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
