The Selected Poems of T'ao Ch'ien Read online

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Note to Reader

  Introduction

  Returning to My Old Home

  After Liu Ch’ai-sang’s Poem

  Home Again Among Gardens and Fields

  After Kuo Chu-pu’s Poems

  Early Spring, Kuei Year of the Hare, Thinking of Ancient Farmers

  In Reply to Liu Ch’ai-Sang

  Written in the 12th Month, Kuei Year of the Hare, for My Cousin Ching-yüan

  Begging Food

  Written on Passing Through Ch’u-o, Newly Appointed to Advise Liu Yü’s Normalization Army

  After an Ancient Poem

  Back Home Again Chant

  Untitled

  Turning Seasons

  Form, Shadow, Spirit

  Scolding My Sons

  9/9, Chi Year of the Rooster

  9th Month, Keng Year of the Dog, Early Rice Harvested in the West Field

  Thinking of Impoverished Ancients

  We’ve Moved

  Drinking Wine

  Wine Stop

  Wandering at Hsieh Creek

  Together, We All Go Out Under the Cypress Trees in the Chou Family Burial-Grounds

  Steady Rain, Drinking Alone

  In the 6th Month, Wu Year of the Horse, Fire Broke Out

  An Idle 9/9 at Home

  Reading The Classics of Mountains and Seas

  Cha Festival Day

  Seeing Guests Off at Governor Wang’s

  Peach-Blossom Spring

  Untitled

  Written One Morning in the 5th Month, After Tai Chu-pu’s Poem

  Untitled

  Elegy for Myself

  Burial Songs

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Special Thanks

  INTRODUCTION

  1. The Work

  T’ao Ch’ien (365–427 A.D.), equally well-known by his given name, T’ao Yüan-ming, stands at the head of the great Chinese poetic tradition like a revered grandfather: profoundly wise, self-possessed, quiet, comforting. Although the Shih Ching (Classic of Poetry) and Ch’u Tz’u (Songs of the South) are the ancient beginnings of the Chinese tradition, T’ao was the first writer to make a poetry of his natural voice and immediate experience, thereby creating the personal lyricism which all major Chinese poets inherited and made their own. And in the quiet resonance of his poetry, a poetry that still speaks today’s language, they recognized a depth and clarity of wisdom that seemed beyond them.

  T’ao Ch’ien dwelled in the Great Transformation (ta-hua), earth’s process of change in which whatever occurs comes “of itself” (tzu-jan: literally “self-so,” hence “natural” or “spontaneous”). T’ao and his contemporary, Hsieh Ling-yün, are often described as China’s first nature poets. But T’ao was much more than a romantic enthralled with the pastoral. He settled on his secluded farm because earth’s Great Transformation was perfectly immediate there, because there he could live life as it comes of itself, as it ends of itself. When he spoke of leaving government service and returning to the life of a recluse-farmer, he spoke of “returning to tzu-jan.” He took comfort in death as an even more complete return, a return to his “native home.” Although he grieved over loss and dying because he knew the actual to be all there is, he also knew that whatever is alive, himself included, ceases to be as naturally as it comes to be.

  T’ao’s return to tzu-jan was also a return to self. His poems are suffused with wonder at the elemental fact of consciousness, and at the same time, his poetry of dwelling initiated that intimate sense of belonging to the earth which shapes the Chinese poetic sensibility. For him, identity is itself tzu-jan. So, to become a complete and distinctive individual was to become an indistinguishable part of earth’s Great Transformation. In a poem not translated in this book, T’ao described this experience of dwelling:

  Vast and majestic, mountains embrace your shadow;

  broad and deep, rivers harbor your voice.

  The language T’ao created perfectly mirrors the life he created. He crafted an authentic human voice, and its simple, unassuming surface reveals a rich depth. The great Sung Dynasty (960–1280) poets found this especially impressive. Su Tungp’o called it “withered and bland”: “The outside is withered, but the inside is rich. It seems bland but is actually beautiful.” And Huang T’ing-chien said: “When you’ve just come of age, reading these poems seems like gnawing on withered wood. But reading them after long experience in the world, it seems the decisions of your life were all made in ignorance.” If T’ao’s poems seem bland, it’s because they always begin with the deepest wisdom. They are never animated by the struggle for understanding.

  The closest T’ao came to a struggle for understanding was his resolute cultivation of “idleness.” Etymologically, the character for idleness (hsien) connotes “profound serenity and quietness,” its pictographic elements rendering a tree standing alone within the gates to a courtyard or, in its alternate form, moonlight shining through an open door. This idleness is a kind of meditative reveling in tzu-jan, a state in which daily life becomes the essence of spiritual practice. Although T’ao’s philosophical orientation was primarily Taoist, the Zen community has always revered him because he anticipated many insights of their tradition.

  In fact, he became the first in a tradition of Zen figures who stand outside the monastic community, their presence challenging students to free themselves from the unenlightened striving of monastic life by seeing that they are always already enlightened. (The T’ang poet Han Shan is perhaps the most famous such figure.) T’ao lived on the northwest side of Lu Mountain – famous as a site of hermitage because of its great beauty – very close to the most illustrious Buddhist monastery in south China. The monastery abbot Hui-yüan, emphasizing dhyāna (meditation), practiced a form of Buddhism which contained the first glimmers of Zen. But even though T’ao maintained close relations with the community there (it is said Hui-yüan tried to recruit him by breaking the rules and serving wine in the monastery), he was never tempted by such extreme, monastic forms of spiritual discipline.

  T’ao’s workaday idleness would seem to be the very antithesis of monastic disciplines. Indeed, it often takes the form of drinking, a pursuit for which he is justly famous. Although he was certainly capable of getting thoroughly drunk on occasion, drunkenness for T’ao means, as it generally does in Chinese poetry after him, drinking just enough wine to achieve that serene clarity of attention which he calls idleness, a state in which the isolation of
a mind imposing distinctions on the world gives way to a sense of identity with the world.

  Because T’ao’s personal lyricism didn’t answer to conventional taste, it received faint praise until the High T’ang literary period (710–780), when Chinese poetry blossomed into its full splendor with such singular poets as Wang Wei, Li Po, and Tu Fu. The admiration poets of that time had for T’ao Ch’ien was a major catalyst in the High T’ang revolution. They recognized in his resolute individuality and authentic human voice an alternative to the lifeless convention of the court tradition which had dominated poetry from T’ao’s time to their own. Following the T’ang, the great Sung poets found virtually all of their interests anticipated in the profound simplicity embodied in T’ao’s bland voice. And the ability of his work to inspire this kind of admiration has continued through the centuries. If his sensibility seems familiar, it is a measure of his lasting influence. He was the first modern poet, and most modern poetry of the west, having moved beyond its own intellectual heritage, could trace its best tradition back to his lazybones work.

  2. The Life

  The outlines of T’ao Ch’ien’s life – his struggle to free himself from the constraints of official life and his eventual commitment to the life of a recluse-farmer, despite poverty and hardship – became one of the central, organizing myths in the Chinese tradition. There is little reliable information about T’ao Ch’ien’s life. As less than half of T’ao’s 125 surviving poems can be dated, placing them in chronological order presents problems. Nevertheless, the poems in this book are arranged so they recreate the outlines of T’ao’s life. Although this involves a considerable amount of guesswork, the legendary status of his life makes it preferable to the haphazard formal arrangement employed in the Chinese texts.

  For the educated class in Confucian society, the one honorable alternative to government service was to become a recluse. This might be a Confucian act of protest against an unworthy government, or a Taoist commitment to the spiritual fulfillment of a secluded life. Most often, it was some combination of the two. In T’ao Ch’ien’s case, the Taoist impulse was clearly the predominant one. However, T’ao was always a devoted Confucian as well. He entered government service at twenty-nine, and spent most of the next decade in office, which must have involved him in the relentless power struggles of his country’s ruthless aristocracy. It is generally agreed that his life and work as a recluse should be read in terms of political protest against an eminently unworthy ruling class. And in spite of its isolated setting, T’ao’s poetry is clearly haunted by the country’s desperate social situation.

  T’ao was born into one of the most chaotic and violent periods of Chinese history. When the Han Dynasty collapsed in 220 A.D., China fell into fragmentation and instability which lasted until the country was again unified under the Sui and T’ang dynasties, over 350 years later. In 317, for the first time in history, “barbarians” took control of the north, the ancient cradle of Chinese civilization, and the Chin Dynasty was forced into the south, a colonial region populated primarily by indigenous, non-Chinese people. The Eastern Chin Dynasty established its capital in Chien-k’ang (present-day Nanjing), but imperial authority was weak and heavily dependent on a handful of very powerful families. Driven to confirm their superiority over the local gentry and the culture supported by “barbarians” in the north, these families created a brief golden age of Chinese culture. But to maintain their wealth and power, they reduced much of the peasantry to virtual slavery on the vast tracts of land which they controlled. This led to widespread discontent and a number of popular rebellions, the most serious of which began during T’ao’s years in public service. And in addition to many military campaigns to defend or expand the Chin borders, fierce struggles for power among family factions of the aristocracy led to substantial internal warfare. This situation made official life dangerous and morally compromising for a true Confucian.

  T’ao’s great-grandfather was a man of considerable importance who played a central role in the founding of the Eastern Chin, but by the time T’ao Ch’ien was born, the T’ao family had become a minor branch of the aristocracy. T’ao’s home village was Ch’ai-sang, about six miles southwest of Hsün-yang (present day Jiujiang, province of Jiangxi), a provincial capital on the Yangtze River. Dominated by the Lu Mountain complex to the south, it was an especially beautiful area of hills, rivers, and lakes, so T’ao’s affection for the family farm is hardly surprising. Coming from an aristocractic family, T’ao was classically educated and was expected to take his proper place in the Confucian order by serving in the government as his father and ancestors had done. This was also the only path to wealth and prestige, both for himself and his family. In 393, when he was twenty-nine, T’ao took a position near his home in the provincial government. But he soon resigned, unable to bear subservience to his overbearing and arrogant superiors. His first wife apparently died at this time, perhaps while giving birth to their first son. A year or two later, T’ao married a woman who is said to have shared his ideals, and by 402, they had four sons. It seems likely that the T’ao family moved to the capital in 395, remaining for six years. T’ao surely would have been working in the central government there, but it isn’t clear what position he held, or what part he played in the political intrigues of the time.

  In 396, the emperor was strangled, and his five-year-old son was placed on the throne as Emperor An. Emperor An was to reign for twenty-four years, but like his father, he was merely a figurehead controlled by the family factions which arranged his ascension. Huan Hsüan, a general from a competing faction, began building a base of power in the western province where he was governor. In 399, he brought the western part of Chin territory under his control. That same year, the Sun En rebellion broke out in the southeast. This was the largest of the popular rebellions, and it became a major threat to the dynasty when Sun En’s forces gained control of the entire southeastern region and moved against the capital.

  In 400, T’ao returned from the capital to his home village (the occasion for this book’s first poem). This return proved temporary, however, for he soon took a position three hundred miles west in Chiang-ling, on the staff of General Huan Hsüan. As Huan was clearly threatening the Chin government by then, this position may represent a serious compromise of T’ao’s integrity. But it’s hard to draw any conclusions because so little is known about the situation, and because the emperor’s legitimacy was dubious. T’ao took a leave of absence during the spring and summer of 401 to work on his farm, apparently planting a fairly successful crop. He returned to office, only to resign at the end of the year, perhaps because he realized just how dangerous and/or compromising his position was. Throughout his years of official service, T’ao’s primary ambition had been to return to the freedom of his farm, and it appears that now, with the spring planting of 402, he finally began living as a recluse-farmer.

  He wasn’t to leave the farm for three years, a period during which the country underwent a considerable amount of internal warfare. Government forces led by a general named Liu Yü had hardly beaten back the three-year-old Sun En rebellion when, at the end of 403, Huan Hsüan led his armies down the Yangtze from the west, overrunning and surely devastating the Hsün-yang region where T’ao was living, and finally taking control of the capital. Loyal forces regrouped, and again led by Liu Yü, soon defeated Huan Hsüan. Had T’ao remained in Huan’s service, he may very well have lost his life in these affairs. Although Liu Yü returned Emperor An to the throne, it was clear that he held the power now.

  By 405, the T’ao family was apparently destitute. That spring, desperate for a means of supporting his family, T’ao took a job on the staff of Liu Yü, although the circumstances are unclear. Then in the fall, he took a position as magistrate in P’eng-tse, thirty miles northeast of his home. His resignation of this post after only eighty days was recounted in the early biographies and became a quintessential episode in the T’ao Ch’ien legend:

  Positions meant not
hing to him, and he wasn’t subservient to high officials. At the end of the year, an inspector was sent to his district. When his assistants told him that he should put on his belt and visit this man, T’ao moaned and said, “I’m not bowing down to some clodhopper for a measly bushel of rice.” He untied his seal-ribbon that same day and left office. And to explain how he felt, he wrote “Back Home Again Chant.”

  “Back Home Again Chant” (p. 32) gives a somewhat contradictory account of what happened, but whatever T’ao’s reasons for resigning, this time he left public life for good, even though he had no means of support other than farm work, which had proven painfully unreliable. Although he received several requests to serve in the government, T’ao farmed in the Ch’ai-sang/Hsün-yang area until his death twenty-two years later.

  During this time, the country’s militarism continued with the same devastating results. Incessant infighting among factions of the aristocracy persisted, sometimes involving battles between substantial armies. In 410, Sun En’s successor led an army down the Yangtze in a campaign against the capital, plundering the countryside and occupying the Hsün-yang region until he was finally beaten back. And in 416, Liu Yü led a year-long campaign which succeeded in recapturing north China from the “barbarians,” only to lose it again a year later. Through it all, Liu steadily increased his power until finally, in 420, after disposing of Emperor An and his successor, he declared himself emperor of his own Liu-Sung Dynasty. But his health was poor, and he died two years later. Thereupon, in addition to renewed hostilities with the “barbarians” of the north, the aristocracy’s deadly infighting began anew. Although we know T’ao maintained close relations with high officials of the new dynasty, it is said that he protested Liu Yü’s usurpation by adopting the name Ch’ien, meaning “in hiding,” hence: The Recluse T’ao. In the end, it was his life as a poor recluse-farmer that was the most important political fact about T’ao’s career: by living the fate of the common people who always pay such a terrible price for the whims of those in power, and wresting such sufficiency from that fate, T’ao made his most private poems intensely political statements.