No More Learning

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Tu Fu was born in 712 at Shao-ling near Ch'ang-an. Like Wang Wei and Li Po his early talents were recognised but he nevertheless failed the Civil Service examinations in 735. He was to take them for a second time later in life but was failed along with all the other candidates for reasons outside his control. His first failure has been put down to a lack of aptitude for the more practical economic and political questions, or the possibility that his style and content was too 'advanced' for the examiners. It may simply have been errors in preparation, nervousness, over-confidence, or any of the other ways in which good students fail examinations they are expected to pass. Or that, despite what lovers of his poetry feel, he was simply not able enough.
His true talents were for poetry and language rather than administration. The result was that he spent many years in poverty, and was never
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? ? ? more than a minor civil servant. He was distantly related to many of the great families of the Empire but his own family was not wealthy or influential and he does not seem to have attempted to exploit connections in the way that Li Po frequently did. He was not a celebrated poet in the way Li was, nor established like Wang Wei. His meetings with Li Po clearly impressed him deeply and provide an interesting contrast of temperaments. Li Po's yearning for a depth beyond the visible world, his regret at not being able to reach the mystery he dreams about or achieve a compensating tranquility in his thoughts, pervade his poetry. Tu Fu's life was the Confucian life of practical realities, a life of survival, of family and domestic affairs, of quiet friendship and acceptance of reality.
Tu sees things clearly and coolly. His greatness is the greatness of the humane eye, that compassionate recognition of existence, that resignation to how things are, that makes him a poet of fate, of the workings of the real world,
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? and a clear mirror for the turbulence and painfulness, the bitterness and poignancy of his times. Again it is interesting to contrast Tu with Wang Wei. Wang is the poet of a tranquil and meditative world, where nature provides a correlative of inner harmony and peace. Wang is self-contained, working to transmute and transcend his feelings even when they run most deeply. His aim is to be 'a thousand miles of quiet evening cloud'. The deaths of those close to him affected him greatly, his wife, his mother, his friend Yin Yao. His sadness and melancholy at death, loss and transience are mirrored in nature by the inner silence and neutrality of the physical world, its lack of an inward life, of mind. He turns to the inner Void in order to reconcile himself to the outer. He knows that strange loneliness and hollowness that we can feel looking at a vast distant landscape or at an evening view, suddenly so remote from and alien to the human, uncaring of us and our reality. It is mind as a process lost among things, the body as
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? an object lost amongst processes. It is a cool but beautiful world where the very neutrality offers a solace. This is Nature not inimical to humanity, nor benevolent, merely apart from us.
That stasis, the solace, is not valid for Li Po, who is always in movement, always presenting a dynamic relationship between self and nature, self and others, or between others. Li is the poet of relationship. His solitudes are in tension with the 'world of humankind', they are solitudes because no one else is there, or someone else is not there. The invisible presence makes, by contrast, the present solitude. Li's stillnesses are a contemplation of emotional relationship: his sadnesses are at the failure of relationship due to his own restless temperament, or the nature of reality. His yearnings are like Shelley's, though less desparately, for a magical paradise where his instability might be a stability. There his restlessness might be a mode of being in that place, his senses might be both stimulated and lulled, his mind might be excited and yet his
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? heart calm. He is always pursuing Shelley's 'Spirit of Delight' or regretting its non- appearance, or drowning its absence in wine.
Where Li is the poet of self as a set of emotional relationships, and Wang Wei is the poet of self as the location of the perception of the inner loneliness of nature, Tu Fu is self as it stands within the world. His honesty and compassion have often been noted. But sanity is his keynote, a balanced attitude that is wholly realistic but wholly human. It is the Confucian clarity and bedrock integrity.
The honesty and straightforwardness, the balance and level-headed realism is there in his poem 'For Wei Pa' or in 'A Visitor'. The compassion is there in his 'Ballad of the War Wagons' and 'The Homecoming' where his instinct for, and loyalty to, family appears as it does in 'Moon at Night in Ch'ang-an'. He is the poet of mind (? ? ) and deliberate creativity (9:? 98,4). It made him a master of strict, dense and complex form. In a tradition where the
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? ? ? ? ? ? ? Confucian values were admired Tu Fu is the quintessential Chinese gentleman, nobility of spirit combining with pragmatic morality and imaginative feeling to emphasise his solidity. He is the ancient tree of one of his poems 'with branches of green bronze and granite roots' exposed to the elements, but tough and straight, not able to be easily made use of because of its nature, but admired for its qualities. If, in moments when we are temporarily out of sympathy with them, Wang Wei can seem too self-centred and quietist, and Li Po too irresponsible and sensation-seeking, then Tu Fu can seem cold with the chill of moral rectitude. But the converse is also true, that Tu Fu has a stability Li lacks and a full engagement with his age that Wang sometimes evades.
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An Lu-shan, frustrated by the state of the Empire, seeing an opportunity for himself, wanting to protect his own position, or from a mixture of these motives, moved his army south from Peking on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 755. His claimed objective was the removal of the unpopular Chief Minister Yang Kuo-chung, who was building troop concentrations loyal to himself. It was not the overthrow of the Emperor, though this was no doubt part of the cloud of propaganda against him issued at the time. He had considerable forces, amassed on his own initiative and through the Imperial policy of autonomous border troop concentrations. He relied on military power, the element of surprise, and the disorganisation of the Imperial Court. It was a bold throw of the dice.
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? ? In a month he had crossed the Yellow River north of Kaifeng and taken the eastern capital Loyang. There was then a pause in hostilities. Early in 756 An Lu-shan proclaimed a new Dynasty and there was sporadic conflict through the spring and early summer. An Lu-shan does not appear to have had a coherent strategy to secure lines of communication or control the major routes.
On the first of July the Emperori? s general Li Kuang-pi inflicted a major defeat on the rebel army near Chenting in the north. There was a possibility that An Lu-shan would be forced to withdraw somehow to his base in Peking and regroup. However an Imperial blunder opened the way to Chi? ang-an. The Ti? ung Kuan (Tungkwan), the eastern pass protecting the capital, had been held successfully by the Imperial general Ko-shu Han. It is said that Yang Kuo-chung nervous that Ko-shu Han would switch sides, move against him, or even foment a separate rebellion, persuaded the
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? Emperor to order the general to take the offensive against An Lu-shan. Repeated commands forced Ko-shu Han to leave the pass and engage the rebels. His army was destroyed. Out of a quarter of a million men, mainly highlanders of Chi? in, only a few thousand survived the battle. Tu Fu refers to this in his poem e? The Homecomingi? . Ko-shu Han took a high rank in the rebel rE`gime, so he may have had rebel sympathies, or perhaps was merely being opportunist. He was eventually imprisoned and executed.
Ten days after the defeat at the pass the rebels entered Chi? ang-an. At dawn on the fourteenth of July the Emperor had secretly abandoned the capital. Yang Kuei-fei and her sisters and Yang Kuo-chung left with him, with members of the Imperial family, the group protected by the army. What followed is the subject of Po Ch ? - Yii? s poem e? The Everlasting Sorrowi? , a story dwelt on endlessly in later Chinese and Japanese culture. Leaving behind a city in panic and
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? ? ? confusion the Emperori? s army headed for the south-western route to Chi? I? ng-tu in Szechwan. On the fifteenth they reached Ma-wei, a post station beside the river, forty miles or so to the west of Chi? ang-an. In a confused scene Yang Kuo-chung was attacked and killed by loyal soldiers of the Imperial army, suspicious of his intentions, and no doubt blaming him, and the Yang familyi? s power over the Empire, for the disaster. Yang Kuei-fei, despite the Emperori? s pleas, was then, according to one version of the story, taken from the post-station to a pear orchard near a Buddhist monastery where she was strangled. Her body was shown to the army, who proclaimed their loyalty, and the Emperor, grieving, fled towards Szechwan.
Here Yang Kuei-feii? s fate turns into legend. Hers was the delicate white jade face, pale as pear blossom, tinged, as Sei Sh? nagon says in the Pillow Book, with pink so faint as to create doubt whether it was there or not. The Emperori? s infatuation with her and her unhappy
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? influence on him is paralleled and described in the opening chapter of the Tale of Genji. To the grieving Emperor, filled with hopeless longing, the memory of his lost love, her face and manner, is like e? Reality in the depths of night. . . insubstantial as a light-filled dream. i? He wanders in nightmare, as if cursed from a previous existence. Blasted by such an intensity of passion that he is left alone and desolate he finds nothing in the world outside that can conjure up her image.
Po Ch ? -Yii? s poem tells how a Taoist adept goes on a shamanistic flight to the magical islands of the Immortals in the eastern seas to find her. She gives him tokens to return with, breaking a decorated box and a hairpin in two, giving him half of each. When he asks for a secret known only to herself and the Emperor as a proof that he has seen her, she tells him about a vow they both had made. They were in the summer palace on that night in the year when the stars Altair and Vega, the Herdboy and Weaver-
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? girl, were allowed to meet in the sky (the seventh night of the seventh month). At midnight the Emperor dismissed his attendants, and much moved they looked up together at the night sky and, in tears, swore to be husband and wife through all future lives. In Genji, it is said that the Emperor and his lady used to repeat Po Ch ? - Yii? s lines e? to fly together in the sky, two birds on the same wing, to grow together on the earth, two branches of one tree. i? When the Taoist wizard returns and describes all this, the Chinese Emperor is stunned with grief.
In Chang-an the city, of a million people, experienced the arrival of An Lu-shani? s Tartar army accompanied by massacre and looting. Wang Wei, unable to follow the fleeing Court, was captured by the rebels, and is supposed to have pretended to be a deaf-mute and to have attempted suicide. Under pressure he was coerced into accepting office under the rebel Government. Later he wrote a poem claiming that he wept when he saw the new Court
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? enjoying outings with artists and musicians on the Imperial lake. Li Po was at Chi? ih-chou on the Yangtze during this time and so outside the scenes of immediate turmoil, while Tu Fu was temporarily absent at the moment when the city fell. But in the autumn Tu Fu was once more in the capital. His poem e? By the Waters of Weii? is set amongst the great houses along the banks of the pleasure lake, emptied, shuttered and abandoned. 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-
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? ? 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
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? ? 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,
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? 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
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? ? 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
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? ? ? 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
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? ? 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,
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? ? ? 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
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? 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
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? ? 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.