purple mists. i? There the disaster of their society is more endurable. e? The blue mountains are themselves blue mountainsi? says the Zenrin, of the natural world that is contained within itself, outside any human contrivance, e? The white clouds are themselves white clouds. i?
When Prince Lin reached Kiukiang in early 757, and the port was e? a mass of military bannersi? , Li Po innocently joined the expedition. He probably believed it to be part of the Imperial opposition to An Lu-shan who was in fact murdered by his son about this time. The son An Chi? ing-hs ? then became the Rebel leader. Prince Lin had already been disowned by the Emperor. Joining the expedition gave Li an opportunity to mix with Court circles again, to enjoy the banquets and the dancing girls, the wine and the music, as the flotilla sailed down the Yangtze River, and to celebrate it in extravagant verse,
206
? his Songs of the Progress to the East. Near Yangchow however the fleet encountered Government forces, Prince Lini? s Generals abandoned him. He was defeated in a river-battle and escaped to the south. He was subsequently captured and executed.
Li Po had fled from Yangchow, but was arrested as he returned to Kiukiang, and imprisoned, despite his protestations that he had been deceived, had joined the expedition to fight the rebels, and had broken with prince Lin as soon as he had realised what was happening. His wife was at Y ? -chang seventy miles south and attempted to intercede for him. He wrote to the new Chief Minister Tsi? ui Huan asking for forgiveness, and was freed in the autumn by a passing official Sung Jo-ssu after a review of his case. Within a few weeks the Imperial forces had liberated Chi? ang-an and Lo-yang.
207
? The fifty-eight year old Wang Wei was working for the Rebel Government in Chi? ang-an when it was recaptured. He escaped execution but was charged with collaboration and imprisoned in the Bodhi Temple. There he composes and recites two poems to his friend Pei Ti. The first portrays the confusion and desolation as the city is taken over by the Rebels, who e? make music on the green waters of the lakei? . The second e? Words spoken to Pei Tii? expresses the desire to escape from enforced Rebel service. The poems and the intercession of his brother and others gained his release. He returned to the Government and was later in service as an official of the Council of State (until his death in 761).
Tu Fu meanwhile had joined the new Emperor at his temporary capital of Feng-hsiang a hundred miles west of Chi? ang-an. Since ordinary methods of recruitment for official
208
? ? service had ceased to operate because of the Rebellion he was able to enter without examination. So at the age of forty-five he at last held a modest position close to the Court. It lasted only a few months. He seems to have been over-zealous, or too courageous in going against the Emperori? s wishes. Whatever the reason in the October of 757 he left Feng-hsiang on leave, to journey to meet his wife and family whom he had not seen since the previous year. e? The Homecomingi? describes the trek of some two hundred miles across the hills northwest of Chi? ang-an. He travelled from Feng-hsiang northeast to Pin-chou on the Ching River, and then northeast again to Fu-chou on the Luo river due north of of Chang-an. His family in Fu-chou consisted of his two daughters and two sons, one still a baby born during his e? detentioni? in Chi? ang-an.
Later in 759 we find that Tu who had not returned to the Court was a local Commissioner of Education and against the background of a
209
? ? ? country still in turmoil was sent to Loyang by the prefect of the District. He stayed on the way with a friend, recalled in e? For Wei Pai? , who was an unemployed minor official. Later in that year again he gave up the post, which he disliked, and moved with his family to Chi? I? ng-tu in the Red Basin of Szechwan.
Li Po was taken into Sung Jo-ssui? s service but in 758 had left again and was lying ill near Lukiang in Anhui. The Chief Minister Tsi? ui Huan who had approved his release from prison fell from power. Li Poi? s sentence was reversed and he was now banished to Yeh-lang in the upper reaches of the Yangtze, in Y ? nnan in the far southwest. He started on a long, and deliberately slow, journey along the Yangtze, staying first with officials who were old friends near Hankow, at Wu-chi? ang and Han-yang. There he drank with old friends and watched e? the girls in their gauze dresses, dancing to the high
210
? ? notes of flutes, their songs climbing to the clouds. i? He was still trying to work his contacts at Court but despite an amnesty for others was again travelling upriver in the spring of 759.
The poem e? Remembering the Springs at Chi? ih-choui? already anticipates his return from exile, and shortly after reaching the Yangtze Gorges in the third month of 759 he was pardoned in a general amnesty which recalled those in exile. By early autumn he had sailed downriver again and was at Yo-chou near the Tung-ti? ing Lake.
China was still in turmoil with fresh revolts and rebellions; An Lu-shani? s son was assassinated and replaced; there were new Government defeats; and Lo-yang fell to a second rebel army. In the ninth month Yo-chou was under threat from a new southern uprising, as the rebellion fragmented into local rebellions and revolts, and it was the end of the year before Li could escape downriver to Wu-chi? ang. From there he drifted back to the Nanking area, where,
211
? ? ? dogged by illness, he spent his last few years, still attempting to gain official employment. At the end of 762 the sixty-one year old Li was lying desperately ill at the home of the famous calligrapher Li Yang-ping, the Prefect of Tang- ti? u (Taiping) on the Yangtze near Nanking. Li Po gave him the separate sheets of hundreds of his poems before his death. Unlike the more fortunate Wang Wei, Li Po died while still in what he must have seen as an equivalent of exile, far from Chi? ang-an, having missed all his life the high office he had believed he merited.
Tu Fu the younger poet still remained in Chi? I? ng-tu. He owned a small cottage, and carried out literary work for local patrons. Living among the network of rivers and streams that descend from the mountains to flow around Chi? eng-tu, in ill-health and probably consumptive, he wrote some of the quietest and most resigned lyrics of his last and greatest
212
? poetic period. e? A Visitori? is set amongst the spring waters, striking a note of realism and a gentle self-deprecating awareness. His poem e? For General Huai? is again set among the waters and high skies, the clouds and remoteness of Chi? I? ng-tu. It was a gentle Confucian warning to the headstrong young General that it was wise to keep to the Middle Way, not to be tempted by ambition to covet illicit power, behave immorally, or aim at the Imperial role reserved for the Son of Heaven.
In 765 Tui? s chief patron died. He had held a nominal official appointment as a Consultant Assistant-Secretary at the Ministry of Works, advising the Provincial Governor, and receiving a small salary. He was now unemployed and he left Chi? eng-tu travelling down the Yangtze, reaching Ki? uei-chou, White King city, upstream from the Wu and Chi? ? -ti? ang gorges, in 766. During his two years there he wrote many of his greatest poems. e? Yangtzei? invokes an autumnal mood and the transience of life, contrasting the
213
? ? turbid human river of existence and the eternal clear star-river of the Galaxy. He is living his twilight in the broken Empire, his thoughts now for a moment clear. The human past has been destroyed, but the Courts of the Heavens are still in place, the Mooni? s circle still perfect, ever renewed. His own sick body is itself a dew- drenched clock that counts the final hours, and it is bowed down by his inner sadness, as the flowers are weighed down by chill night dew.
In e? High and Dry on the Yangtzei? in the gibbon-haunted gorges near Ki? uei-chou he looks back through the same cool autumn light, with the same clarity of vision, on his real and his metaphorical journey. The mind, that mind which creates the poem and in a limited and impersonal way lives on within language, looks with irony and pity on the body that is so ill it can no longer even escape itself through wine.
In e? Night Journey Thoughtsi? Tu is on the Yangtze on his voyage in 768-9 down river across the Tung-ti? ing Lake and up the Hsiang
214
? ? ? River by Chi? ang-sha. In his objective, solitary, and starlit vision he is the lone white gull floating on the random currents of the air. e? Deep Winteri? written in the same region is almost an extended metaphor for his situation.
He is the last survivor of the three great poets. Tu Fu the clear-eyed. In a last gentle poem e? Meeting Li Kuei-Nieni? four lines are enough to remember the past greatness, celebrate friendship and creativity, and appreciate a moment of peace and the spring warmth of the south, even though it is a last place, where the petals fall, along with poems, years, lives and empires.
? ? ? ? 215
? %? 0? %? ,3? ? ? ? 3,89? ? ,3/? %? 20
The Ti? ang Dynasty reveals its consciousness of, and preoccupation with, time. The Tao that is eternal and invisible energy manifests itself in temporal things, in visible process. The Ti? ang Dynasty sees itself in a long continuum of Chinese history. e? Hold fast to the oldest Wayi? , says the Tao Te Ching, e? to understand the Present Time. To know the root of the Past is the thread that runs through the Way. i? Ti? ang looks back to Han, to the past lives of great individuals whose memory it cherishes.
The Emperor fulfils a role beyond man, as a mediator between the eternal and the ephemeral. His vows may carry through many existences, since Buddhism claims that the spirit is bound on the Wheel of Lives unless it can achieve release in Nirvana. Equally there may be only one life, so that he must strive also to become a Taoist Immortal. Ti? ang poems remember Emperor Wu
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? ? of Han, who, obsessed by the desire for everlasting life, set up dew-pans held by bronze immortals to catch the elixir of Heaven. Buried at Mao-ling, Leafy Mound, he is remembered as e? Young Liu in Leafy Moundi? whose life and dynasty vanished swifter than the wind.
Immortality is always out of reach. The Wheel of Lives is always turning. The living Emperor is caught between everlastingness and nothingness, between the desire for and the escape from immortality. Through the poems as through the palaces there is the sound of dripping water clocks, of bells and drums tolling the hours. Moon, sun and stars move over Heavens where time congeals in dew, is mirrored in water, is reflected from bronze.
Life though is transient, love and empires grow cold, or are destroyed, the blossom is forever falling from the trees, autumn ruins the leaves, courtyards fill with weeds, beauty grows old with neglect and inattention. Yet everything stirs with the vortex, birds are always in flight,
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? the silk curtains blow, there is a cool wind in the pines, wine and songs flow like the waters, hearts are high as clouds that drift over the mountains. Li Po dances with his shadow. Tu Fu watches the bent grasses in a river-breeze. Wang Wei is blown like thistle-seed across the northern wastes of the Empire. Rain falls, rivers flow, cloud moves, light alters.
Wang Wei knows a way to defeat time if he could only follow it. Through meditation on the Void we enter the timeless, the Moment, the Now, where there are no names or forms, where language is still and only being exists. It is the place Nature inhabits, free of mind. Or it is the place where everything within the self has become mind and therefore mindless. It is Nature, without thought, without memory, without intention. It is Nature, without ownership, without demands, without, authority.
And he knows another way, a way of creation, where the painting freezes time in order to re-create itself in the eye of the observer, in
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? ? ? ? the eyei? s living time. The way of the poem also, where time runs within a closed form, within a frame of words and characters, and is an object as a painting is. The painting and the poem are landscapes that wait for an eye to make them live again. They persist in time, wait and wake in time, contain a time, a moment of time, and spill over into other times. Art escapes life to capture life, denies the creator immortality in the body while achieving its own immortality of form, and carrying a meaning and purpose to come. Wang Wei, destroyed again and again by loss, by the death of others, cannot reach the silence he yearns for, can only recreate the Now in ink, on silk, in the mind, again and again, as artist, in intensity.
Li Po is possessed by transience. Li, the restless, who is the wanderer, and the searcher after immortality. He traverses China from Szechwan to Shantung, from Peking to the Yangtze Delta. Li who can compose in a flash, in a lightning stroke. Who drinks to lose time, to
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? make time vanish, to escape reality in stupor, and consciousness in sleep. Li who can almost touch and feel the tranquility and stillness of others, but rarely his own. Li who is so far below the hills that the adepts seem to climb, who is dizzied by height, who has to descend the mountains, and abandon the hills. Li who is e? knee-deep in a thousand fallen flowersi? . Li whose emblems are the Moon and the mirror. Li who dreams he is the butterfly, who is e? helplessi? in the deep garden. Li who is the transience of colours, and the beauty of sunsets, lost notes of music, lost poems fluttering, lost hours, girls, wine-cups, lost emotions. Li whose inner movement is the spirit journey, the ? 8? 03i? s flight through the night, through the Heavens. Li, who is the shaman from the East, the lone magician of Asia, who can ride through the air, unaided. Li who can visit the timeless Paradises of the West, the Magic Islands of the East, and return, as Keatsi? s knight returns, to a world of time that is inadequate to his senses and his aspirations. Li
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? ? who longs for the alchemy that will transcend time, that will e? transmute his bones to goldi? , to that fused silver moon and golden sun of the Taoist Eternal Child. Li who like Baudelaire in e? The Voyagei? is always ready to set sail one more time, to move on, into the unknown, to find the new.
Tu Fu is the eye that sees the Moment. He is the self-awareness of the intellect, the perception of form and its intricacies, the observer of time as History being made, History as it defines the human and the inhuman, as it enters into memory, as it remains in the present through its creations and its transformations. Tu is the lone element of being, wandering on the surface of the real, driven by the wind, or caught in the walls of the whirlpool. He is the observer of the neutrality of the universe, and the neutrality of the vortex of historical events, of the twin sets of forces that emerge from them to touch the individual. He is the inhabitant of a universe
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? ? which is neither benevolent as his Confucianism taught, nor in any way malevolent.
The universe is not indifferent, hostile, alien, or malign, since these are all words that imply sentience, feeling or attitude. It is insensible, without mind, an ocean of energies. Tu is the eye behind the crystal blind, the eye that gazes and is filled with sympathy, energy, delight or tears. He sees those things that are embedded in time, arts and ethics, laws and rituals. He is a Confucian in his humanity, his humility, his warmth, his power to endure and to create within the world. He knows the pain of fitting human nature to a social order, and the pain of seeing order descend into human chaos. He counters pain with feeling, sensibility, creativity, strength of mind, compassion and good will. He knows the human world is subject to time, and therefore to loss, regret, irretrievable error. He knows that turmoil of politics where as the old song of Chi? u says e? loyalty brings disasteri? . He also sees within the strands of event, natural beauty and natural
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? affection, transient but deep, ephemeral but consoling. In the natural, in his personal Taoist depths, Tu Fu is calm, simple, tranquil.
The Tao is the matrix of time, and it creates the forms of time. Attempting to understand what lies behind the e? howi? of the universe Chuang-tzu says e? Things appear to us, but we do not understand where they come from. They emerge into the world, but no one sees the portal. We value what is known, but do not know how to use the unknown. i? In western terms we produce a scientific description of how events succeed each other, what changes we expect to see, and the appearance of the e? surfacesi? of our experience. But we delude ourselves if we believe that we grasp the e? inner naturei? of energy, or change, of e? being herei? and e? changing intoi? .
The whole thrust of critical sceptical philosophy, of epistemology, in the West, since
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? Hume and Kant, has been to mark out empirically, through observation and meditation the limits of human understanding in thought and language. The Tao is not deity. It does not produce by intentional design. It is unknown and unknowing. The vortex of its events produces space and time. It is the waves, the oscillations, the regular vibrations, we use to measure the succession of events we call time. And it is the contiguities that we use to measure immediate space, and therefore the speed of light and by deduction the distances of the remote universe.
The Tao exists in itself and not for itself. Taoism attempts to loosen the bonds that bind us, to free us from time. Its aspiration is not to understand nature, but to -0? nature. e? The wise put Self last, and it comes firsti? says the Tao Te Ching. Its method is to work e? without actioni? , ? :? ? 0? , that is without self-conscious intent, without striving or stress, without endless words. Its tenor is calmness, to be the water surface that reflects light without intention, that accepts
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? images without grasping and retains them without possessing. Its appearance is an uncultivated innocence e? sorrowful like a baby that has lost its mother, stupid like one who has lost the wayi? as Chuang-tzu says, tongue in cheek. If the natural world cannot be trusted in its lack of intent, what can? If simplicity will not get us there, how will complexity achieve it?
Being never quite at ease, that is the dangerous road for the mind. To be, on the other hand, a creative source, to make the difficult happen as if spontaneously, to concentrate the mind on the object until the self vanishes, without being aware that it has vanished, is the Way. In this our greatest enemy is our sense of time. We find beauty in the timeless, virtue in the selfless, truth in the uncarved and unadorned. Though we, through natural selection, are nothing if not the creatures of time, the result of event, the products of the sieve of generations, the stability that preserves mutation, we are also that which contemplates time, reflects on
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? process, inhabits the Now. Not to be lost in language games is the Way, not to believe, not to follow, not to own. Death does not exist for the self, only dying. Dying is the vanishing of self- consciousness. To be aware and conscious but without self-consciousness is to have vanished, as a smile vanishes or a thought.
Liberation from time is achieved by destroying the grasping, the desire that links us to time. e? How can I free myself? i? asks the pupil. e? Who is imprisoning you? i? says the Master. e? No onei? replies the pupil. e? Then why do you seek to be free? i? Not to contemplate, or to concentrate, to strain at awareness, or to restrain the body, but to eliminate thought is the Way. To abandon learning and embrace the natural.
In it there is nothing special.
Tu Fu was still in the capital in early 757, separated from his family who he had left at Fu-
203
? ? chou in the north. e? Spring in Chi? ang-ani? is a poem of resignation to fate, but also one of hope since even in a fallen Empire and an occupied city nature remains inviolable. The ambiguous grammatical construction of the second couplet identifies his tears of separation and painful memory with the dew spilling from the flowers, and his own fears for his family with the secret anxieties of the wild birds caught in the turmoil of the capital. The beacons on the hills are burning month after month signalling the continuing civil war, and news from home is scarce. e? Moon at Night in Chi? ang-ani? is another poem of separation and absence, belying any view that Tu Fu lacks the deeper emotions. On the contrary the feelings are the more profound for being directed towards his wife and children. It is in a poem like this, in the steadiness of his gaze, that Tu can make Li Po seem superficial and disengaged, and Wang Wei seem pliable and low-profile.
204
? ? ? In the previous autumn of 756, Prince Lin, a son of the emperor had command of a southern army based on Chiang-ling on the Yangtze. Lin began to build forces and supplies out of proportion to his role, and a nervous Su-tsung ordered him to report to the ex-Emperor in his refuge of Chi? I? ng-tu. Prince Lin ignored the order and his flotilla set off down the Yangtze. Lin apparently intended to set up an alternative government in the Yangtze delta.
Li Po meanwhile had taken refuge in the Lu Shan mountains south-east of Kiukiang on the Yangtze. His wife joined him from Kweiteh (near Kaifeng), in the north, after a long separation. She was accompanied by her brother, to whom Li confessed himself a less than an ideal brother-in-law. He said that he was ashamed to be waited on by his distinguished sister. At Kiukiang his wife visited Li Lin-fui? s daughter who was living as a Taoist nun on the Lu Shan. Li writes a poem to her there in e? that
205
? ? refugei? . e? You follow the Tao, seek out Immortals, catch the blue clouds in your white hands, trail your skirt of gauze through purple mists. i? There the disaster of their society is more endurable. e? The blue mountains are themselves blue mountainsi? says the Zenrin, of the natural world that is contained within itself, outside any human contrivance, e? The white clouds are themselves white clouds. i?
When Prince Lin reached Kiukiang in early 757, and the port was e? a mass of military bannersi? , Li Po innocently joined the expedition. He probably believed it to be part of the Imperial opposition to An Lu-shan who was in fact murdered by his son about this time. The son An Chi? ing-hs ? then became the Rebel leader. Prince Lin had already been disowned by the Emperor. Joining the expedition gave Li an opportunity to mix with Court circles again, to enjoy the banquets and the dancing girls, the wine and the music, as the flotilla sailed down the Yangtze River, and to celebrate it in extravagant verse,
206
? his Songs of the Progress to the East. Near Yangchow however the fleet encountered Government forces, Prince Lini? s Generals abandoned him. He was defeated in a river-battle and escaped to the south. He was subsequently captured and executed.
Li Po had fled from Yangchow, but was arrested as he returned to Kiukiang, and imprisoned, despite his protestations that he had been deceived, had joined the expedition to fight the rebels, and had broken with prince Lin as soon as he had realised what was happening. His wife was at Y ? -chang seventy miles south and attempted to intercede for him. He wrote to the new Chief Minister Tsi? ui Huan asking for forgiveness, and was freed in the autumn by a passing official Sung Jo-ssu after a review of his case. Within a few weeks the Imperial forces had liberated Chi? ang-an and Lo-yang.
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? The fifty-eight year old Wang Wei was working for the Rebel Government in Chi? ang-an when it was recaptured. He escaped execution but was charged with collaboration and imprisoned in the Bodhi Temple. There he composes and recites two poems to his friend Pei Ti. The first portrays the confusion and desolation as the city is taken over by the Rebels, who e? make music on the green waters of the lakei? . The second e? Words spoken to Pei Tii? expresses the desire to escape from enforced Rebel service. The poems and the intercession of his brother and others gained his release. He returned to the Government and was later in service as an official of the Council of State (until his death in 761).
Tu Fu meanwhile had joined the new Emperor at his temporary capital of Feng-hsiang a hundred miles west of Chi? ang-an. Since ordinary methods of recruitment for official
208
? ? service had ceased to operate because of the Rebellion he was able to enter without examination. So at the age of forty-five he at last held a modest position close to the Court. It lasted only a few months. He seems to have been over-zealous, or too courageous in going against the Emperori? s wishes. Whatever the reason in the October of 757 he left Feng-hsiang on leave, to journey to meet his wife and family whom he had not seen since the previous year. e? The Homecomingi? describes the trek of some two hundred miles across the hills northwest of Chi? ang-an. He travelled from Feng-hsiang northeast to Pin-chou on the Ching River, and then northeast again to Fu-chou on the Luo river due north of of Chang-an. His family in Fu-chou consisted of his two daughters and two sons, one still a baby born during his e? detentioni? in Chi? ang-an.
Later in 759 we find that Tu who had not returned to the Court was a local Commissioner of Education and against the background of a
209
? ? ? country still in turmoil was sent to Loyang by the prefect of the District. He stayed on the way with a friend, recalled in e? For Wei Pai? , who was an unemployed minor official. Later in that year again he gave up the post, which he disliked, and moved with his family to Chi? I? ng-tu in the Red Basin of Szechwan.
Li Po was taken into Sung Jo-ssui? s service but in 758 had left again and was lying ill near Lukiang in Anhui. The Chief Minister Tsi? ui Huan who had approved his release from prison fell from power. Li Poi? s sentence was reversed and he was now banished to Yeh-lang in the upper reaches of the Yangtze, in Y ? nnan in the far southwest. He started on a long, and deliberately slow, journey along the Yangtze, staying first with officials who were old friends near Hankow, at Wu-chi? ang and Han-yang. There he drank with old friends and watched e? the girls in their gauze dresses, dancing to the high
210
? ? notes of flutes, their songs climbing to the clouds. i? He was still trying to work his contacts at Court but despite an amnesty for others was again travelling upriver in the spring of 759.
The poem e? Remembering the Springs at Chi? ih-choui? already anticipates his return from exile, and shortly after reaching the Yangtze Gorges in the third month of 759 he was pardoned in a general amnesty which recalled those in exile. By early autumn he had sailed downriver again and was at Yo-chou near the Tung-ti? ing Lake.
China was still in turmoil with fresh revolts and rebellions; An Lu-shani? s son was assassinated and replaced; there were new Government defeats; and Lo-yang fell to a second rebel army. In the ninth month Yo-chou was under threat from a new southern uprising, as the rebellion fragmented into local rebellions and revolts, and it was the end of the year before Li could escape downriver to Wu-chi? ang. From there he drifted back to the Nanking area, where,
211
? ? ? dogged by illness, he spent his last few years, still attempting to gain official employment. At the end of 762 the sixty-one year old Li was lying desperately ill at the home of the famous calligrapher Li Yang-ping, the Prefect of Tang- ti? u (Taiping) on the Yangtze near Nanking. Li Po gave him the separate sheets of hundreds of his poems before his death. Unlike the more fortunate Wang Wei, Li Po died while still in what he must have seen as an equivalent of exile, far from Chi? ang-an, having missed all his life the high office he had believed he merited.
Tu Fu the younger poet still remained in Chi? I? ng-tu. He owned a small cottage, and carried out literary work for local patrons. Living among the network of rivers and streams that descend from the mountains to flow around Chi? eng-tu, in ill-health and probably consumptive, he wrote some of the quietest and most resigned lyrics of his last and greatest
212
? poetic period. e? A Visitori? is set amongst the spring waters, striking a note of realism and a gentle self-deprecating awareness. His poem e? For General Huai? is again set among the waters and high skies, the clouds and remoteness of Chi? I? ng-tu. It was a gentle Confucian warning to the headstrong young General that it was wise to keep to the Middle Way, not to be tempted by ambition to covet illicit power, behave immorally, or aim at the Imperial role reserved for the Son of Heaven.
In 765 Tui? s chief patron died. He had held a nominal official appointment as a Consultant Assistant-Secretary at the Ministry of Works, advising the Provincial Governor, and receiving a small salary. He was now unemployed and he left Chi? eng-tu travelling down the Yangtze, reaching Ki? uei-chou, White King city, upstream from the Wu and Chi? ? -ti? ang gorges, in 766. During his two years there he wrote many of his greatest poems. e? Yangtzei? invokes an autumnal mood and the transience of life, contrasting the
213
? ? turbid human river of existence and the eternal clear star-river of the Galaxy. He is living his twilight in the broken Empire, his thoughts now for a moment clear. The human past has been destroyed, but the Courts of the Heavens are still in place, the Mooni? s circle still perfect, ever renewed. His own sick body is itself a dew- drenched clock that counts the final hours, and it is bowed down by his inner sadness, as the flowers are weighed down by chill night dew.
In e? High and Dry on the Yangtzei? in the gibbon-haunted gorges near Ki? uei-chou he looks back through the same cool autumn light, with the same clarity of vision, on his real and his metaphorical journey. The mind, that mind which creates the poem and in a limited and impersonal way lives on within language, looks with irony and pity on the body that is so ill it can no longer even escape itself through wine.
In e? Night Journey Thoughtsi? Tu is on the Yangtze on his voyage in 768-9 down river across the Tung-ti? ing Lake and up the Hsiang
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? ? ? River by Chi? ang-sha. In his objective, solitary, and starlit vision he is the lone white gull floating on the random currents of the air. e? Deep Winteri? written in the same region is almost an extended metaphor for his situation.
He is the last survivor of the three great poets. Tu Fu the clear-eyed. In a last gentle poem e? Meeting Li Kuei-Nieni? four lines are enough to remember the past greatness, celebrate friendship and creativity, and appreciate a moment of peace and the spring warmth of the south, even though it is a last place, where the petals fall, along with poems, years, lives and empires.
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The Ti? ang Dynasty reveals its consciousness of, and preoccupation with, time. The Tao that is eternal and invisible energy manifests itself in temporal things, in visible process. The Ti? ang Dynasty sees itself in a long continuum of Chinese history. e? Hold fast to the oldest Wayi? , says the Tao Te Ching, e? to understand the Present Time. To know the root of the Past is the thread that runs through the Way. i? Ti? ang looks back to Han, to the past lives of great individuals whose memory it cherishes.
The Emperor fulfils a role beyond man, as a mediator between the eternal and the ephemeral. His vows may carry through many existences, since Buddhism claims that the spirit is bound on the Wheel of Lives unless it can achieve release in Nirvana. Equally there may be only one life, so that he must strive also to become a Taoist Immortal. Ti? ang poems remember Emperor Wu
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? ? of Han, who, obsessed by the desire for everlasting life, set up dew-pans held by bronze immortals to catch the elixir of Heaven. Buried at Mao-ling, Leafy Mound, he is remembered as e? Young Liu in Leafy Moundi? whose life and dynasty vanished swifter than the wind.
Immortality is always out of reach. The Wheel of Lives is always turning. The living Emperor is caught between everlastingness and nothingness, between the desire for and the escape from immortality. Through the poems as through the palaces there is the sound of dripping water clocks, of bells and drums tolling the hours. Moon, sun and stars move over Heavens where time congeals in dew, is mirrored in water, is reflected from bronze.
Life though is transient, love and empires grow cold, or are destroyed, the blossom is forever falling from the trees, autumn ruins the leaves, courtyards fill with weeds, beauty grows old with neglect and inattention. Yet everything stirs with the vortex, birds are always in flight,
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? the silk curtains blow, there is a cool wind in the pines, wine and songs flow like the waters, hearts are high as clouds that drift over the mountains. Li Po dances with his shadow. Tu Fu watches the bent grasses in a river-breeze. Wang Wei is blown like thistle-seed across the northern wastes of the Empire. Rain falls, rivers flow, cloud moves, light alters.
Wang Wei knows a way to defeat time if he could only follow it. Through meditation on the Void we enter the timeless, the Moment, the Now, where there are no names or forms, where language is still and only being exists. It is the place Nature inhabits, free of mind. Or it is the place where everything within the self has become mind and therefore mindless. It is Nature, without thought, without memory, without intention. It is Nature, without ownership, without demands, without, authority.
And he knows another way, a way of creation, where the painting freezes time in order to re-create itself in the eye of the observer, in
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? ? ? ? the eyei? s living time. The way of the poem also, where time runs within a closed form, within a frame of words and characters, and is an object as a painting is. The painting and the poem are landscapes that wait for an eye to make them live again. They persist in time, wait and wake in time, contain a time, a moment of time, and spill over into other times. Art escapes life to capture life, denies the creator immortality in the body while achieving its own immortality of form, and carrying a meaning and purpose to come. Wang Wei, destroyed again and again by loss, by the death of others, cannot reach the silence he yearns for, can only recreate the Now in ink, on silk, in the mind, again and again, as artist, in intensity.
Li Po is possessed by transience. Li, the restless, who is the wanderer, and the searcher after immortality. He traverses China from Szechwan to Shantung, from Peking to the Yangtze Delta. Li who can compose in a flash, in a lightning stroke. Who drinks to lose time, to
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? make time vanish, to escape reality in stupor, and consciousness in sleep. Li who can almost touch and feel the tranquility and stillness of others, but rarely his own. Li who is so far below the hills that the adepts seem to climb, who is dizzied by height, who has to descend the mountains, and abandon the hills. Li who is e? knee-deep in a thousand fallen flowersi? . Li whose emblems are the Moon and the mirror. Li who dreams he is the butterfly, who is e? helplessi? in the deep garden. Li who is the transience of colours, and the beauty of sunsets, lost notes of music, lost poems fluttering, lost hours, girls, wine-cups, lost emotions. Li whose inner movement is the spirit journey, the ? 8? 03i? s flight through the night, through the Heavens. Li, who is the shaman from the East, the lone magician of Asia, who can ride through the air, unaided. Li who can visit the timeless Paradises of the West, the Magic Islands of the East, and return, as Keatsi? s knight returns, to a world of time that is inadequate to his senses and his aspirations. Li
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? ? who longs for the alchemy that will transcend time, that will e? transmute his bones to goldi? , to that fused silver moon and golden sun of the Taoist Eternal Child. Li who like Baudelaire in e? The Voyagei? is always ready to set sail one more time, to move on, into the unknown, to find the new.
Tu Fu is the eye that sees the Moment. He is the self-awareness of the intellect, the perception of form and its intricacies, the observer of time as History being made, History as it defines the human and the inhuman, as it enters into memory, as it remains in the present through its creations and its transformations. Tu is the lone element of being, wandering on the surface of the real, driven by the wind, or caught in the walls of the whirlpool. He is the observer of the neutrality of the universe, and the neutrality of the vortex of historical events, of the twin sets of forces that emerge from them to touch the individual. He is the inhabitant of a universe
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? ? which is neither benevolent as his Confucianism taught, nor in any way malevolent.
The universe is not indifferent, hostile, alien, or malign, since these are all words that imply sentience, feeling or attitude. It is insensible, without mind, an ocean of energies. Tu is the eye behind the crystal blind, the eye that gazes and is filled with sympathy, energy, delight or tears. He sees those things that are embedded in time, arts and ethics, laws and rituals. He is a Confucian in his humanity, his humility, his warmth, his power to endure and to create within the world. He knows the pain of fitting human nature to a social order, and the pain of seeing order descend into human chaos. He counters pain with feeling, sensibility, creativity, strength of mind, compassion and good will. He knows the human world is subject to time, and therefore to loss, regret, irretrievable error. He knows that turmoil of politics where as the old song of Chi? u says e? loyalty brings disasteri? . He also sees within the strands of event, natural beauty and natural
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? affection, transient but deep, ephemeral but consoling. In the natural, in his personal Taoist depths, Tu Fu is calm, simple, tranquil.
The Tao is the matrix of time, and it creates the forms of time. Attempting to understand what lies behind the e? howi? of the universe Chuang-tzu says e? Things appear to us, but we do not understand where they come from. They emerge into the world, but no one sees the portal. We value what is known, but do not know how to use the unknown. i? In western terms we produce a scientific description of how events succeed each other, what changes we expect to see, and the appearance of the e? surfacesi? of our experience. But we delude ourselves if we believe that we grasp the e? inner naturei? of energy, or change, of e? being herei? and e? changing intoi? .
The whole thrust of critical sceptical philosophy, of epistemology, in the West, since
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? Hume and Kant, has been to mark out empirically, through observation and meditation the limits of human understanding in thought and language. The Tao is not deity. It does not produce by intentional design. It is unknown and unknowing. The vortex of its events produces space and time. It is the waves, the oscillations, the regular vibrations, we use to measure the succession of events we call time. And it is the contiguities that we use to measure immediate space, and therefore the speed of light and by deduction the distances of the remote universe.
The Tao exists in itself and not for itself. Taoism attempts to loosen the bonds that bind us, to free us from time. Its aspiration is not to understand nature, but to -0? nature. e? The wise put Self last, and it comes firsti? says the Tao Te Ching. Its method is to work e? without actioni? , ? :? ? 0? , that is without self-conscious intent, without striving or stress, without endless words. Its tenor is calmness, to be the water surface that reflects light without intention, that accepts
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? images without grasping and retains them without possessing. Its appearance is an uncultivated innocence e? sorrowful like a baby that has lost its mother, stupid like one who has lost the wayi? as Chuang-tzu says, tongue in cheek. If the natural world cannot be trusted in its lack of intent, what can? If simplicity will not get us there, how will complexity achieve it?
Being never quite at ease, that is the dangerous road for the mind. To be, on the other hand, a creative source, to make the difficult happen as if spontaneously, to concentrate the mind on the object until the self vanishes, without being aware that it has vanished, is the Way. In this our greatest enemy is our sense of time. We find beauty in the timeless, virtue in the selfless, truth in the uncarved and unadorned. Though we, through natural selection, are nothing if not the creatures of time, the result of event, the products of the sieve of generations, the stability that preserves mutation, we are also that which contemplates time, reflects on
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? process, inhabits the Now. Not to be lost in language games is the Way, not to believe, not to follow, not to own. Death does not exist for the self, only dying. Dying is the vanishing of self- consciousness. To be aware and conscious but without self-consciousness is to have vanished, as a smile vanishes or a thought.
Liberation from time is achieved by destroying the grasping, the desire that links us to time. e? How can I free myself? i? asks the pupil. e? Who is imprisoning you? i? says the Master. e? No onei? replies the pupil. e? Then why do you seek to be free? i? Not to contemplate, or to concentrate, to strain at awareness, or to restrain the body, but to eliminate thought is the Way. To abandon learning and embrace the natural.
In it there is nothing special.
