The Songs of Chu

by Gopal Sukhu

  Dissatisfaction with the mundane, especially the political, is sometimes expressed in youxian poems, but more often than not it remains implicit. Because of the unsubtle quasi-religious subject matter and highly formulaic presentation, most youxian poems tend to be boring in translation, but the genre is a very important one in Chinese literary history, for it provided images and tropes that were taken over into other genres, especially landscape poetry and the poetry of secret or unrequited love.

  The Six Dynasties period was the golden age of youxian poetry, and one of its chief exponents was an occult Daoist practitioner, the scholar-poet Guo Pu 郭璞 (276–324 C.E.). One of his best-known works is a series of poems called Youxian shi 游仙詩, of which only fourteen remain. Number three is presented and translated below:

  翡翠戲蘭苕, 容色更相鮮. 綠蘿結高林, 蒙籠蓋一山.

  中有冥寂士, 靜嘯撫清弦. 放情凌霄外, 嚼蘂挹飛泉.

  赤松臨上游, 駕鴻乘紫煙. 左挹浮丘袖, 右拍洪崖肩.

  借問蜉蝣輩, 寧知龜鶴年.

  When the kingfisher plays among the flowering thoroughwort,

  Its color is even brighter.

  When the pine gauze forms in the high forests,

  It envelopes the whole mountain.

  There the obscure lonely hermit lives

  Tranquilly whistling and playing his clear-sounding qin,

  Sending his heart to dwell beyond the clouds,

  Eating medicinal herbs and drinking from flying springs with cupped hand.

  Red Pine looks down on him from above

  As he wanders by driving a giant goose in his chariot of purple mist.

  His left hand holds the sleeve of Fu Qiu and his right is on the shoulder of Hong Yan.

  Answer this question please, mayfly,

  Can you even conceive of a life as long as that of the tortoise or crane?

  In this poem Red Pine, Fu Qiu, and Hong Yan are all names of people who became immortal by doing the sorts of the things the herb-eating springwater-sipping hermit is doing. Note that there is also a flying chariot in this poem, but the emperor has been replaced by an immortal. The symbols of immortality are the tortoise and crane, which were traditionally thought to live a very long time. The short-lived mayfly, of course, stands for ordinary mortals who live in the capital wearing themselves out, ever scheming to gain status and wealth.

  The immortals are of course airborne, a sign of their transcendence. It is from that vantage point that they can see the vanity and brevity of ordinary human life, which the hermit is attempting to escape. That airborne perspective goes all the way back to “Li sao,” where the persona of the poem takes flight at the end of the poem and, hovering over the capital that he once cherished, realizes that in fact there is nothing there worth clinging to. Guo Pu’s poem, like most poems in the genre, posits the most generalized dissatisfaction with the world as motivation for those aspirants to xian-hood. Such poems invite rulers, ministers, and ordinary people alike to be practitioners. The “Li-sao”–like flight is there, but the moral edge is missing, and that was the case for most youxian poetry after “Wandering Far Away,” the Chuci work considered the main ancestor of the genre.

  The moral edge gradually returns as we proceed into the Tang dynasty, especially in the poetry of another of the great youxian writers, Li Bai 李白 (701–762). Aside from being one of the great poets in Chinese history, Li Bai, like Guo Pu, was an occult Daoist practitioner, having studied with a number of renowned masters. It was this status along with his genius and unconventionality that inspired the Tang poet He Zhizhang (659–744) to dub him “the banished immortal” (謫仙 zhe xian).

  The Tang imperial house, which traced its ancestry back to Laozi, considered by many to be the founder of Daoism, was especially interested in occult Daoist practitioners. And Xuanzong, the emperor at the time, loved poets. Li Bai was both. His willingness to use his knowledge and talent to please, if not flatter, can be seen in the following poem “Yu Zhen xianren ci” 玉真仙人詞 (The immortal Jade True), written for Princess Yu Zhen (Jade True), who was the sister of Emperor Xuanzong and who became a Daoist nun:

  玉真之仙人, 時往太華峰。清晨鳴天鼓, 飆歘騰雙龍。

  弄電不輟手, 行雲本無蹤。幾時入少室, 王母應相逢。

  The immortal Jade True

  Time after time goes to Great Flower Peak,

  And in the early morning sounds the celestial drums,

  And driving her two dragons on speeding winds,

  Casts lightning bolts without dropping the reins.

  Like a drifting cloud she appears and disappears without trace.

  When will she enter the Chamber of Youth,

  Where she will surely meet the Queen Mother of the West?

  Great Flower Peak, known as Hua Shan 華山 in Chinese, is one of the five sacred mountains of China, with a long history as a center for occult Daoist practice. The expression “sounds the celestial drums” is probably code for a particular Daoist ritual involving gnashing the teeth together. The loud clicking sound is supposed to drive away evil spiritual forces. There may well be other codes in the poem as well, but the only other things that have been identified so far are the Chamber of Youth (Shao Shi), which is a peak to the west of Mount Song, another sacred mountain, and the Queen Mother of the West, who among other things is the ruler of female immortals. After receiving this poem, Princess Jade True apparently helped Li Bai gain access to the emperor.

  Li Bai lost imperial favor as quickly as he won it, and more than once. In the course of his rocky career he wrote a set of poems called Fifty-Nine Ancient Airs that offer moral judgments in figurative, and often satirical, form. There is a great deal of flying in these poems. Here the flying becomes a trope, which while still bearing the marks of the youxian genre recalls more directly the older parts of the Chuci by restoring the spirit of Qu Yuan to the midheavens—that is, making the moral judgments that only a lofty perspective can afford. One of the most famous examples is number nineteen:

  西上蓮花山。迢迢見明星。素手把芙蓉。虛步躡太清。

  霓裳曳廣帶。飄拂升天行。邀我登云台。高揖衛叔卿。

  恍恍與之去。駕鴻凌紫冥。俯視洛陽川。茫茫走胡兵。

  流血涂野草。豺狼盡冠纓。

  I went west and up Lotus Mountain,

  And saw in the distance the mountain spirit Bright Star

  Holding a lotus in her hand

  As she tiptoed on the air of the highest heaven,

  Her broad sashes trailing from her rainbow skirt,

  Fluttering as she rose,

  She invited me to ascend with her to the cloud tower

  To pay our respects to Wei Shuqing.

  And away I went with them in a blur

  Riding great geese over the purple void.

  We looked down on the plain of Luoyang

  And saw a vast horde of barbarian soldiers running,

  Their spilling blood painting the wild grass red,

  And jackals and wolves were there,

  All wearing officials’ caps.

  This is a hybrid youxian poem mixing youxian elements with the Chuci-derived genre of poems that describe erotic encounters between male mortals and female spirits such as “Gaotang fu” (高唐賦, “Rhapsody on Gaotang”), attributed to the late Warring States period poet Song Yu 宋玉, and “Luoshen fu” (洛神賦, “Rhapsody on the Spirit of the River Luo”), by Cao Zhi 曹植 (192–232), which I discuss below. With the exception of “Gaotang fu,” such poems give a vision of the beautiful spirit only to describe the erotic frustration of the one who has the vision. In Li Bai’s variation, however, the spirit beckons with no erotic intent; she is merely introducing him to another immortal, Wang Shuqing, a male. He is one of the great immortals, and Li Bai expresses no hint of feeling that “three is a crowd.” The goal of the trio is not erotic but moral heights, the same midair perspective from which the ma
in persona of “Li sao” looks down and realizes that there was nothing he should cling to in the state, for there are no men in the state—that is, no one who was not corrupt or useless. When Li Bai and company look down from the celestial heights, they see only war and those who wage it, and they turn out not to be men but beasts dressed up as men.

  The intersection of many lines of Chuci influence—in this case from the Nine Songs, “Li sao,” and “Wandering Far Away”—is typical of much of the Fifty-Nine Ancient Airs series and a number of Li Bai’s poems outside the series. One of the most interesting works in this regard is “Song of the Celestial Grandmother Dream: A Parting Gift” (夢遊天姥吟劉別 “Meng you tian mu yin liubie”).

  Celestial Grandmother is the name of one of the mountains sacred to Daoism, located in Zhejiang. The poem was a parting gift to a friend Li Bai was visiting. In it Li Bai describes a dream in which he travels to the mysterious and massive mountain, whose image “flickers in and out of view among the clouds at sunset.” In ancient China dreams were believed to be a form of spirit travel. The poem accordingly describes Li Bai flying through the air on his own power, the way some of the shamans do in the Nine Songs and the disgruntled persona in “Wandering Far Away” does:

  一夜飛渡鏡湖月。

  湖月照我影, 送我至剡溪。

  And throughout the night I flew

  over the moon in Mirror Lake,

  And the moon shining on my form accompanied me

  all the way to Shan Stream.

  Once he reaches the mountain, he marvels at the sights, including the place where one of his favorite poets spent the night, the sun high over the sea, and an expanse of flowers, where he tarries entranced. Suddenly it grows dark and

  熊咆龍吟殷巖泉, 慄深林兮驚層巔。

  雲青青兮欲雨, 水澹澹兮生煙。

  The roar of bears and the growl of dragons

  Thundered through the cliffs and over the streams

  Shaking the deep forest, making the craggy ridges tremble.

  The clouds grew dark, threatening rain,

  And the lakes rippled as they sent up mist.

  All the above lines are modeled on lines from the Nine Songs both in imagery and meter, including the insertion of a rhythm particle (xi) in the middle of the line. But the ancient gods of Chu do not descend at this juncture. Instead the mountain peaks collapse amid thunder and lightning, exposing a massive stone gate that roars open to reveal a “cave heaven” (洞天 dong tian)—that is, another dimension, accessed through a cave, entirely inhabited by immortals:

  青冥浩蕩不見底, 日月照耀金銀臺。

  霓爲衣兮風爲馬, 雲之君兮紛紛而來下。

  虎鼓瑟兮鸞迴車, 仙之人兮列如麻。

  Inside it was all blue sky vast and endless,

  With both sun and moon shining on glistening gold and silver towers,

  And, clothed in rainbows, the Lord of the Clouds descended,

  With the winds as his horse team, followed by a crowding entourage:

  Tigers playing the strings of the se as the luan phoenixes parked the chariots,

  And the immortals standing dense as hemp in rows.

  The Lord of the Clouds is one of the deities worshipped in the Nine Songs. Here we see that for Li Bai at least there was no great distinction between the immortals and the ancient gods of Chu. The vision of the cave heaven ends when Li Bai suddenly wakes up from his dream. The poem thus imitates the structure of the “Li sao,” in the midsection of which the persona goes into a trance induced by the spirit of Shun in which he has a vision of his spirit flying through the cosmos in search of a spirit bride. In the end he comes out of the trance and consults a diviner as to the meaning of the vision. On the basis of the diviner’s advice the main persona of “Li sao” departs from the kingdom in a flying chariot, free at last, heading in the direction of the Kunlun Mountains, where the spirits of the shaman ancestors live. When Li Bai awakes from his dream vision he is further confirmed in his opinion that mortal life is fleeting and vain, and he asks the friend to whom the poem is dedicated to always have a white deer at the ready to carry Li Bai on his visits to the great mountains in the area upon his return. The white deer is one of the magical animals the immortals prefer to ride, and its first occurrence is, of course, in the Chuci—in the section called “Ai shiming.” Here, however, Li Bai’s aspiration to xian-hood is not motivated purely by the devotee’s belief in immortality. Here it is really a trope of freedom, expressing his realization that he is out of step with the world of political ambition that is the imperial capital; real fulfillment lies elsewhere. The last lines of the poem are as follows:

  安能摧眉折腰事權貴, 使我不得開心顏。

  How could I lower my brow and bend my waist

  to serve the powerful and highborn

  and never let my heart or face open?

  Li Bai is an example of a poet who obviously learned a great deal from the Chuci. Like many Chinese poets who served in the government he saw something of his own career in the experience of Qu Yuan and mined the Chuci for appropriate ways of talking about it. This use of Qu Yuan and the Chuci is observable in Chinese literature throughout the imperial period and into the Communist era. The influence of the Chuci extends beyond poetry of political complaint and the poetry about immortals, a genre that carries a subtle tone of political complaint even at its most mystical. Two other types of poetry deeply influenced by the Chuci are love poetry and landscape poetry. They are both very large topics, and I could not do them justice here. However, I offer the following poem as an example of how two lines of Chuci influence can intersect in subtle, fascinating, and purely aesthetic ways. The poem is “Mulan zhai” 木蘭柴 (Magnolia enclosure) from the Wangchuan Collection (輞川集 Wangchuan ji) of the Tang poet Wang Wei 王維 (699–759):

  秋山斂餘照, 飛鳥逐前侶。

  彩翠時分明, 夕嵐無處所。

  Autumn mountains gather in the last of the sun,

  Flying bird pursues its mate.

  At times the green peaks stand clear against the golden clouds,

  Tonight the mountain mist has no place to stay.

  This is a very simple poem until the last phrase, “has no place to stay.” The original Chinese is 無處所wu chu suo. For the educated Tang reader this phrase triggered a chain of literary associations going all the way back to the Chuci. The phrase comes from “Gaotang fu,” a rhapsody supposedly by Song Yu, believed by some to be Qu Yuan’s successor, but more likely by a later author. The first part of the poem consists of a dialogue between King Xiang of Chu and Song Yu, who gives an account of an earlier king’s dream encounter with the goddess of Shaman Mountain (巫山Wushan). Song Yu tells the story to explain a strangely behaving cloud that King Xiang has noticed hovering over a distant pavilion.

  Once upon a time King Xiang and Song Yu were enjoying the sights from the lodge at Yunmeng and they saw in the distance the Gaotang pavilion. Hovering over it was a single cloud of mist piled precipitously high, which suddenly changed shape and in a small space of time changed into innumerable shapes. The king asked what sort of mist it was. Song Yu answered, “That is what they call the morning cloud.” The king asked, “What manner of thing is this morning cloud?” Song Yu answered, “In the past a previous king was traveling through Gaotang when he grew tired and took a nap. A woman appeared to him in a dream, who said, ‘I am the daughter of Shaman Mountain and a guest of Gaotang. When I heard that you, Lord, were sojourning in Gaotang, I desired to offer you my pillow and a sleeping mat.’ The king then made love to her, and as she was leaving she said by way of farewell, ‘I am on the southern side of Shaman Mountain amid the dangerous rocky heights. At dawn I am a morning cloud, at dusk I am sudden rainfall. Morning after morning, dusk after dusk, I’ll be there near the Sunlit Tower.’ In the morning when he went to the place to look, he found that it was just as she had said. He therefore had a temple built on the spot, which he nam
ed ‘Morning Cloud.’ ” King Xiang asked, “When the morning cloud comes out at the beginning of the day, what does it look like?” Song Yu replied, “When it first comes out, it is bushy like a pine tree and as straight. As it approaches, it brightens and resembles a beautiful young woman raising her sleeve to shade herself from the sun as she looks in the distance expectantly for the one she yearns for. Then suddenly it changes shape, and it resembles a chariot pulled by four speedy horses with colorful feathered flags raised. Then the air grows chilly as though a storm were about to come. And after the wind calms and the rain stops, the cloud is nowhere to be found.”

  The poem, which gave the Chinese language the phrase “clouds and rain” (雲雨 yunyu) as a euphemism for sexual intercourse, goes on to give a catalogue of the scenic wonders of Gaotang. The phrase that Wang Wei lifted from the text, wu chu suo, can mean either “is nowhere to be found” or “has no place to stay.” The latter meaning is active in Wang Wei’s poem, but the fact that the subject of Wang Wei’s sentence is mountain mist recalls the goddess of Shaman Mountain. And the goddess of Shaman Mountain recalls the female divinities in the Nine Songs, some of whom are amorous, such as the Mountain Spirit who speaks in the ninth poem of the Nine Songs:

  “I stand on the mountain exposed and alone,

  The clouds a land of shifting shapes beneath my feet.

  Vast is the darkness, yes, daylight benighted—

  A breeze from the east, the spirits bring rain.

  Stay with me, Spirit Adorned, and find such ease you’ll forget your home.23

  Once I am late in years, who will make me flower again?

  …

  “Thunder rolls through rain’s dark veils,

  Hear the gray gibbon weep and the black gibbon’s night cry

  Against the soughing wind and the whistling trees.