KUAN HSIU
Kuan Hsiu [832 - 912 CE] was a Zen Master who was also a major innovator as a portrait artist.
Hymn on the Way
Grass and trees have the buddha nature.
They are not different from me.
If I could just be like the grass and the trees,
I'd find the Way in no time.
Men nowadays won't go the Way:
point it out, and they curse it.
A wounded sigh for these folks:
paupers gone begging on a mountain of gold.
Translated by
J.P. Seaton
CHIA TAO
Chia Tao (799-843 CE), also known as Lang Hsien, Wandering Immortal, was a Ch'an Buddhist monk, or priest, who left monastic practice in midlife to devote himself to poetry and a civil service career in Ch'ang-an; and whose poems--famed for their inner "nature couplets"--evoke the world of poet-scholars and religious hermits.
Morning Travel
Rising early
to begin the journey;
not a sound
from the chickens next door.Beneath the lamp,
I part from the innkeeper;
on the road, my skinny horse
moves through the dark.Slipping on freshly
hoarfrosted stones,
threading through woods,
we scare up birds roosting.Behind us, a bell
tolls in far mountains;
the colors of daybreak
gradually clear.
Translated by
Mike O'Connor
Spring Travel
Keeping on and on,
a traveler gets farther, farther away;
dust of the world
follows an indefatigable horse.A traveler's feelings
after the sun's rays slant--
colors of spring
in the morning mist.The river's flow heard
at the empty inn--
flowers just blooming
at the old palace.I think of home
a thousand li away;
wind off the pond
stirs in green willows.
Translated by
Mike O'Connor
Seeing Off Shen Miao, Buddhist Master
Mists of willow catkin
are falling
on the roads
of western Szechwan.We meet--
then suddenly spring is over;
your teachings imparted,
you go alone,traveling fast, with rain
in far mountains;
sleeping late, after
a night of storm.Of the trees
around your cottage--
when you return,
their leaves should be vermilion.
Translated by
Mike O'Connor
TAO YUANMING
Tao Yuanming (365 or 372-427 CE), also known as T'ao Ch'ien, was the first great modern poet in China; that is, the first to achieve wide modern popularity, to express a modern consciousness of themes such as anxiety and self-doubt, and to transcend archaic forms and language for poetic forms that continued in wide use through the nineteenth century. His stark simplicity was so alien to contemporaneous expression that his poetry was largely honored for moral purity rather than for styling until the times of Meng Hao-jan. Unlike Hsieh Ling-yun, he was a poet of farms and villages, not the wilderness. Having forsaken the life of the bureaucratic official for a return to country living, he is the prime example in Chinese literature of the poet who rejects "the world's net" for a life closer to spiritual values, rather like Thoreau in the West.
Drinking Wine
I built my hut near people
yet never hear carriage or horse.
"How can that be?" you ask.
Since my heart is a wilderness the world fades.
Gathering chrysanthemum by the east hedge,
my lazy eyes meet South Mountain.
Mountain air is clean at twilight
as birds soar homeward wing to wing.
Beneath these things a secret hides
but it dies on the tongue when I try to speak.
Translated by
Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping
Return to My Country Home
1.When young I couldn't bear the common taste;
I loved the mountains and the peaks.
Yet I fell into the world's net
and wasted thirteen years.
But trapped birds long for their old woods
and fish in the pool still need deep waters
so I'm breaking earth in the south field,
returning to the country to live simply,
with just a few acres
and a thatch roof over some rooms.
Elm and willow shade the back eaves,
rows of peach and plum trees by the front hall.
A distant village lost in haze,
smoke twining from neighbors' houses.
Dogs bark in far alleys,
a cock chuckles atop a mulberry tree.
No dust or clutter within my courtyard door,
just empty rooms and time to spare.
After all those years like a beast in a cage
I've come back to the soil again.2.
No social events in the fields,
no carriage wheels whir through these back roads.
Bright sun, but I close my cane door
and empty myself in my empty rooms.Sometimes I meet the peasants
going here and there in palm-leaf raincoats,
but we speak of nothing
except how the crops are doing.Each day my hemp and mulberries grow taller
and my land gets wider every day
but any day the frost or hail
could beat it flat as a field of weeds.3.
So long away from these mountains and lakes,
today I'm wild with pleasure in the fields.
Now nephews and nieces hold my hands
as we part brush and enter the wild ruin of a town.We search through hills and gravemounds
and the lingering signs of ancient folk,
scattered wells and traces of their hearths,
rotten stumps of bamboo and mulberry groves.I ask a man who is gathering wood here
"What happened to all these people?"
The woodsman turns to me and says
"They're dead, that's all, there's not one left!"In thirty years, at court or market, all things change.
I know these are not empty words,
that we live among shadows and ghosts
and return at last to nothingness.
Translated by
Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping
HSIEH LING-YUN
Hsieh Ling-y n (385-433 CE) was a member of one of the four powerful aristocratic families which virtually ran the country during his time. Ling-yun had a huge, undomesticated estate around whose wilds he hiked tirelessly, sometimes using cleated mountain-climbing sandals of his own design. He was one of the two or three greatest poets of his time and is credited with inventing the major genre of landscape ("mountain-and-river") poetry. He is especially famous for punctuating his poems with vivid couplets succinctly capturing natural scenes.
Crossing the Fields, I Climb
the Mountain on Serpentine IslandWhat consolation is there
for an exile's bitter sorrow?
I gaze at the sea,
console myself with the dawn breeze.No one can know
the vast waves' limit;
no one can know
the great deeps in the east.I think of the idle boating song,
"Picking Water Chestnuts,"
sung by nobles in the capital,
but for me it contains
a scowling frown.Rambling aimlessly,
I wander islands
of jasper-green sand;
I wander on and on
among mountain peaks
red as cinnabar.
Translated by
David Lunde
Traveling from Shih-kuan Pavilion at Night
I have followed the mountains a thousand miles
floating on streams for ten nights, nearly.
Returning birds. I rest my oars.
The stars thin out. A weary trip.
With spreading dawn, the moon shines bright.
Cold sinks deep in the early dew.
Translated by
Matthew Flannery*
Climbing a Lonely Midriver Isle
South of the river, I tired of travel;
north of the river, I wearied the wilds.
I searched for the new but the way was twisted;
I sought the obscure but the view was blocked.
But now mad currents roil around
the midstream spell of a lonely isle.
Cloud and sun meld molten light.
River and sky spread deep and pure.
Pursuit of the essence is valued no more:
who shall unveil the hidden truth?
I direct my thoughts to Mount K'un's** shape
aloof from human circumstance
and come to grasp Priest An-ch'i's way:
to fill the years, I nourish life.
Translated by
Matthew Flannery
* I would like to thank Dr. Leon Chang of Queens, New York, for his kind and gracious assistance on each of the translations under my name in this issue. He is a doctor of law, political scientist, diplomat, professor, author, calligrapher, poet, and a polymath of Chinese culture, especially of literature, history, and art. His expansive erudition has been of inestimable value to this work.--MF
** The K'un-lun range in far western China has many mythical and mystical associations. In line thirteen, An'-ch'i was a Taoist priest from Shan-tung province said to have lived a millenium.
MADAME MENG
Madame Meng (T'ang Dynasty c.618-907 CE) was a court lady of the Golden Age of Chinese poetry.
Hearing the Chin Played
White jade fingers on vermilion strings,
grating at first, then clear;
the despair of the Hsiang River Consorts
is painful to listen to.First I hear blustering wind,
blowing hard and cold;
then it sounds like an evening shower,
lightly pattering down.Near, the sound of a gurgling spring
flowing from a green peak;
far, it is like the swoop of a black crane,
dropping from a high blue sky.Deep in the night, when the playing ends,
I still endure their despair;
dew dampens the clustered orchids,
and moonlight floods the courtyard.
Translated by
David Lunde
CHANG WEN-CHI
Chang Wen-chi (T'ang Dynasty c.618-907 CE) was married to a military staff officer. Each of her four extant poems presents an emblematic reading--or sometimes more than one.
Clouds at the Creek's Mouth
A mountain creek, the mouth
of its cleft:
dense clouds
spread wide and melt.Coming together
in mid-creek,
at last, they spill.If they don't
turn back again
to the creek cleft's
mouth,then once more, there,
in mid-creek,
they
will make
rain.
Translated by
Jeanne Larsen
Bamboo at Pond's Edge
They lean close to this pond,
These Noble Ones.Branches dip
till they and water
touch.Their green--surrounded
by waves of
other greens--ripples, shifts,
day after
day, and
does not fade.
Translated by
Jeanne Larsen
Egrets on the Shore
A sandy shoal,
a riverful of birds: Drumming
wings
put forth
pure
sounds.They only wait
for higher winds
to rise--it's not
that they have no heart
for the heavens'
stream of stars.
Translated by
Jeanne Larsen
A Pair of Autumn-Blooming Mallows
Green shadows vie
unstinting, lush.Red beauties shine
toward one another,
shine and blaze.They don't take after
flowers of peach and plumthat blow
careless
in spring's wind,
and tumble down.
Translated by
Jeanne Larsen