by Livia Kohn
Then what can release my autumn passions? ( QTS 9053) This is one of two poems to Wen Tingyun. Here she restlessly describes sensations of the scene all around her on an autumn night. She hears crickets and her neighbors’ music, sees dew on nearby trees and starlight on distant mountains, and feels a chilly wind. She translates all these physical sensations into sad music on her zither. The turquoise zither refers to a famous instrument (Sima Xiangru’s?) in a poem by Li Shangyin (813?–858). Playing the zither is an attempt to reach a like-minded friend. She then translates the language of music into this poem. Individual elements of this poem belong to the conventional lonely, lovelorn autumn poem, but the chaotic pile of images creates an unbalanced mood that is unconventional. Lord Xi is Xi Kang, the Six Dynasties Southern poet, eccentric, and member of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove. He was a handsome fellow, a wild drinker, and a great companion. In a famous letter to his friend Shan Tao, Xi Kang claims that he is too lazy and untalented to hold a position at court.
Yu Xuanji flatters Wen Tingyun with the comparison. Her last line goes beyond the customary request for a reply, sounding desperate for true communication.
Yu Xuanji describes someone else playing the zither in what is perhaps her clearest expression of lesbian eroticism: a love song addressed to three orphaned sisters, young courtesans of refined musical and literary ability, who were for a time her neighbors in a guest house. The title of the poem as it stands is quite long; probably some introductory remarks of the editors are mixed up with a shorter title like “Poem
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Composed Following the Rhyme Words of Three Sisters.” The title in the Quan Tangshi reads: “Guang, Wei, and Pou are three sisters, orphaned when young and accomplished from the beginning. Now they have written these poems, so essential and pure that they are hard to match. How could even the linked verses from the Xie household [i.e., by Xie Daoyun] add to them? There was a stranger coming from the capital city who showed them to me. Consequently, I put these rhymes in order.” The poem itself is also rather long:
Formerly I heard that in the southern nations flowery faces were few, But today my eastern neighbors are three sisters.
In their dressing room, gazing upon one another: the “Rhapsody on the Parrot”;
At their cyan window they must be embroidering phoenix slips.
Pink fragrant plants fill the courtyard, ragged and jaggedly broken off;
Green strained wine fills our cups; one after another we put them to our mouths.
I suspect they once served as girl attendants at the Turquoise Pond (Yaochi);
Coming in exile to this dusty world, they did not become males.
I finally venture to compare them to the appearance of Lady Wenji; Little Xi (Shi) would be speechless before them; I am still more mortified.
A single tune of ravishing song—the zither seems far away and indistinct;
While the four-strings are lightly strummed, they talk, murmuring unclearly.
Facing the mirror stand, they compete equally with their blue-glinting silk-thread hair.
Opposite the moon, they vie in showing off their white jade hairpins.
In the midst of the Lesser Existence Grotto (Xiaoyou dong), pine dew drops;
Above the Great Veil Heaven (Daluo tian), willow mist is contained.
If only they were able to tarry on account of the rain,
They need not fear that matters of “blowing the syrinx” are not yet understood.
How many times has the Amah scolded them for talking beneath the flowers?
Lord Pan [Pan Yue ]consulted them once in a meeting in a dream.
When I temporarily grasp their pure sentences, it’s as if my cloud-soul were cut off;
If I were looking at their pink faces, even dying would be sweet.
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Despondently I look from afar for those delightful people: where are they?
Traversing the clouds, I return home to the north while they return to the south. ( QTS 9055–9056)
This is clearly a same-sex erotic poem. Chinese male poets regularly used male voices to declare their passions for beautiful women, and women’s voices to express their conceptions about women’s responses to men. Poems by men speaking in women’s voices, often describing the suffering of a grieving victim at the hands of her faithless lover, have been read as political commentary. The powerless, abandoned woman makes criticisms that the abused official does not dare to utter. In a departure that seems as shocking today as it must have seemed in the Tang dynasty, Yu Xuanji turns these conventions upside down. She uses her own woman’s voice to express her romantic responses to other women.
She may also be advertising their beauty and talent to male literati.
The introduction identifies the orphaned sisters with Xie Daoyun, a fourth-century aristocratic poet, who as a child showed her precocious literacy by besting her father’s guests in a poetry competition on the subject of snow. As the poem begins, Yu Xuanji compares the three southern girls to luxurious pet birds described in the “Rhapsody on the Parrot” by Ni Heng of the second century c.e. They remind her of famous beauties of old. Lady Cai Wenji was a Han dynasty noble-woman and poet married to a Xiongnu chieftain as a result of a war treaty. She grew to admire her husband and is traditionally considered the author of “Nineteen Songs from a Nomad Flute,” a Tang poetic cycle. Little Xi Shi, whom Yu claims is no match for the three sisters, was herself a notorious “state-toppling beauty,” the tempting center of a plot by one Warring States’ ruler to overthrow a rival, and the subject of another poem by Yu Xuanji (“At the Temple of Washing Silk Gauze,” QTS 9048). Yu identifies Xi Shi, to whom she compares herself, with sexuality and power.
The breathtaking loveliness and apparently supernatural talent of the three sisters make the poet exclaim that they must formerly have been attendants of the Queen Mother of the West (Xiwangmu) at the Turquoise Pond in her paradise on Mount Kunlun. Xiwangmu’s entourage of goddesses was known for their beauty and musicianship.
Yu Xuanji also places the sisters in a spot associated with the Queen Mother’s cult: the Lesser Existence Grotto on Mount Wangwu, where the poet had also traveled. The actual guest house that was the setting for the poem may be nearby. The sisters’ comfortable familiarity with
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the goddess is expressed in the intimate form of address, “Amah,” that they use for her. She is their teacher who scolds them for chattering idly in the garden when they are supposed to be studying their lessons. The poet may wish the Queen Mother would serve as match-maker for herself and the girls, a role the goddess often fulfilled in heterosexual unions between a divine teacher and a human student.
For Yu is powerfully attracted to the sisters: she says their words make her feel “as if my cloud-soul were cut off.” That is: they take her breath away. She wishes they could tarry to make love: rain and blowing the syrinx are regular metaphors for sexual expressions of love.
“Blowing the syrinx” also refers to techniques of ascending to transcendence by means of music, as did the pre-Qin immortals Xiao Shi and his wife, Long Yu. The mixture of divine and worldly love is a commonplace in Shangqing Daoist literature. The four women enjoy an evening of wine, music, and poetry together, and then must part. Yu Xuanji heads north, while the three sisters head back south.
The zither is one of several musical terms in this poem (four-strings, syrinx, tune, song), which also mentions divine musicians (jade girls in the Queen Mother’s entourage, Xiao Shi) and musical heroines (Lady Wenji). But the zither is outstanding among them, for it contains three essential meanings for our author: it is a means of self-disclosure, communication, and seduction. Although it is indistinct, the sisters’ song tells the speaker who they are and ravishes her. Music parallels the self-expression the sisters and Yu Xuanji share in the words of their exchanged poems. According to Yu Xuanji’s response,
they are compatible in erotic and literary gifts.
One of Yu Xuanji’s most evocative uses of the zither to express her longing to communicate appears in “Sending Someone My Innermost Feelings”:
My sorrow is sent on vermilion strings;
Holding in passions, my thoughts have become unbearable.
Early on, I knew meetings of cloud and rain,
Before arousing my orchid mind.
Gleaming and shining, peach and plum trees
Do not obstruct a statesman’s pursuits.
Gray-green pines and cinnamon trees
Still long for the praise of worldly people.
In the moon’s color, my moss-covered staircase seems clean; In my song’s resonance, the bamboo close deepens.
Before my gates, the ground is covered with red leaves;
I don’t sweep, waiting for one who recognizes my sound. ( QTS 9052)
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From beginning to end, this poem concerns the search for a friend who will understand her. In the opening line she plays her zither to express her feelings, hoping to reach someone who will, as she says in the last line, “recognize my sound.” She refers to Bo Ya, the great Warring States’ musician who played his zither for his friend, Zhong Ziqi.
Here Yu Xuanji also uses images that go back to the shamanistic hymns of the Chuci and to the Luoshen fu and Shennü fu in the Wenxuan. The orchid, a worthy and virtuous plant, recalls her name: “Tender Orchid.” “Clouds and rain” refer to sexual intercourse, originally the union of a goddess and a king. The author was notorious for sexual as well as literary precocity: here she suggests her mind was aroused only after her body’s awakening. Peach and plum blossoms, standing in for the transient beauty of young girls, shine for a day and bring pleasure to men. But serious men only toy with young women; they will not risk careers or swerve from the path to their goals for the sake of love. Even elder statesmen, those eminent old pines, care about their reputations and need the approval of their peers. The poet waits and sings in her room in the shady bamboo grove at the end of a mossy staircase, hoping for a real friend who will hear her tune and know exactly what it means.
Conclusion
The language of material culture in her poetry opens a window into Yu Xuanji’s thought, helping us move beyond sensationalist versions of her life. Simple language describing textiles, boats, and zithers carries a complex array of meanings in Yu Xuanji’s writing. A small number of images from material culture occupy a surprisingly large place in the world of meaning in her poems. Nineteen of her fifty surviving poems mention clothing or woven goods, eleven poems mention boats, and at least nine poems mention the zither.
Some images, such as white patterned tabby-weave and netted-gauze silk, have more than one meaning, depending on the context. Clothing identifies the social class of the wearer. A man’s perfumed clothes may arouse her scorn or admiration. A sheer silk sleeve can be the target of her rage and frustration over intellectual opportunities lost or serve as an ineffective shield against public humiliation. Yu Xuanji’s language of clothing reveals a self-conscious, often lonely, and isolated person, living for much of her life on the margins of Tang society, with few economic or social resources. She expresses her envy of a recluse’s
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prestige and power in the vision of garments cut from auroral clouds, like those of the great goddesses. That divine garment embodies her longing for the contemplative life. Yu Xuanji’s textile images show her desire for the gifts, powers, and unfettered lives of divine women. She enacts the self-discipline and asceticism of the Daoist adept when she rejects robes of the finest woven silk. Her own white silk duster, tangled up in her books and papers, expresses the freedom and ease she attains as a Daoist nun.
Yu Xuanji’s poetic image of the untied boat also allows several interpretations. The little boat is clearly herself. A drift in mid-ocean, it can seem disoriented and at a loss, lonely and isolated like the poet in her life and times. In other poems that express a more resigned and positive attitude toward her fate, her boat drifts peacefully along the river. Like a boat flowing with the current, she naturally and easily relies on the Dao to bring her back home where she belongs. The boat represents life changes and transformations as well as alterations of place.
The zither, the final image of material culture from Yu Xuanji’s poetry, represents her desire to communicate and find a true companion. The zither is an instrument of self-expression. Yu Xuanji uses it to convey her feelings to both men and women friends. Her messages are sometimes both religious and erotic at once. Some readers believe a Chinese poem may express either sexual or spiritual feelings, but not both together. There is also an old tradition of interpreting erotic images in Chinese literature, such as those found in the first section of the Shijing (Book of Songs), as political or ethical in intent. In the poetry of Yu Xuanji, however, just as in parts of the Chuci and Shangqing Daoist mystical corpus, there is no meaningful distinction; sensual and divine love mingle. The language is both erotic and religious.
Images of sensual attraction and sexual union provide a way to try to describe the ineffable Dao.
Expressing herself, using her talents, following the Dao, and finding companions may all have motivated Yu Xuanji to enter the convent. We may never be able to interpret her religious vocation fully or determine her guilt in the murder of her maid. Although many specific facts of her life may never be recovered, Yu Xuanji’s poetry, using the language of material culture, speaks in a powerful individual voice that, despite her conflicts and limitations, praises the Dao and the life of the recluse. Her poetry reveals her Daoist identity.
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Notes
1. This chapter is part of a longer study of Daoist holy women of the Tang.
I thank Stephen Bokenkamp, Victoria Cass, Michael Chang, Susan Fernseb-ner, Marta Hansen, Donald Holzman, Terry Kleeman, Dorothy Ko, Livia Kohn, Paul Kroll, Liu Lu, Susan Mann, Mabuichi Masaya, Mitamura Keiko, Sherry Mou, Charles Orzech, Hal Roth, Audrey Spiro, Stephen West, Victor Xiong, Yao Ping, and Ye Wa for their suggestions.
2. Accounts of Yu Xuanji’s life began to appear a few decades after her death and continue to be produced up to now. Dieter Kuhn (1985) discusses the sources with unusual thoroughness. The earliest account was written around 910 by Huangfu Mei in his Sanshui xiaodu (see Kelly 1978). His sensational-ized and critical account is the source of nearly all subsequent versions. These include the Beimeng suoyan of Sun Guangxian, written around 940–960 (Sun 1939), the Tangshi jishi (Recorded Anecdotes Concerning Tang Poetry) of Ji Yugong ( Ji 1962), the Tang caizi zhuan (Transmissions Concerning Talented Masters of the Tang Dynasty) by the Yuan writer Xin Wenfang, and the Qing anthology known as the “Complete Tang Poetry.” In the twentieth century, Mori Ogai (1862–1922) wrote a novel on Yu Xuanji’s life (Mori 1951), and Robert van Gulik imagined an episode between her arrest and execution in Poets and Murder (van Gulik 1968). Most recently, the Shaw Brothers’ studio in Hong Kong made an unusually strong movie on her life, Tangchao haofang nu (A Wild Woman of the Tang Dynasty), which combines elements of martial arts, soft porn, and tragedy (1984).
3. Maureen Robertson discusses how poetic convention limits what we can discover about female authors as well as the pitfalls involved in interpreting conventional and occasional poetry (Robertson 1992). My approach to reading poetic texts by women authors is indebted to Professor Robertson, but my conclusions about how much we can discover are more optimistic.
4. Poems by Yu Xuanji are cited by the abbreviation QTS followed by the page number in the edition of the Quan Tangshi published by Zhonghua shuju (Beijing, 1960).
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