Wang Wei

(ca. 699–761)

   Wang Wei was an imperial court poet during the greatest period of Chinese poetry in the TANG DYNASTY. He was known not only for his poetry, but also for his landscape painting, his music, and his calligraphy. Unlike his two great contemporaries, LI BAI (Li Po; a Taoist) and DU FU (Tu Fu; a Confucian), Wang Wei was a Buddhist who often described the illusory and transient nature of the created universe.

   Wang Wei was born to an aristocratic family in what is now Shansi province, the eldest of five brothers. He is reputed to have been a child prodigy, composing poetry at the age of nine. At 21 he passed the imperial jinshi (chin-shih) (presented scholar) examination and was appointed to the post of assistant secretary for music. But he was exiled from court shortly thereafter for some minor indiscretion and demoted to a provincial office in Jizhou, where he remained for four years. He spent another six years traveling through the eastern provinces and became acquainted with Taoism.

   More important when Wang Wei’s wife died sometime after 730, he began to study Buddhism seriously with Chan Master Dao-guang. Beginning about 737, he spent intermittent periods of retreat in the mountains of Zhongnan (Chung-nan). His devotion to Buddhism ultimately led him to remain celibate and never to remarry.

   He did not return to the capital until 733. Over the next 25 years, he held a variety of official positions in the capital and in the provinces, including grand secretary of the Imperial Chancery in 754. During the An Lu-shan rebellion of 755, he was captured and imprisoned in the Bodhi Temple in Chang’an, where he is said to have attempted suicide. Eventually he was released and briefly compelled to work for the rebel government.With the restoration of the emperor, however, he was pardoned— largely through the efforts of his brother Wang Chin, who was vice president of the Ministry of Justice at the time.He was restored to public office in 758 and finally appointed assistant secretary of state on the right, his highest political office. Wang Wei could write celebratory courtly poetry on command, but is better known for more personal poems in which he contemplates nature. Wang Wei inherited a poetic tradition that idealized the contemplative life of a recluse living in a bucolic setting. In fact he does seem to have particularly loved his mountain estate at Wang Stream, south of the Tang capital at Chang’an, and dedicates much of his verse to his life there.He also celebrates the estate in his paintings. His delicate black ink landscape paintings often depict water and mist, and through them Wang Wei became one of the founders of Chinese landscape art. During the last few years of his life, however, Wang Wei seems to have withdrawn from public life, visited his Wang Stream estate only infrequently, and stopped writing nature poetry, preferring to stay isolated in the capital reading Buddhist tracts. He died in 761 and was buried at his estate. His poetic reputation is, once again, largely due to the efforts of his brother Wang Jin, who upon his death presented Wang Wei’s collected poems to the emperor Taizong (Tai-tsung). Scholars consider about 370 extant poems to be genuinely his. Typically the poems deal with one of three themes: life at the court, Buddhist philosophy, or scenes from nature. Many critics have seen in Wang Wei’s poetry, especially the nature poems, a painter’s sensitivity to the arrangement of objects in space, and to how the observer’s moving point of view can create changes in the scene observed. Others remark that his poems, like his paintings, are not full of detail, but create the atmosphere of a scene with a few suggestive strokes. The following poem (called “North Cottage”) is one of a series of 20 quatrains Wang Wei wrote about his Wang Stream estate, and might well serve as an illustration of his technique:

   North cottage, north of lake waters,

   Mixed trees half hide its red railings.

   South river’s waters wind far away,

   Appear and vanish at the green forest’s edge.

   (Owen 1996, 395)

   Here the scene is created with a few well-chosen details—the variety of trees, the half-hidden red railings. The perspective of the viewer turned one way allows the glimpse of only part of those railings, and turned the other way allows a glimpse of the river through the forest. Further, the Buddhist notion of the world as illusion is suggested in the poem: One only half sees the railings, only half sees the water of the river. The river, continually flowing, vanishes altogether, as do all things in this transient world. Thus Wang Wei’s celebration of the landscape is not merely for its beauty or for the serene context of retirement it creates for the poet, but also for its demonstration of a Buddhist worldview. Even in four lines, the complexity of Wang Wei’s poetry can be observed.

   Bibliography

   ■ Owen, Stephen, ed. and trans. An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911. New York: Norton, 1996.

   ■ Wagner,Marsha L.Wang Wei. Boston: Twayne, 1981.

   ■ Yu, Pauline. The Poetry ofWang Wei: New Translations and Commentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980.