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The Artist: Tao Chien [T'ao Ch'ien] (original
name Tou Yuen-ming or Tao Yuanming, tzu Yuan-ling, 365-427 A.D.) is generally
considered one of the two or three greatest pre-Tang dynasty poets.
Although his great-grandfather had been an illustrious statesman and general,
the fortunes of the house of Tao declined rapidly, and by Chien's birth
it into a poor family in Jiangxi province. His father's name is unrecorded.
Even during his life, though, Tao
was a noted poet and essayist. Many of his one hundred and twenty
extant pieces could be considered philosophical, yet were written in simple
language and straightforwardness that speak from his heart directly to
the reader. He scorned the more ornate language and the obliqueness
favored by many of his contemporaries. This was a time when the Daoist
reaction against rigidly traditional Confucianist art and literature produced
inspired imaginative works, the likes of which had not been seen in seven
centuries. Tao was the first writer to make a poetry of his natural
voice and immediate experience. This led to the personal lyricism
which all major Chinese poets inherited and made their own.
He maintained relations with Hui-yuan's
Lu-shan monastery and became the first in a tradition of Chan figures
who stood outside the
monastic community and thereby challenged the students to free
themselves
from the unenlightened striving of that life by seeing that they are
always
already enlightened.
Tao is also noted for having established a type of landscape
poetry known as t'ien-yüan (fields and gardens), a pastoral foil to
the wilder scenes of the shan-shui (mountains and rivers) tradition.
Farming, symbolic of his ideal life of simplicity, self-sufficiency, and
self-reliance is a favorite topic. Drinking, which releases the true
self from all worldly worries and social inhibitions, is another.
His series of twenty verses on "Yin chiu" (Drinking Wine) contain some
of his best-known lines and works (see below). His popularity has
remained high throughout the centuries, and his influence on such literary
giants as Du Fu and Su Shi (q.v.) was often noted.
Tao was also an official, holding numerous but never long-lived
posts. At one point he was even adjutant to a general who later became
an emperor.
A year and two positions later, Tao was advised to receive with
accepted protocol an official sent by the provincial government to his
district. "How could I bend my waist to this village buffoon for five doou
(pecks) of rice!" This was about 50 kilograms, his monthly
pay. He resigned from the magistrate's office which he had held for
less than three months.
Two different explanations are given for his resignation.
He later wrote that he had held office merely for economic reasons, which
he considered enslaving himself to his mouth and stomach. He was
ashamed to have compromised his principle of being himself. More
likely, though, he resigned because of his sister's death, since he did
go immediately to her funeral after turning in his official seal.
His awareness of the brevity of life was heightened by her death and it
impressed upon him the folly of enslaving himself with an official career.
Tao had always maintained that he was ill-fitted to the common
world and did not want to be involved in human affairs, preferring to keep
mostly to himself, enjoying the simple life, freely roaming the hills and
mountains, and chatting leisurely with others of like mind. And yet
he also had a fierce, unbounded ambition from a Confucian upbringing and
pressure to live up to his illustrious family name, feeling it almost an
obligation to accomplish great things lest he [continue to] be a failure.
Resolved at last, he retired to his native village to enjoy a
quiet farm for the last twenty-two years of his life. Unsuccessful
at supporting himself and his family by farming, turning down several opportunities
to re-enter officialdom, he died poor but apparently content. Nowhere
in the works that describe his decision to retire and his life in reclusion
is there either the bitterness at being unjustifiably neglected or the
resentment at having lived in inopportune times that can be found in the
works of many Chinese recluses. Instead, Tao's works express the
joy of one who has found himself and followed the true dictate of his heart.
Tao personally cultivated chrysanthemums in pots, and his were
well known at that time. (Were they a source of some meager income?)
Some say that his mums may have marked the beginning of dwarf potted plants
and that the first use of the term "penzai" comes from his writings.
His chrysanthemum garden has been a popular motif both in poetry and in
painting for over a thousand years, and his description of a return to
this garden after several years of absence is accounted one of the classical
works of Chinese literature.
Originally cultivated here at least 1,000 B.C., chrysanthemums
were believed to be full of magical essences and thus were first grown
for their medicinal properties. They were a valued ingredient of
the Daoist elixir. One story told how the people of Nanyang in Central
China drew their drinking water from a stream where the flowers grew.
Essences from these plants seeped into the water, and the Nanyang residents
all lived to be a hundred. Tonic wine was brewed from an infusion
of the petals and fragrant chrysanthemum tea was good for the health.
Now, there is a technique often used in small city gardens to
give an illusion of greater space. This concept of "borrowed scenery"
(jie jing) makes use wherever possible of buildings, trees, or natural
scenes which are physically outside of but visually within either a garden
or a courtyard within a garden. The scenery beyond is both a background
for and an integral part of one's garden. Even the distant horizon
could thus become part of one's own miniature recreation of a natural landscape.
(To the Japanese, it would be known as shakkei)
The concept of borrowed scenery can be found at least as early
as Tao's writings, specifically, from the 3rd in a series of 8 groups of
verses which comprise his "Drinking Wine":
I live in town without all that racket
horses and carts stir up, and you wonder
how that could be. Wherever the mind
dwells apart is itself a distant place.
Picking chrysanthemums at my east fence,
far off, I see South Mountain...
Now, the Chinese saw in the flowers something more than simply
decorative and useful objects. They sought a meaning and expressiveness
in these silent beings, and if the meaning was in many cases rather freely
constructed, it was nevertheless calculated to strengthen and deepen the
appreciation of the living symbols of the vegetable kingdom. And
it helped, of course, to establish their importance in the gardens.
This view of natural objects was thoroughly symbolic, and thus opened up
quite other possibilities of artistic interpretation and use of such objects
than a more objective or "scientific" way of looking at them would have
done. The connection between the cultivation of flowers and their
representation in art has therefore been intimate in China. What
was valued most in the flowers was the same as that which the artists sought
to capture and express. 1
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The Artist: Du Fu [Tu Fu] (712-770)
was the second greatest of all ancient Chinese poets, is considered as
the more profound observer of the two, and was one of the geniuses of world
literature. He was a synthesist who violated accepted boundaries
of the various poetic styles and subjects. He brought a fresh realism
and curiosity to the field and, like the great artistic masters of all
cultures, his later years' productions are filled with freedom and a certain
degree of surrealism.
Tradition holds that Du Fu's forbearers had been scholars for
eleven generations serving the southern courts, first from Hubei province
and then Henan. At age twenty-four he went to the capital to enter
upon the career of an official. This first time he did not pass the
examinations and went home dejected. He spent nearly half of the
next two decades travelling through the countryside.
At long last after becoming a minor official at age forty-four,
Du Fu was in the Chang-An when it was seized by An Lu-Shan's forces.
Although he was held in captivity for six months, Du Fu was unknown and
relatively unimportant at the time and so his services weren't commandeered.
After his release, he held the office of Imperial Censor/Reminder, a type
of master of ceremonies for state rituals and sacrifices during which the
emperor was the celebrant and central figure.
Du Fu, however, gave offence to the emperor, was degraded in
rank and sent elsewhere as a minor official. Drought and famine came
-- one of his children had starved to death previously -- and Du Fu resigned
from office and moved with his family to Chengdu by the spring of 760.
This had been the provincial capital and military center through the centuries,
the so-called Embroidered City on the northwest edge of the green plain
in Sichuan. The Chengdu Plain is the bed of a prehistoric lake, some
70 by 30 miles in size, with a gentle incline from north to south, surrounded
by mountains. The red sandstone region is covered by a network of
clear streams which allows the plain to be incredibly fertile and thus
able to be densely populated. Here Du Fu built what has become known
as his Grass Hut. He grew pines, bamboo, peach trees, and had a medicinal
herbal garden.
Within a year Du Fu had become revitalized there, but was growing
weary of life among the rustics. Not promising that he would accept
an office, Du Fu and family accompanied the Governor to safer regions.
News came of the army's success against the rebellious bands near Chang-An.
Du Fu, believing that their victory inaugurated a permanent peace, indulged
in his perpetual but ever unconsummated hope of return to civilization.
In spite of poverty he did quite successfully, honored at feasts by the
local officials.
He and his family returned to Chengdu for a short time and, by
the spring of 766, had gone on to Gui [Kuei] Prefecture. Here
everything interested Du Fu and some four hundred poems were written during
this period.
Two years later he and his family travelled down the Great River
to Dongting [Tung Ting] Lake. In recent years he had had problems
with asthma, diabetes, consumption and other illnesses, and near the end
of the year 770, he died.
The history of the State can be read in Du Fu's poems.
He particularly detailed military movements, showing an appreciative eye
for strategy, and his opus also provided a listing of the flora and fauna
of his country. He observed that "old trees form round tops," and
his poems contain several references to Green Maples, with at least one
mention of "scarlet leaves of maple forest." His earliest poem dates
from around 735, but the earliest anthology reference to him is about 900.
He was not established as preeminent until the eleventh century.
He claimed to have composed over a thousand poems, but barely fifteen percent
survived the warlordism and foreign encroachments following the An Lu-Shan
Rebellion.
There is a wooden statue of Du Fu to be seen in the shrine at
the temple which now stands on the site where Du Fu -- with the help of
various local officials and a geomancer (the Daoist equivalent of a surveyor)
built his Grass Hut in open country on the banks of Washed Flowers Stream.
The place is still today a favorite place of pilgrimage for his compatriots.
Du Fu has one poem describing a rock landscape shrunk into the
space of one cubic foot:
"A container of a square [sic] foot, with three peaks merging.
A glance puts one in the wilds, and clouds seem to cling to the peaks.
The perfume of lush bamboo accents fragrant wine as incense burners smolder
brightly. Facing south to offer a toast, a delightful aroma fills
the air."
This is also stated as:
"To be able, in the space of one square foot, to evoke a landscape of ten
thousand leagues!"
[Per Wikipedia,
"On land, the league is most commonly defined as three miles (4.83km), though the length of a mile
could vary from place to place and depending on the era." Thus, 10K leagues could be 30,000 miles
or 48,300 km, poetically referring to a landscape of 30K miles sq or 77,700 km sq or about 19.2MM acres,
the approximate equivalent of the land area of the modern day country of
United Arab
Emigrates, the U.S. state of Maine, or the Chinese
Zhidoi County within Yushu Prefecture in Qinghai
Province.] 2
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The Artist: Two other Tang poets to mention in this regard were
include Pee Yat-yau (Fei Yat-yau ?), who described a miniature artificial
rock-hill , and Bai Zu Yi [Bai Juyi or Po Chü-i, courtesy name
Pai Lo-tien] (772-846). The latter was one of
China's most revered and read poets. Born in a small Henan town just
sixteen years after the disastrous An Lu-Shan rebellion, Bai was descended
from a long line of petty bureaucrats, and grew up in an age of great political
disorder, raised amid poverty and insecurity. He was first in his
family to pass the examinations for Advanced Scholar, a gateway to official
promotion and high rank. Various posts were given to him, from offices
in the Palace Library at Chang-An (in the years equivalent to 803-807 and
827), demoted to a minor administrative post along the Yang-tze at the
instigation of political enemies between 815 and 819, and then became Governor
of Hangzhou (822) and Suzhou (825). In 842 he officially retired
on a half-salary pension.
During his life his writings aroused
enormous popular interest.
He also addressed himself to political problems, comparing the current
regime unfavorably to the days of the founding emperor. His
collected
works (with the exception of those from his last few years) have come
down
to us virtually intact -- unlike those of his literary
equals/colleagues
Li Po and Du Fu. (He admired and studied the writings of Tao
Yuan-ming and Du Fu). In 839 Bai deposited copies of his works
in five separate temples, idealistically inclined good bureaucrat that
he was.
Upon his retirement from a long and distinguished career in service
of the Tang dynasty, Bai Zu Yi chose a naturally scenic spot at Lu Shan
on which to construct his residence. He celebrated a religious service
there after making a terrace with a basketful of earth and by assembling
stones as big as a thumb into a miniature mountain. He surrounded
this creation with a lake poured from a drinking vessel.
Bai extolled penjing in his verse:
Mist brings out the beauty of autumn.
Large waves have existed since the dawn of time.
I cut slices of green jade, carve verdant cloud roots (rocks).
Air travels freely through hollows.
Neat patches of moss guard cavern entrances.
Although small in stature, the three peaks deserve to be the grandsons
of Mount Hua (a famous site in Shaanxi province).
Feng Chih of the Tang quotes another work which includes this
section:
A stone rises up on a base. Many flowers are carved amid
moss, and there are also ornaments in gold and jade. This is called
a "landscape in a hu vessel" [hu-chung chih ching]. It no longer
exists. 3
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