3: What We Talk About When We Talk About Encountering

(With apologies to Raymond Carver)

Matt requested some discussion of the Buddhist themes in the comments to the last post, and I'll oblige tomorrow. Tonight, I want to talk about this poem as part of the sequence of 感遇 (gǎnyù) poems.

Zhang Jiuling's first poem compared two types of birds - the lone swan flying over the ocean, and the kingfishers nested in the high tree. Zhang's sympathy appears to be first with the swan, claiming that as he wanders high and far, the arrows of men cannot harm him. However, Zhang writes this poem after being banished from the imperial court and sent to a distant province. In fact, his position has a great deal in common with the kingfishers, who, nesting in the tall tree, are nevertheless vulnerable to the "golden bullets" of a hunter's sling.

Similarly, in the second poem, we naturally project Zhang onto the hermit wandering the lonely valley among the cinnamon and lotus flowers in the autumn and spring. However - and I'm going with Matt's excellent read on the character 折 zhé as "select" in the sense of "pluck" or "pick" - by the end of the poem there's considerable ambiguity as to whether the poet identifies more with the peaceful religious hermit or the flowers, which, rejoicing as they grow, don't care whether they might be picked by the hermit. However, we're not certain whether it's a good thing for the flowers to be plucked. Zhang and his readers certainly thought that the hermit was a virtuous figure, but is being picked by a hermit an honor for the flowers, or certain death? This is particularly interesting given the form Zhang's exile took: he was selected (picked / 折'd) by the Emperor as a governor of a backwards province, and in the process ripped out of his flowering, carefree life at court.

In this poem, Zhang's focus shifts from the natural world to the hermit himself: a religious recluse living away from the urban press of humanity in some secluded valley, meditating and perfecting his mind (more on which later). Of the ten characters in the poem's first couplet, two (独 dú and 孤 gū) emphasize the solitary, lonely nature of the hermit's retreat. The hermit, isolated from the universe, achieves perfection by contemplating emptiness. What a fitting image for a poem by a man separated from his society!

But Zhang doesn't stop there, of course. In the last two lines, he arrives again, strangely separate from what at first appeared to be the main character of the poem:

From flying or sinking affairs am I cut off;
what comfort do I gain from dedication?

In contrast to the first two lines, which contain two characters meaning "lonely," the last two lines contain two characters, 自zǐ and 吾wù, that both mean "I" - in the same position as the two "lonely" characters in the first couplet. It seems likely to me that this is an intentional parallelism (and one almost impossible to capture in English translation, of course). The emphasis on the personal pronoun is weird in a a poem like this: the Tang poet has many different ways to narrate or describe a situation, yet here Zhang draws our attention to an "I" in a manner most uncharacteristic of a Buddhist monk.

I see a few different possibilities here:

1. The monk is talking. A Buddhist sage seems unlikely to communicate in such a self-centered manner. Maybe I'm misreading the line, but I think this is the least probable option.
   
2. Zhang is talking, and the "dedication" in the last line is meant to be read as "dedication to the Emperor" or "the court." In that case, he might be saying: "look at this monk! When I am distant from court, I feel really, really sad -- what does that idle dedication gain me? I should start meditating like the monk here."
   
3. Zhang is talking, and the "dedication" in the last line refers to Buddhist practice. In this case, Zhang is wistfully confessing his inability to focus on contemplation like the ideal monk: "all this meditation doesn't help me; what comfort can I gain from dedicating [myself to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha]?"
   

Regardless of which interpretation we choose (or others I've missed that y'all should feel free to point out for me), thinking about the last three poems this way has given me a lot of respect for Zhang's mastery of perspective and subtlety. I wonder where he'll take us next.