SOURCE: "Beginning with Images in the Nature Poetry of Wang Wei," in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 42, No. 1, June, 1982, pp. 117-37.

[In the following essay, Chou traces natural imagery in the poems of Wang Wei and discusses the possible Buddhist themes implied by these symbols.]

Wang Wei (701-61) is a poet whose reputation primarily rests on his nature poems. Although in the poems which have survived other themes are well represented—elaborate and perfect poemsabout the emperor's court, sentimental sketches of bucolic life, poems expressing friendship—it is with the nature poems that his name is universally identified. The prominence given a handful of nature poems reflects both the judgment that they contain the essence of Wang Wei's achievement and an acknowledgment of the position they occupy in the evolution of nature poetry. The sense displayed in these poems of a life lived in harmony with nature marks an important development in the appeal of landscape and nature to the poetic sensibility.

The world of Wang Wei's nature poems is a narrow one of simple and recurring scenes—a brief wind lifts his sash, a slight chill hangs in the air, light fills the mountainside, a bell sounds once. These are small moments intensified, during which nothing much happens. In general, Wang Wei does not draw any conclusions from scenes so presented—and this is the problem. A small area of experience has been sharply delimited, but within this area the reader is not guided to an interpretation. The clarity of the moment distilled seems to bespeak openness, yet the reader who feels that a meaning beyond that moment has been intended finds it concealed and the poems lacking in internal clues. In this Wang Wei reminds me of Imagist poets, in which the sharpness of the observed details contrasts with the vagueness of the interpretation which has been implied. That a meaning beyond that captured moment has been intended seems a reasonable expectation. Indeed, given Wang Wei's enduring reputation, it seems a necessary one; for it is hardly possible that any nature poetry can continue to hold our attention that does not project a certain amount of significance onto the landscape presented.

The problem of significance—what is there besides descriptions of nature?—has been recognized for a long time. A major response has been concerned with identifying the Buddhist meaning of Wang Wei's poetry. This attempt seems justified in view of the whole of Wang Wei's poetry and also the known facts of his life. Wang Wei began the serious study of Buddhism about the age of thirty, adopted the tzu of Mo-chieh (which together with his ming Wei formed the Chinese transliteration of the name of the sage Vimalakirti), and began to move in Buddhist circles. In his poetry, his Buddhist interests are reflected in the many poems written to monks, in his appreciative descriptions of their lives, and in the frequent references to Buddhist practices and goals in his own life. These visible effects on his poetry are not disputed, but the most interesting claim of influence is made in a strong form. This is that the Buddhist influence is present in exactly those of the nature poems which show no overt signs of Buddhism, that is, those of Wang Wei's nature poems which I have described as simple and yet elusive. [There is no clear way to divide Wang Wei's poems into categories. I have chosen the ones set in mountains, following the description of landscape as shan-shui, and left out those set on the plains, which seem to me more pastoral, t'ien-yuan. The core is made up of the twenty poems of the "Wang-ch'uan chi," of poems about returning to Wang-ch'uan, and of those with mountain names or streams in the titles. A peripheral group includes poems about monasteries, whether or not monks are also there.]

The poems meant are such as these:

In Ching Brook white stones jut out,
The sky is cold, red leaves thinning.
On the mountain path, there had been no rain,
The cloudless blue, clothes are dampened.

—"In the mountains"

All at rest, the cassia flowers fall.
The night is quiet, the spring mountains empty.
The moon appears, startling mountain birds,
Which from time to time cry out from the spring
ravine.

—"Birdcries Stream"

Of the first poem the Sung-dynasty monk Hui-hung (1071-1128) reports the opinion that it is full of t'iench'ü "the essence of nature." Of the second the Ming-dynasty critic Hu Ying-lin (1551-1602) declares that Wang Wei had entered into the ranks of Ch'an Buddhists. The Ch'ing anthologist Shen Te-ch'ien (1673-1769) says that Wang Wei's poetry does not use Ch'an vocabulary but often attains Ch'an meaning. Such views of the poems are widespread and usually expressed in similarly general terms.

Some modern scholars have therefore recently added various qualifying suggestions to the equation of Wang Wei's nature poems with Buddhist influences. Iritani Sensuke discusses the "Wang-ch'uan chi" in terms of its Ch'u tz'u elements, its realism, and its mysticism, but does not bring in Buddhism. Fujiyoshi Masumi emphasizes the limited influence of Buddhism on the T'ang nobility in general and the importance of Taoism in its mediating role between Confucian ideals of service and Buddhist withdrawal. Pauline Yu is at pains to show that Wang Wei's attitude towards retirement from public life was not uncomplicated. None of them denies the pervasiveness of Buddhism in Wang Wei's life and in his works taken as a whole.

I think that ultimately we will have to refer to Buddhism at least in order to appreciate the full context out of which Wang Wei wrote and possibly in order to appreciate the full meaning of the nature poems. However there are aspects of the poems which we can consider before this final appeal that do not deny the possibility of Buddhist influence and yet may make easier the problem of defining this influence. This consideration begins by recognizing the nature of the problems posed by the poems.

I think of the problems as of two kinds. The first is that the literary qualities of the poems are hard to define; hence the persistent fascination with Buddhism as a key to them. Literarily the poems are elusive because they seem to defy further analysis, so simple is the setting, so precise the imagery and unhurried the tone. The stillness and tranquillity seem impossible to explicate further. Discussion would merely intrude paraphrase onto these spare scenes. The poems resist any response other than acceptance; they appear to be the simplest statements about themselves.

The second is that in those poems where Wang Wei does not use Buddhist terms—and these constitute the majority of what I have called nature poems—the Buddhist themes prove elusive to specify. I suggest that we deal with this problem by secularizing it, by looking first to see whether any philosophical viewpoint, rather than a specifically Buddhist one, is expressed in the poems. Then we may ask whether this philosophy can be identified with some aspect of Buddhism. This approach brings us to the more familiar uncertainty that the true meaning or intent of poems might always remain to some degree unverifiable, and especially so in poems, like these and like the Imagist poems, where the reader finds few guides to an interpretation. Differing literary analyses would then stress different themes, not all of which would have Buddhist analogs, but each of which may nonetheless be literarily acceptable.

I propose in this essay to begin with an analysis of some literary qualities of Wang Wei's nature poems and from this analysis to make a suggestion about the problem of meaning in these poems.

The spareness of a Wang Wei scene is not a reflection of nature but the consequence of careful selection. The images which make up each poem are simple; the elements which make up the images are few. I suggest that it is the physical spacing displayed in the images which provides a key to the remoteness and the uncanny stillness which are their chief impression on the reader.

A central image in the nature poems is the physical isolation of the poet. Not only does he live away from man, but he chooses to live in the mountains, which encircle him on all sides. Furthermore he is often stationed inside an enclosure of some kind:

I sit alone in a secluded bamboo thicket.
The bright moon shines among the pines.
The bright moon shines on me.
The mountain moon shines on a zither played.

The moon by creating a well of light around the poet emphasizes his placement in a clearing.

Further, the poet is not only isolated, but his existence is not even suspected by others:

Deep in the forest, no one knows [of me].

He suggests the same isolation for a friend:

On the wide waters, no one will know [of you].

Again, of monasteries Wang Wei likes to emphasize that to the unsuspecting they do not exist:

From the city, seen afar, a deserted cloud-capped
mountain.

From the city walls, looking out,
One would see only white clouds.

The poet lives alone in harmony with nature, but he has not dissolved into nature. As a personality he is self-effacing: there is generally no emotion reaching out to the landscape, no emotion aroused in turn by the landscape. Rather, the continued existence of his ego is expressed by the insistence on an active separation between himself and others. Again, this separation often takes the form of exclusion. One aspect of an experience that he savors is the exclusion of others from it. In poems by Meng Hao-jan (691-740) which describe scenes similar to Wang Wei's, it only gradually becomes apparent to the reader that the poet is alone, for the fact is not stated. Wang Wei, on the other hand, tells us many times and in so many words that no one is around. Wu jen ("there is no one") and pu chien jen ("I see no one") are used repeatedly. K'ung ("empty") is often used of a forest or a mountain to mean that no one is about, save for the poet. This absence of people gives to his solitude a delicious edge:

The house by the stream is quiet, unpeopled.
In profusion, [magnolias] blossom and fall.

Where once there had been people living, there is now no one, and the scene is the more piquant. The same sense of specialness can be seen in the poet's being privy to the secrets of the landscape:

Beautiful spots which only I know of.

Where he walks, no one else seems to have walked:

Beneath ancient trees, an unused path.

Another type of isolation is often established by the first two characters (the first phrase) of short poems:

All at rest, the cassia flowers fall.
The night is still, all movements cease.
In the empty mountains, after the new rain.

(The second example is twice used as a first line.) Inside the bell jar of quietude defined by the first two characters, the remainder of the poem takes place. Within a poem Wang Wei will often define a space by the silence which pervades it. This silence is then broken by a sound which also emphasizes the space defined:

The mountains are still, the spring even noisier.
The valley is still, the spring even noisier.
The valley is still, the autumn spring noisy.
The valley is still, only the pines whisper.

Or the sound occurs first, then the space is defined:

The travellers echo through the empty forest.

The image of isolation explains other types of images that occur, in particular Wang Wei's preference for sound over sight. Again, he can be very insistent, both that he sees nothing, and that he hears only sounds:

Empty mountains, I see no one,
But hear the echoes of people's voices.
The bamboos ring with the returning
washerwomen.

The effect is that of a one-way mirror. Through sound images, the poet knows about other people's existence without their guessing his.

Sound has the additional advantage that what the poet hears need not be close by, but can be transmitted over an intervening distance. This distance then acts as an invisible barrier that expresses his isolation:

From the valley mouth, the sound of a distant bell.
The fisherman's song enters deep into this
tributary.
Deep in the mountains—from where?—a bell.

The last is a refinement, a sound whose source is unknown. The barrier is sometimes made explicit by the use of ko ("separated by"):

At times I hear dogs on the far side of the grove.
Across the river I ask the woodcutter.
On the far shore I see homes.

We can compare these examples with a characteristic pose found in Meng Hao-jan's poetry. The figure of Meng's poet is often on a river bank, or by a jetty, from which he can also see the people making the noise. The Meng Hao-jan line "From the mountain temple a bell sounds, day is already dusk" contains elements familiar in Wang Wei too—the temple, the bell, dusk—but in Meng Hao-jan is followed by the cheerful noise of people actually seen ("By the fish dam, at the ferry, the clamor of everyone wanting to cross"). For Wang Wei, on the other hand, the consciousness of humans a distance away and dwindling further makes his solitude the more sweet. It is a solitude that perseveres on the edges of other people's activities and is the consequence not only of the circumstances of composition but of a certain control by imagery of the physical spacing.

It is not hard to find in the work of other poets, especially Meng Hao-jan, lines which are similar to some cited here. The world created in the poem as a whole, however, is almost always different. One much praised line by Wang Wei, for example, in its crucial part can be found in Sung Chih-wen (d. 712):

Returning rays enter the cliffs and valley.

In Wang Wei:

Returning rays enter the deep forest.

The returning rays are the afternoon light, which shines in the opposite direction from earlier in the day. In Sung Chih-wen, the line is one of twenty in a poem confiding the poet's hopes and fears during his recovery from an illness. In Wang Wei, it forms part of a pattern of solitude:

Empty mountains, I see no one,
But hear the echoes of people's voices.
Returning rays enter the deep forest,
Shining once more upon green moss.

The arrangement of sights and sounds, seemingly so artlessly noted as they impinge upon the poet's consciousness, constitute the whole of Wang Wei's world. The exclusion of other concerns is what is meant I think by the common description of Wang Wei's nature poems as the first ones to have been "pure." The subsequent unity of the poet with this world is then effortless, so pared is this world. The poet is able to transcend the world through immersion in nature in part because his natural world already transcends our natural world.

The spacing controlled by the images is physical and literal. I would like to suggest that the same control of spacing has a metaphorical and sometimes symbolic existence on the level of the whole poem. It is possible to interpret the themes of some poems in terms of distance and barriers, and also to offer such an interpretation for other poems which seem to be solely description.

The control of space, for instance, is implicit in one common theme we find, the theme that on the other side of an intervening distance exists a desirable state which I think we may call truth. In one of the ways in which this pattern is worked out, the truth is attained by bridging the distance. This distance is usually bridged only unknowingly: a journey is made which is not deliberately undertaken. At least the goal is not deliberately sought. This is the pattern found in the poem "Visiting Hsiang-chi Monastery":

I had not known of Hsiang-chi Monastery
When I was several li into the cloudy peak.
Beneath ancient trees, an unused path,
Deep in the mountains—from where?—a bell.
Noise from a spring burbles over sharp rocks,
The sun's light chills the dark pines.
At dusk, by the empty curve of the pond,
Meditation to subdue the poisonous dragon.

The poem begins with the poet isolating himself from men by asserting a limited ordinary knowledge of his world, in this case the existence of Hsiang-chi Monastery. Without saying what he has in mind (for the first couplet constitutes only a denial of a purpose), the poet moves towards and, in the last couplet, reaches the hidden monastery. At this point, in the last line, the image of isolation is repeated at a higher level: the figure in the last line, either a monk or the poet himself, withdraws from his world and from us into meditation.

Real journeys of course often imply a journey of another kind, and not always as subtly as in this poem. In the poems "Green Stream" and "The Shih-men Monastery in the Lan-t'ien Mountains," Wang Wei is explicit about the truth reached at journey's end. In the first, the traveller rounds a bend in the river and sees a spot ideal for living in retirement. In the second, the traveller happens upon five or six hermit monks, living peacefully unbothered by any knowledge of the world outside. It is of course a second Peach Blossom Spring. In both endings, the identification of man and nature is achieved by the fact of his finding an ideal natural end to his journey. Although the moral is obvious, the pattern of the journey is the same as the Hsiang-chi Monastery one. The journeys are made without a purpose, the discoveries are serendipitous, and the distances deceptive. It is just that in these poems Wang Wei depends rather on the charm of such qualities than on the profundity of the meaning. Two couplets from each poem illustrate this:

To reach Yellow Flowers River,
One must always follow the waters of Green
Stream.
Hugging the mountains, it makes ten thousand
turns,
The true distance no more than a hundred li.

From afar I had admired the beauty of trees in
clouds.
At first I thought we were on a different course.
How was I to know the clear stream wound
around
And led to the mountain before us?

Although in the journey poems, the distance is bridged and the truth temporarily seen, in other poems, the stronger theme, and I think the more profound one, is expressed that though the truth lies on the other side of an intervening distance, only across this distance is it knowable. This variant is less obvious than the journey theme and not directly stated. Therefore the tracing of this theme through imagery poses a problem of interpretation. A certain image might be more than an element in the scenery, it might contribute to the poem's meaning, but how much significance we are meant to find in that image is not specified by Wang Wei. Instead we have to bring together hints scattered through many poems to lend some weight to the reading of a single occurrence which might otherwise be a case of over-reading. There is no certainty, however, that in each case the same truth is being so delicately hinted at. These uncertainties do not exist in every poem; Wang Wei can be disconcertingly flat about his meaning. However, where the uncertainties do exist, in Wang Wei it is not enough to consider each occurrence of the image on its own.

The function of the image of white clouds, an image which occurs in about twenty poems, illustrates this problem of interpretation. In many of the poems, the reader feels that the white clouds must be a significant image, but what it is and what is implied in each case is not always specified. I would like to go into this in a little detail.

An example of the unfixed significance of white clouds occurs in the following poem:

Playing on flutes, we cross to the far shore.
At day's end, I see off my friends.
On the lake, I turn back once—
Around the hill's green are wreathed white clouds.

The poem is the eleventh of the set of twenty quatrains, the "Wang-ch'uan Garland," which Wang Wei wrote about various scenic points on his country estate. This one is entitled "Lake Yi." Is it as simple as it appears to be? The first two lines are purely narration. Are the last two lines more significant? Is it significant that the white clouds are placed last? I will return to this poem later.

In several other poems, the white clouds lie in the unspecified distance, and mark a place towards which some are headed and to which others long to go. It seems to be the ultimate and natural resolution of the scenes of nature described, the home of one's true self. Accordingly, the verb kuei ("to go home") is often used of going there. Examples are:

I am returning to the foot of the Southern
Mountains

Where white clouds will never fail.
My heart has always been in the green hills,
As though to keep company with the massed white clouds.
Saddled for going home, beyond the white clouds.

These white clouds exist only in the mind, clearly a symbol for a longed-for place, though, unlike the Peach Blossom Spring, not a readily describable ideal place.

In general, no one is shown as having reached that place, although no difficulties are placed in the way of going. The white clouds are far away, but there is no implication that they are unreachable, or that one needs special qualifications—wisdom, unworldliness, etc.,—to make the journey. It is simply that they are described from a distance. People do live among the white clouds. For example, in lines quoted earlier, monasteries are located within the clouds. But those clouds exist only for the viewer looking upon them from a distance. In poems where one is actually at the monastery, it is only an inhabited monastery and white clouds are not mentioned. There is no line such as "In the midst of white clouds." In a poem about the majestic Chung-shan Mountain, when the poet "turns to look, the white clouds have closed up," but when he "enters it, in the blue mist I see nothing." The image is beautifully apt, for clouds do dissolve into mist when one is in them, so when the poet has covered the distance, he enters to see "nothing."

This double view of the same place depending upon the poet's location and emphasizing the inaccessibility of the place is seen very clearly in the poem "Lament for Yin Yao":

We escorted your return for burial on Shih-lou
Mountain.
Dark and green, the pines, the cypresses, as the
guests turned home.

Your bones are buried under white clouds, for all
time.
Only the flowing stream reaches the human world.

The poet has accompanied his friend's coffin to Shih-lou Mountain and seen his burial (lines 1 and 2). After his return, he visualizes it as the place of the white clouds, remote, its only communication with the world a stream.

The white clouds are most within reach when they can be gazed upon. The two together, the viewer and the clouds, define the boundaries of an ideal world. The poet's content is to sit and gaze:

I walk to where the waters end
And sit and watch the clouds begin.

In the past we stopped on our excursions
When we had come to where the clouds end.

Wang Wei admires a friend's study:

I envy your refuge here:
A distant view of white clouds.

Now let us return to the poem "Lake Yi":

Playing on flutes, we cross to the far shore.
At day's end, I see off my friends.
On the lake, I turn back once—
Around the hill's green are wreathed white clouds.

The poet has made a pleasant excursion out of seeing off his friends, and in line 3 he recrosses the lake to return home. When part way on this crossing he turns to look back, he is looking towards the place, and the day, he has just left: the green hills and white clouds show an untroubled serenity. What is the meaning of this sight? The recrossing of the lake has placed a distance between that day's gaieties and the quiet now. The white clouds confirm that distance; they reveal nothing of what had passed that day and hint at the finality of its pastness. Their presence—their passivity almost—is a comment on the pleasures of the day. That the image can bear the weight of such a firm closural function with some confidence is due not to the poem alone but also to the occurrences of the image in other poems.

It is interesting to see a later evolution in the white clouds image in a poem by Yuan Mei (1716-98). In this poem, "white clouds" has lost its faint capacity to hint at some meaning. The last couplet of a 32-line poem, the clouds nicely end the poet's visit to an unsophisticated village. Naturally the Peach Blossom Spring story is also referred to. I give the first and last couplets:

I saw in the distance peach orchards in leaf,
But did not know what village it was.

My one regret is that I must leave it;
I turn my head; there are only white clouds.

The white clouds, the distance, peach blossoms, and rustic utopia have all blended together in Yuan Mei's easy geniality.

As an image acquires more significance, its vividness in nature begins to fade. The reader begins to discount the literalness of some of the recurring images: the white clouds in a sense had to be there across Lake Yi. The immediacy of the scene gives way before the philosophical meaning that is implied in the recurrence of the images. This is true of the sound of the bell, of the white clouds, and of other images such as the empty mountains or the woodcutters. As the literalness of the images loses force, the questions of the reader about the philosophical meanings grow stronger. As in the case of the white clouds, one could consider all the occurrences together in order to return to an understanding of one poem. Knowing how much to draw upon Buddhist thought as an extra-poetical context would help in these circumstances. We may learn for instance the weight of pu chih ("do not know") when it occurs without an object, and of k'ung ("empty"), so central a concept in Buddhism. In this paper I have suggested mainly literal readings because I want to emphasize that these words first have a literal function in the poem. The pattern of images I have suggested I hope will prove to hold on several levels and to remain an identifying mark for Wang Wei on the simplest level of the visualizable world he created.

Can poems be explained at a less elaborate length by referring directly to Buddhism? I think that it is a step which follows literary analysis. At this point, for example, we may ask whether the gazing upon clouds can be considered a secular form of contemplation. The unstriving movement towards knowledge I described as a theme is certainly familiar from Buddhism, as is the distance between humans and an enlightened state. I suggest that by fully tracing out a theme, one then knows what kinds of correspondences to seek in Buddhist philosophies. In other words the literary analysis precedes the philosophical one. The theme is after all expressed in literary terms. To say that "Visiting Hsiang-chi Monastery" is Buddhistic because it is a monastery the poet visited rather than because of other qualities in the poem eliminates its literary existence. The problem, however, with this approach—literary analysis preceding philosophical analysis—is that the answers tend to be restricted to a kind of perception of Buddhist influence that is probably too diffuse to satisfy those readers who feel vividly the Buddhist nature of the poems. These answers tend to boil down to the conclusion that certain themes thread through the poems because the consciousness that brought them before us was imbued with Buddhism. Only the themes perceived (and the examples selected) might vary with the analysis. What this approach cannot provide is an answer which states that these poems in their details specifically contain certain Buddhist views of phenomena and truth.

What if we began from the other direction, by considering the possible Buddhist meaning before the literary detail? Of the critics who do give examples of what they mean by the Ch'an nature of Wang Wei's poetry, few also explain how to read the poems that way. Tu Sungpo is one who does, and so I give his reading of the first two poems translated in this essay as an illustration of the direct philosophical approach:

In Ching Brook white stones jut out,
The sky is cold, red leaves thinning.
On the mountain path, there had been no rain,
The cloudless blue, clothes are dampened.

—"In the mountains"

All at rest, the cassia flowers fall.
The night is quiet, the spring mountains empty.
The moon appears, startling mountain birds,
Which from time to time cry out from the spring
ravine.

—"Birdcries Stream"

Of "In the mountains" Tu Sung-po writes:

Concealed are principles of Ch'an. The first two lines show that when the visible is exhausted the tao manifests itself (hsiang ch'iung tao hsien) and that the essential is revealed through its function (t'i yu yung hsien). The second couplet shows that the tao has no physical form (tao wu hsing-chih), but can be responded to and known. If one does not bring to the poem this kind of empathy, then he will see only the technical skill of the polished lines and completely miss what may be called the t'ien-ch'ü of the lines.

And of "Birdcries Stream":

When a person is at rest, all reaches its quietest (ching chi). He becomes aware of the falling of the cassia flowers. His mind (nei hsin) and his setting (wai ching) are as one and thus he becomes aware of the emptiness of the spring mountains. Into this quietness enters a sudden stimulus (chi): the moon comes out and the birds cry in alarm. Thus is illustrated the sphere of stimulus (chi ching).

One great difference is that this type of interpretation can only be couched in Buddhist terms, for which I have retained the Chinese. Is it possible to arrive at the same explanation of the poems through literary analysis? Yes and no. In the poem "In the mountains," the second couplet has a certain mysteriousness about it (why are his clothes damp? is there a mist? why an empty sky rather than cloudless [for cloudless is my paraphrase]? why yuan?). One naturally asks whether the mystery spills over into the other lines and imparts a deeper meaning to the whole poem. For the literary critic, the question is raised by the poem itself in the unexpectedness of the description. I have no explanation for the poem myself, but Tu Sung-po does. Comparing his with the poem, I can see that the mysteriously wet clothes can be accounted for as an image of the nonphysical tao, but why involve the first couplet? Literarily the couplets are quite different, but the philosophies Tu attaches to them are of equal weight. If symbolism can be read into the landscape of the first couplet, why not into every landscape described? What are the limits?

The interpretation of "Birdcries Stream" is problematical in a different way. There is no mystery in the poem, and one could give the same description of the poem's development from silence to sudden sound without bringing up Buddhist terminology. The assignment of a technical term, stimulus, to the moon's appearance is the chief addition. What a Buddhist reading misses is that, because of the name of the stream and the title of the poem, the birds' being startled into cries turns the poem on one level into an etymological poem. The literary critic would raise a question about the poem's meaning only because otherwise it seems an inconsequential, though very nice, poem.

Tu Sung-po may well be right in both poems about Wang Wei's intent. There is no way directly to verify it. The Chinese tradition seems to allow an interpretation that parallels the poem without being anchored in it at any point. The oddest example is the way in which love poems from the Shih ching were used, according to the Tso chuan, in interstate diplomacy with perfect understanding on all sides. (The Shih ching poem sung by the envoy substitutes for speech and the poem's scenario is supposed to parallel the situation between the two states.) This is interesting because it is a well-documented instance of the complete confidence and total agreement with which certain poems were at one time understood—and yet from an external source, the discipline of folklore and mythology, we can say with some sureness that theirs was a misunderstanding about the nature of the poems. The question in Wang Wei's case is whether he intended his nature poems to carry a parallel philosophical life as some of the Shih ching poems did a political life. Short of external proof, the question is complicated to resolve. The position of the literary critic is conservative in not assuming any intention on the poet's part that cannot be discovered within the poem. Perhaps by this method, however, not enough meaning can be recovered from the poems to do them full justice.

There is overlap and empathy between poetry and Ch'an Buddhism, especially in rhetorical devices. Thus all critics assume that it is Ch'an which permeates Wang Wei's poems, though in fact which sect or sects he held to is not known. In choosing to write poetry, however, Wang Wei displayed no consciousness that language might be unable to express truths, as the Ch'an sect taught. Moreover, although there is empathy between poetry and Ch'an, between poetry and true Buddhist (or Ch'an) poems there is a great difference. In Buddhist poems written to convey a teaching or to voice a truth seen at the moment of enlightenment, the intent of the author is unmistakable: everything in such a poem stands for some-thing else and the whole illustrates a lesson. The appeal is in the beauty of thought. In poetry, there is no such certainty about the creator's intent, and the appeal is in the beauty of language. There is no evidence that, devout as Wang Wei was, he ever attained enlightenment, though such themes hover around his poems.

However much these poems are Buddhistic in premise or inspiration, the level in the poetry that can be paraphrased by reference to Buddhist philosophies is probably not unique to Wang Wei. Poetry, unlike religion, values the language in which a truth is conveyed as much as the truth itself; the paraphrased truth of a poem deprived of the language of which it is composed may be no more than cliché whereas the truth of religion is absolute, unqualifiable by clumsiness of expression. It is by using the secular tools of language that Wang Wei has preserved for us so much of the beauty of his temporal world and of its eternal principles.