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The Selected Poems of Wang Wei. Translated from the Chinese by David Hinton. New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2006. Paper $14.95.

Review by Tom Pynn

A single lifetime, and so many things to wound this heart:

if you don't enter the empty gate--where will you get free?

--Wang Wei, from "A Sigh for White Hair"

The world orientations of Intimacy and Integrity are two ways of relating; ways people in both East Asian and Western cultures tend to think, explain, value, and persuade. Thus, they form the basis of what we call the East Asian and Western worldviews, respectively. Worldviews show how cultures differ from one another where cultural difference is the tendency of a culture to ask particular questions and to think about particular things. Worldviews, or cultural orientations, as Thomas P. Kasulis points out in Intimacy or Integrity: Philosophy and Cultural Difference (2002), are not mutually exclusive. As westerners, Kasulis explains, we tend to see others, the world, and ourselves in terms of Integrity: as free, autonomous, self-interested individuals in a competitive society. East Asians tend to see others, the world, and themselves in terms of Intimacy: responsive, interrelated, and other-interested members of a fiduciary community. Here’s the important point: both integrity and intimacy orientations are available both to Westerners and East Asians. For Westerners, Integrity is foregrounded and Intimacy is backgrounded, while it is the reverse for East Asian cultures. So, if we want to understand another culture, we can start by finding out what questions are asked and what members of that culture tend to think about. An important question, then, for cross-cultural communication is “How can I increase the fluency between integrity and intimacy in order to communicate effectively with another?” Kasulis concludes that we can and ought to become bi-orientational. Being bi-orientational means that whatever situation we find ourselves in, we can relate in that specific context either from the Integrity or Intimacy orientation. As long as we trust the orientation rather than acting suspiciously, we can relate to things from the standpoint of the other.

Reading David Hinton's latest translation of classical Chinese poets--he has translated not only the other two recognized luminaries of Chinese T'ang poetry, Li Bai and Tu Fu, but also their precursors in Chinese lyricism T'ao Ch'ien and Hsieh Ling-yun --offers Westerners the opportunity to slip into the background of our own cultural orientation. It could be argued, however, that good poetry even in the West, is composed out of the background. Our tendency as Westerners to relate to ourselves, others, and things is challenged by encountering Wang Wei whose poetry presents an intimacy orientation Hinton calls alternately "spiritual ecology" and "wilderness cosmology", and what Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall have called "correlative cosmology" (Daodejing: Making this Life Significant, 2003). This is to say that the Chinese worldview understands and relates to things as events or processes, things that arise of themselves (tzu jan) in a universe of change or what Hinton has elsewhere termed Ta Hua ("Great Transformation"): In this idleness, quiet clarity deepens/ each day, tall bamboo graceful of itself. Wang Wei took up the practice of Chan Buddhism late in life, so his poetry is informed by the Chinese worldview generally, and Buddhist practice and philosophy particularly.

Just as things in the universe arise spontaneously of themselves, so does the self. In the Chinese Intimacy orientation, self is nothing other than who we are in the various contexts we find ourselves. Thus, Wang Wei can write in his poem "In the Mountains, for My Brothers," In mountain forests, I've lot myself completely: / identity's nothing but the role we play in public. This doesn't mean that the self does not exist, only that selfhood comes of its own relationally. The most common form of relationality among humans is expressed in the class of poems having to do with either the departure or arrival of guests. The poems between Li Bai and Tu Fu are an exquisite example of this tradition. "Farewell to Shen Tzu-fu, Who's Returning East of the Yangtze" stands in this tradition:

Beneath willows at the river-crossing, travelers are rare.

Fishermen paddle shoreline shallows at the edge of sight.

My thoughts, they're all there for you: spring colors

along the river, bidding you farewell all the way home.

The poignancy of departure mirrors the poignancy of Tao--all things are moving inexorably towards the primordial universe from which they will inevitably return; although, not in the same form. Noticeably fewer in this selection, however, are the poems marking the moment of arrival. In "Visiting Li Yi," arrival soon yields to departure: and after we share an Yi-ch'eng wine, / I wander on back to my Lo-yang farm.

Despite the emphasis, especially in the Confucian poetry of Tu Fu, on inter-human relations, Buddhist informed poetry, like Taoist poetry, allows for the significance of extra-human relations. A wonderful poem that confronts the anthropocentrism of Confucian traditions is "Playfully Written on a Flat Stone":

Dear stone, little platter alongside cascading streamwater,

willow branches are sweeping across my winecup again.

And if you say spring wind explains nothing, tell me why,

when it scatters blossoms away, it blows them here to me?

Both Chan and Taoist traditions allow for meaningful interplay between the human and the non-human. In Wang Wei's poem "In Reply to Adept Li," the apperceptive dimension of human/non-human interplay is suggested: Look: // lotus blossoms reveal perception here, / and willows no-mind's transformations. So in the human, so in things. The human does not stand above the myriad things, but takes its place among them arising from Tao and returning to Tao. Furthermore, all things are constituted of various inflections of energy, one of which is vital energy or Ch'i. Therefore, both Chan and Taoist adepts recognize the mutuality between all things as they move through the field of experience. For Chinese culture, the question is how one moves.

Even with the strong emphasis in the Chinese culture on relationality, there has also been a vibrant eremitic tradition that, according to Red Pine (a.k.a. Bill Porter) still survives to this day (See Bill's Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits, 1993). Porter tells us that hermits in China though "out of touch with the times but not with the seasons, . . . cultivated roots of the spirit, trading flatland dust for mountain mist." Working for the Imperial government in the capital as a civil servant, Wang Wei also yearned for the life of a recluse. Thus, he purchased a house and land that he named Wheel Rim River Hermitage. In one of the short lyrics comprising the "Wheel-Rim River" poems Wang Wei writes,

Sitting alone in the silent bamboo dark,

I play a ch'in, settle into breath chants.

In these forest depths no one knows

this moon comes bathing me in light.

Like most of Wang Wei's poetry, the above is a complex mix of traditional Chinese references as well as allusions to Buddhist meditation practice. Since ancient times, and especially in the poems collected in the Book of Odes (Shih Jing), the poet typically sang his poems often accompanying himself on the ch'in, a stringed instrument. The emphasis on being alone also marks the poem as part of China's long history of eremitic poetry. As in the above lyric, Wang Wei often references his practice of Chan Buddhist meditation: "Sitting alone" indicates seated meditation, while the ubiquitous image of the "moon" indicates clear awareness or enlightenment.

Reading Hinton's translation of Wang Wei's poetry also brings up another important question: How is it that Wang Wei seems to be referring to both Chan Buddhist and Taoist elements of their respective philosophical practices? Indeed, one might ask more generally,

How did Buddhism, a foreign tradition, come to be regarded by many as integral to the three-part root (Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism) of Chinese culture? In his penetrating and illuminating study Chan Buddhism (2005), Peter Hershock explains this as a two-fold process of assimilation: accommodation and advocacy. The first phase of assimilation is what Hershock calls accommodation, in which the original non-native system of concepts and practices “is opened in such a way as to accommodate some important local concepts and practices.” This is especially important, Hershock explains, if Buddhism is going to fulfill one if it’s basic counter-cultural functions: cultural critique leading to cultural reformation. In the early development of Chinese Buddhism, Hershock demonstrates the first phase of assimilation by showing how the core Buddhist concepts of change, interdependence, and emptiness are convergent with the two complementary spiritual and philosophical traditions of Confucianism and Daoism. The second phase of assimilation is advocacy, “making room for . . . indigenous resources and then opening them in new directions.” As Hershock explains, advocacy does not supplant indigenous value systems, but selectively supplements them: “this process depends upon improvising personal and cultural narratives that are recognized by the indigenous population as complementing, and not conflicting, with their own.” By the T'ang dynasty, Buddhism had weathered the difficult period of accommodation that included a period of persecution to become the dominant cultural influence.

The interplay between Taoist and Buddhist elements are expressed in many of the poems Hinton has selected for this volume. "A Meal with Kettle-Fold Mountain Monks" is a good example of how T'ang poetry has assimilated both Taoist and Buddhist insights. In the poem's opening lines, Wang Wei writes, I fathomed the inner pattern of crystalline / quiet late. Hinton tells us that the Chinese term li, "inner pattern", has an ancient philosophical connotation: "the system of principles that governs the burgeoning forth of the ten thousand things from the pregnant emptiness." The myriad things emerge out of T'ai Ch'i ("Supreme Ultimate") as the deferential relation of yin and yang. This notion of change dates back to at least the I Ching (Book of Changes) and provides the cosmological dimension of Chinese culture. As Chinese poets, artists, and thinkers directed their attention toward things arising, the "spiritual ecology" or "wilderness cosmology" aspect of their respective arts correlatively emerged. Buddhist understandings of impermanence accommodated itself, into this notion. Yet, this poem also shows the advocacy of the central Buddhist idea of emptiness that challenges Taoist conceptions of deference. Wang We writes in the poem's closing lines Life here has idleness enough and more: // how deep could thoughts of return be, when / a lifetime is empty appearance emptied out? Hinton has developed this concept of 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," in his interpretative translation of T'ao Ch'ien's Taoist inflected poetry. In Wang Wei's poetry, however, idleness takes on a distinctly Chan flavor at the end of the poem when he questions the Taoist idea of return (the movement of yin and yang in which the myriad things participate) by suggesting that emptiness rather than deference ("a yielding [and being yielded to] grounded in an acknowledgement of the shared excellence of particular foci [de] in the process of one's own self-cultivation"--Ames and Hall) accurately describes things. In doing so, idleness becomes empty of even a processually conceived self while leaving identification (Buddhist muga) in tact that is necessary to Buddhist understandings of compassion. Thus, Wang Wei may be read as engaging in the process of advocacy by “making room for . . . indigenous resources and then opening them in new directions”: moonlight infusing idleness everywhere.

We are all of us indebted to David Hinton for his eloquent and, more importantly, philosophical translations of Chinese poetry. I point this out because while there have been many translations of Chinese poetry over the last century, few have acknowledged and brought to life the philosophical context of the poetry. David Hinton and Bill Porter are important in this respect. This is not to say, however, that there is not room for quibbling. I think that Hinton overstates the representative place, certainly not the mastery, of poets such as Wang Wei, T'ao Ch'ien, and Li Bai, among others. In his introduction, Hinton claims that the "rivers-and-mountain tradition," of which he considers Wang Wei "a major figure" (this I do not dispute), "is the heart of Chinese poetry" (xvi). It is this last claim that tends to marginalize the older ode tradition of Chinese poetry. One of my favorites from the Book of Odes: I work with the sunrise, / Rest with the sunset. / What do I care for the power above? Clearly, this verse has little to do with the "most basic elements" ("consciousness, landscape, emptiness"--regarding this last element: is the heart of Chinese poetry Buddhism?) of "experience" (xiii). (A more representative collection of Chinese poetry is Sam Hamill's Crossing The Yellow River: Three Hundred Poems from the Chinese, 2000.) Furthermore, insisting on rivers-and-mountains poetry as the heart of Chinese poetry leaves us little room for understanding how contemporary Chinese poetry fits in with this tradition. Perhaps, as Pauline Yu has suggested, we have all of us Westerners been overly influenced by the post-world war two Americans and Europeans who sought out just this kind of poetry that Hinton admires. For the record, though, I must also say that I, too, am deeply affected and influenced by the rivers-and-mountains tradition of Chinese poetry and will continue to await the arrival of Hinton's philosophical and poetic translations.