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.