Specifically, how do we grapple with seemingly obvious symbols of success and failure?

And in moments of crisis, when we are forced to face gains and losses, are we still able to retain inner peace and stability to adjust to our immediate realities?

Like all of us, Wang Wei experienced these turning points in both his personal and professional life. To a large extent, they reoriented his life trajectory, drawing him closer and closer to the Buddhist path.

Wang Wei was not a Buddhist practitioner in the absolute sense, yet he still managed to dedicate himself to his studies while fulfilling worldly responsibilities.

Sometimes, when I look back on missed opportunities and setbacks in my own life, I remind myself to look to Wang Wei’s example.

In some of our darkest hours, having someone guide us to see things differently, through a philosophical viewpoint, I think, can lift us, even if it may not necessarily resolve the problems at hand.

Standing with the disgraced official

In his mid-thirties, Wang Wei was at a crossroads in his public career.

The political climate in Chang’an had shifted irrevocably. The rise of Li Linfu 李林甫 as the new prime minister led to the exile of Wang Wei’s mentor and friend, Zhang Jiuling 張九齡.

Since his very first official post, Wang Wei’s career had been tossed around by the fluctuations of imperial politics (see part 1). Now, after the reshuffling in the political center, he found himself professionally isolated. In a poem to Zhang Jiuling, he wrote:

There is no one who knows me in all the age; 舉世無相識

To the end of my life, I think of your old favors.1 終身思舊恩

From hindsight, this was an unwise gesture in the eyes of many. In the pragmatic, often ruthless world of Tang politics, associating oneself with a disgraced official was an undeniable risk. Yet, Wang Wei chose to stand with his mentor, sticking to what he considered the right thing to do, no matter the consequences. |

He had just lost his wife and child a few years earlier. Now he had to face a new turning point in his career head-on.

He was dispatched on a tour to the frontier at Liangzhou 涼州 (in today’s Gansu Province). There, at the far edge of the empire, in the next few years, Wang Wei gained a clearer view of Tang politics through firsthand experience.

Being far from the capital also opened Wang Wei to a wider face of nature, beyond the familiar mountains and rivers:

From the great desert a lone line of smoke rises straight; 大漠孤煙直

By the long river the setting sun is round.2 長河落日圓

Nature, with its unspeakable power, has a way of refreshing the poet’s wearied spirit.

A question put to Shenhui

Releasing oneself from what is familiar can open the door to unexpected discoveries.

Yet we tend to be misled by the habit of dualistic thinking, either grasping what is already gone or longing for imagined alternatives. In doing so, the spirit is always on the outside, chasing and seeking, and hence, disturbed.

During these years of work and travel, Wang Wei made another crucial encounter. In the 740s, he attended a debate between the Northern and Southern schools of Ch’an. The leader of the Southern School was Shenhui (神會, 670–762), a disciple of Huineng (惠能, 638–713), the founder of the school.

While listening to the debate, Wang Wei posed a question: “How about liberating oneself through self-cultivation?”

Shenhui replied: “Every person has a pure heart-mind (zhongsheng ben zi xinjing 眾生本自心淨). Assuming that you want to cultivate your heart-mind, this is basically letting it be misguided, not the path toward liberation.”3

Both were struck by each other’s thoughts. Shenhui later invited Wang Wei to compose a biography of his master Huineng, which was inscribed on a stele.

Wang Wei grew up with the influence of the Northern School, which emphasizes sitting meditation (zuochan 坐禪) and continuous cultivation.

The Southern School, by contrast, insists that every individual already possesses a pure mind within and that enlightenment means seeing one’s pure nature directly and instantaneously, not gradually. In other words, one either sees it immediately or not.

Judging from Wang Wei’s existing works, we can actually see the influence of both schools.

Learning to say farewell

Bidding farewell, however, was a lesson Wang Wei was forced to learn again and again.

Around 740, he lost his mentor Zhang. In the same year, while on court duty in Xiangyang 襄陽, he expected to see his old friend, the poet Meng Haoran 孟浩然 (ca. 689–740), only to find that Meng had already passed away. Saddened, he wrote:

I can no longer see an old friend. 故人不可見

Han River waters flow eastward daily.4 漢水日東流

We can only imagine what Wang Wei might have felt during that visit, thinking, perhaps, about the shortness of this life, so inconstant, so ungraspable.

These successive losses subtly reinforced a deepening Buddhist sense of impermanence. When he finally returned to Chang’an in his early forties, Wang Wei began to develop a way of life that allowed him to fulfill worldly duties while becoming more and more of a lay Buddhist disciple, just like Vimalakirti:

…In his later years, he became a vegetarian and often dressed plainly… While in the capital, he offered meals to over ten famous Buddhist monks every day and enjoyed discussions with them on philosophical issues. He had nothing in his room but a tea set, a mortar of Chinese medicine, a desk for sutra-reading, and a rope-made bed. After coming home from the court, he spent his time sitting in meditation and chanting sutras with burning incense.5

What changed was not merely outward appearances. His poems from this period began to show fewer color words, the palette, like the poet himself, growing quieter and even more restrained.

We see that Wang Wei’s understanding of Buddhism gradually shifted from consciously studying its teachings to internalizing them, with traces of the self being drawn out from sensory experiences interacting with the phenomenal world. This change became evident in everything he wrote afterward.

Night meditations in the forest

It was during this period that Wang Wei began his “half-official, half-hermit” existence, dividing his time between court duties and his estate at Wangchuan 輞川, a mountainous region near the capital.

In the memory of later generations, Wangchuan has become a symbol of poetic landscapes and harmony with nature. It was recorded that he painted the place, but the original copy has been lost. There, Wang Wei could finally find a retreat after worldly entanglements.

Between engagement and withdrawal, a third way of living arises: a non-dual attitude toward things. Wang Wei could convince himself that worldly fame should rest only on “tassels and girdles”: the formalities of public service, while the heart and spirit find peace in the pure teachings of Buddhism.

A key tenet of Mahayana Buddhism, embodied in Ch’an, is the practice of non-grasping and non-dwelling: the heart-mind does not cling to the past, the present, or the future. It sees into the ultimate reality, the shifting moves of all things, like seeing the stars and the moon taking on evanescent forms, yet still everlasting. In other words, it is to remain in a state of open, intuitive awareness, knowing how one interacts with external circumstances in the very moment of contact.

Mountains and rivers became close companions, healing the poet with their unfathomable wonder. He would often wander without a particular purpose, simply observing, and perhaps, encountering the feeling of becoming one with the spontaneous rhythms of nature:

Along the mountains for a myriad turns, 隨山將萬轉

Yet traveling no more than a hundred miles. 趣途無百里

Noises deafen amid a jumble of rocks, 聲喧亂石中

And colors are tranquil deep within the pines. 色靜深松裏

Tossing lightly, water chestnuts float; 漾漾汎菱荇

Clear and still, reeds and rushes gleam. 澄澄映葭葦

My heart has always been serene: 我心素已閒

The clear river is equally at peace.6 清川澹如此

…

Court duties, for Wang Wei, became simply part of living. It exists not as an alternative, not something to be negated or escaped. In the non-dual view, the distinction between “good” and “bad,” between samsara and liberation, is already a conceptual perception of reality. Fleeing one end or seeking the other is itself a form of suffering.

Yet in nature, embodying the non-differentiation state of Tao and the ultimate reality of emptiness, strained emotions find release, and the spirit is soothed.

Sometimes, a thought would carry Wang Wei out to explore what the surrounding landscape might offer:7

In such moments of peaceful wandering, the poet regains his serenity through being with the rhythm of nature itself.

The mountain moon, the valley stream’s fragrance, the monks and poet at those hours of stillness, become harmonized, unified in a state of oneness.

This is the spirit liberated through tathata (rulai 如來), or suchness. It signals a state of mind that does not try to define or conceptualize external reality, but sees reality as it is.

What more should one ask or seek, if such inner peace is already possible?

Approaching the end of the poem, Wang Wei wrote: “seeking again I fear I’d lose the way, tomorrow I will go out to continue my climbs.”

Life continues, and we may be struck by external waves again and again. But we already carry the innate capacity to reposition ourselves in its current.

Part 1 can be found here:

The next part will be focused on Wang Wei’s life at Wangchuan 輞川 and the Ch’an poetry he was often known for.

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Yet such a spirit can cause problems for artists like him in the complex social and political worlds. He himself was aware of this weakness. In a famous letter in which he announced his breaking off of relations with a friend (only publicly), he diagnosed his personality, hence, being unfit for office:

I am by nature straightforward and narrow-minded: there are lots of things that I cannot put up with…I am quite ruthless in my hatred of evil, and speak out without hesitation, whenever I have the occasion.1

吾直性狹中 多所不堪...剛腸疾惡 輕肆直言 遇事便發...

This open, forthright attitude toward things and people eventually cost Ji Kang’s life. In 262 AD, he went to the court to defend the name of a close friend who was involved in a family scandal that became public. Zhong Hui (see part 1) seized this opportunity to accuse Ji Kang of defying authority and corrupting society.2 As a result, he was executed at the age of forty.

It would be a mistake to read Ji Kang as someone who embodied an absolute rejection of the Confucian moral and political order itself. In fact, he was not against rituals and social conventions as such. What he criticized and opposed was their misuse by those in power during the Sima regency — the power clique that often disguised political ambition in the language of Confucian propriety, while manipulating cultural forms into instruments of coercion and control. Ji Kang saw through this, and he refused to play along.

Among the Seven Sages, Ji Kang was more of a philosopher than a poet. One important thread in his essays is a systematic reflection on life and on how to restore a spontaneous, natural way of living.

And what distinguishes Ji Kang from his contemporary thinkers is that his philosophy and life experiences are inseparable, reinforcing one another. His mastery of the lute (guqin 古琴) deepened his understanding of the Tao. And his confrontations with the political world very much sharpened his understanding of individuality and harmony.

The nature of harmonic sound

Ji Kang’s intimacy with music is invariably connected to the Taoist view of nature as inherently, spontaneously harmonious. All the myriad things arise together, each following its own nature, and in doing so, they form an organic whole.

Sound is integral to this natural order. It is not something humans project onto an otherwise silent world. Instead, it is a natural, objective presence, as real and as impersonal, like the scent of flowers pervading the air:

Heaven and Earth united their virtues and the ten thousand things by this were born. Cold and hot succeeded one another, and the five elements as a result came to be. These became manifest as the five colors and issued forth as the five tones. The arising of musical sounds is like the presence of odors in the air; they are either good or bad. And though they get mixed in with other things, they remain in essence what they are and don’t change.3

The tone colors of sounds may vary, but particular notes may pass through dissonance, finding their way into the harmonic unity. The variations in sound indicate its inconstancy, not to be easily categorized.

From this premise, Ji Kang makes a counterintuitive claim: sounds do not carry sorrow or joy. As the title of his essay suggests, “Music has in it neither grief nor joy (sheng wu ai le lun 聲無哀樂論).” It seems that, on the surface, Ji Kang is making the case that music and emotions can be separated.

To articulate this point, he uses an analogical approach comparing wine and sounds. In both cases, wine and sounds elicit emotional reactions in a person. In the case of wine, getting drunk can make one feel ecstatic or angry.4 But we do not consider that wine itself carries these emotions. In the same way, sounds in the form of music may make one feel happy or sad, but it does not mean music itself is necessarily about these particular emotions.

He further explains that the presence of specific emotions, such as joy or sadness, in the human heart, when encountering the musical catalyst, draws out those emotions. But this is not Ji Kang’s understanding of the harmonic sound:

The grieved heart is stored inside. When it encounters harmonious sounds, only then is it released. Harmonious sounds have no sign (he sheng wu xiang 和聲無象), but the grieved heart has its essence (ai xin you zhu 哀心有主). If you make the grieved heart that has an essence depend on the harmonious sounds that have no sign, then all you understand is the grief. How could you know, further, that ‘it blows differently through the ten thousand things but causes each to be itself’?5

In this sense, the sorrowful heart, usually concealed within, encounters harmonic sound and flows out. That is to say, the harmonic sound is without image and contour, while sadness, as a particular form of emotion, has its own substance and flavor. And the encounter between these two generates what we experience as an emotional response: sadness, joy, anger, or anything else.

Ji Kang is not saying that music is emotionally neutral, or that it fails to move us. He is presenting the logic of how this process of resonance works: the reason the same music can trigger varied responses in different people is precisely because of the formless harmonic sound. In this sense, he recognizes the varied effects of harmonic sounds on the human heart:

…sounds in harmony and sequence are what move people most deeply 聲音和比 感人之最深者.6

Here, he is suggesting a different state of emotion that generates a resonance with the various shapes of harmonic sound, namely, an equanimous and balanced mind (pinghe 平和).7 This emotion differs from general feelings, such as joy and sorrow, as it allows one to engage with music with an unoccupied heart, with space to interact with unencountered emotions. In other words, this balanced, tranquil state of emotion makes it possible for a range of mutual resonance between the heart and multiple forms of musical expressions.

So in this sense, the potential of harmonic sound is inexhaustible, innately capable of meeting each listener where they are, instead of inserting a rigid, particular form, or a specific meaning.

We assume we have come to listen to the music, waiting to be stimulated, inspired, or soothed. But we have only come to listen to the voice within ourselves. Harmonic sound moves us because we are co-creating a new experience, in our distinct ways.

In other words, harmonic sound represents the spontaneous harmony of nature. For Ji Kang, this nature of the harmonic sound is communicated by the unity of the guqin and the person who knows it:

With regard to the construction of the lute, and the quality of its tones, it must be said that, as its very structure is harmonious, its sounds are wonderful…If the mind of the player is pure and serene and conforms to fundamental principles, the music embodies the harmonious peace of perfect virtue. By its influence it can truly purify heart and spirit, and awake profound emotions.8

Harmony of the Tao

The guqin, for Ji Kang, is not simply an instrument, but an embodiment of a principle. This is where Ji Kang’s musical philosophy is linked to his broader metaphysics.

In Taoist thought, the Tao is this invisible ground of all forms of specific, spontaneous existence without contours. Yet it is immanent in the myriad things, enabling the formation of particular shapes of individuality and potentiality.

And to model after the Tao, on a personal level, is to release the conception of the self, such that one returns to the infinite sphere of possibilities and potentialities, without being fixated on a particular shape.

Harmonic sound, in Ji Kang’s view, corresponds to the natural harmony of the Tao. That is to say, the harmonic sound provides the encompassing condition within which particular sounds can take their place and be recognized for what they are. And differences in tonality and musicality can be connected to the harmonic whole without being forced into uniformity.

In this sense, Ji Kang makes the case that if harmony is a natural condition of music, then it might also serve as a model for living:

…filled with a harmonious heart on the inside, they manifested a harmonious manner on the out…responded to it with Great Harmony. They guided their spirits and breath, nourished them and brought them to completion.9

One could reach the emotional state of harmony through dissolving the occupation of one’s heart by sadness, joy, or other directed emotions. Just as the essence of music lies in the state of mutual resonance, an optimal mode of living can also possibly be found in harmony.

To be in harmony with oneself, with others, and with the external, larger world, on an existential level, means appreciating individuality in not erasing differences or suppressing one’s nature. In this sense, Ji Kang’s life philosophy is represented by the way of the guqin.

The way of living naturally

Taoist thinkers generally would suggest that living a life proper to one’s nature is actually within one’s natural capacity. Yet we stray from what is natural due to the disruptions caused by excessive use of the mind and are driven by self-indulgence.

Ji Kang’s life philosophy is essentially concerned with restoring a natural life, aligned with the natural principles of Tao.

An important work in this regard is his essay, “Dispelling Self-Interest (shi si lun 釋私論).” A central argument in this piece is about being morally and genuinely open about one’s feelings rather than hiding them.

Ji Kang used a specific approach to make his point clear: analyzing principles by distinguishing names. Three terms are examined in the essay:

1. Selfishness (si 私): self-interest, in the sense of being guided by one’s own private feelings, inclinations, and concealed desires, often without being aware of it

2. Unselfishness (gong 公): being open and straightforward

3. Unconcerned (wu cuo 無措):10 a state of having no thoughts where the mind is unoccupied, does not grasp for conceptual distinctions of the actual world, and thus, is aligned with the holistic Tao in a state of nothing in particular but everything in full

Ji Kang makes a nuanced clarification about the notion of self-interest. It does not simply mean doing something wrong or in an objectionable manner. Instead, it indicates the more pervasive condition of acting from hidden inclinations, one’s subtle sentiments, habitual preferences, that quietly operate below the surface of deliberate choice.

From Ji Kang’s perspective, a remedy cannot be found in a sort of moral correction, for this act is still constitutive of conceptual distinctions, a form of being attached to self-interest. It comes from seeing clearly: realizing that being trapped in this state of mind is the obstacle to being with the Tao, hence to reaching the state of liberation and natural existence.

In this light, the ideal character, or “gentleman (junzi 君子)” referred to in his essay, more commonly known as the Taoist “perfect person (zhiren 至人)”, is someone whose heart-mind is not occupied by notions of right and wrong, and whose actions do not deviate from the inclusive Tao.

Ji Kang points out that the obstacle people face in aligning with the penetrating and liberating Tao, such as the Confucians concerned with being righteous in their normative ethical and political principles, is that they are, unfortunately, trapped in a divided, partial state of perception. In essence, their notion of selfhood is inevitably tied to names and titles, and therefore, they cannot rise above self-interest.

But for those who can see through the notions of the self in the process of becoming selfless, to borrow Chuang Tzu’s term, “by means of the Tao are united and become one (dao tong wei yi 道通為一),”11 letting the mind become unoccupied, and therefore, mutual understanding, can possibly be realized.

With this understanding, a different way of being becomes possible:

One whose breath is tranquil and spirit empty has a mind which does not dwell on arrogance and self-praise; one whose substance is pure and mind penetrating has feelings which are not attached to that which he desires. Since arrogance and self-praise do not exist in his mind, he can transcend the moral teachings and follow naturalness 越名教而任自然; since his feelings do not cling to that which he desires, he can carefully examine noble and mean and thoroughly understand the essential nature of things.12

“Transcend the moral teachings and follow naturalness” is one of Ji Kang’s most cited phrases, and also one of the most misunderstood. It is not a call to reject institutions and rites, completely negating their value. Names, rules, and rituals are not inherently wrong; they can take on different meanings in various forms across time and contexts.

What Ji Kang objects to is rigid attachment, not seeing a convention, for example, for what it is — a partial, temporary, contextual form — and yet still clings to it as an absolute, truthful representation of reality. Pride, or self-praise, when associated with this specific convention, value, or a way of doing things, becomes a defensive weapon for those who cannot escape self-interest.

In other words, what obstructs following the Tao, the realization of naturalness, is exactly being captured by the particular forms of epistemological, moral, and ideological norms of artificial constructions.

The three terms Ji Kang analyzes constitute a hierarchy of clarity. The ordinary person is trapped in self-interest, moved by concealed desires and feelings, unable and unwilling to see through them. The unselfish person can be genuinely candid about their feelings and act openly rather than defensively.

The most difficult practice is “unoccupied 無措,” which describes a state of mind unconcerned with what others think, without the need to position oneself as right in the moment of action.

As a result, one is liberated from artificiality and the conceptual distinctions about reality, moving about naturally, while still being aligned with Tao in letting things freely be, making things happen without interference:

…unrestrained he forgets about the worthy (ao ran wang xian 傲然忘賢), and the worthy and good fortune coincide. Indifferent to all else, he follows his heart (hu ran ren xin 忽然任心), and his heart and the good come together. Forgetting himself, he has no concerns (tang ran wu cuo 儻然無措), and his actions are one with the right.13

Here, Ji Kang suggests a very Taoist view on how things work. Worthy (xian 賢), for instance, is not the outcome of intentional effort toward merit; it is what remains when artificial efforts are released.

In light of this, we see a clear connection between his reflections on life and his musical philosophy. Through his metaphysical thinking about the lute, Ji Kang inspires us to find a way aligned with the natural harmony of Tao. And by understanding what obstructs us from living naturally, his thought on dispelling self-interest serves as a guide: preserving one’s genuine, inborn nature while still navigating the changing shapes of reality.

This is the end of the 9-part introduction to the Wei-Jin thinkers, titled Wei-Jin Metaphysics (Weijin Xuanxue 魏晉玄學) for now.

Ji Kang was my childhood hero, and in many ways, he still is. The stories of Ji Kang and his friends at the Bamboo Grove will return in another series.

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In popular imagination, he is often portrayed in a bamboo grove, with a lute in hand, seemingly indifferent to worldly concerns. There is certainly truth in this image, though it conceals as much as it reveals.

Ji Kang is also known for being a member of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove (zhulin qixian 竹林七賢). The “bamboo grove” was an actual place in Shanyang 山陽, where Ji Kang lived,2 located in the capital city of the state of Wei 魏.

His entire life was spent in the short-lived Cao-Wei 曹魏 dynasty (220-266 AD), founded by the warlord Cao Cao 曹操 (155-220 AD). He married into the imperial family, serving in a minor court post while carefully navigating a political world he found philosophically repugnant.3 And he remained, to the end, a loyal servant of the Wei imperial house and an open opponent of the Sima clan 司馬氏 that was secretively moving against it.

The Book of Jin (Jin Shu 晉書), the official historical record of the dynasty, had this portrait of him:

Hsi K’ang (Ji Kang) was still a child when his father died. He was gifted with rare talents, which marked him as a man for above the average. He measured 6 feet 2 inches, a handsome and stately figure. He regarded his body as mere clay or wood, and disdained all adornment of his person. People said of him that he combined the majesty of the dragon with the elegance of the phoenix. By nature a man of plain character, he was peaceful and serene, and had few desires. He had a forbearing disposition, and was extremely tolerant. In his studies he did not follow any special school, but read widely, with great understanding. Having grown up he became fond of Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu.4

In many ways, Ji Kang stood apart from his contemporaries. He seemed to be able to master a subject with little effort, whether it was music, poetry, or philosophy.

Unlike Wang Bi and Guo Xiang, who are better known for their philosophies and scholarship, Ji Kang led an unconventional personal life and became entangled in politics, which eventually led to his tragic yet heroic death.

It is this blend of character traits, a kind of mysterious depth, unrivaled talent, and unyielding independence, that made Ji Kang, for later generations, the very embodiment of the Wei-Jin spirit.

A glimpse of history

To understand Ji Kang’s life, it would be helpful to have a basic grasp of the historical context in which he was born.

With the collapse of the Han dynasty, three independent political forces emerged, contending for the realm. The state of Wei was located in the northern and central part of the country, with the state of Shu 蜀 in the southwest and the state of Wu 吳 along the eastern coast.

The era became known as the Three Kingdoms period, and it was characterized by constant warfare, factional intrigues, and the steady erosion of the old Confucian moral and social order.

Within the realm of the Wei, the political foundation of the imperial family was never solid. The brilliant Cao Cao had held things together through military genius and sheer force of personality. But his successors could not preserve this inheritance. At the same time, there was as much internal fighting within the family as there were underlying currents of power struggle in the court.

The house of the Sima amassed power steadily through political maneuvers and military command. Sima Yi 司馬懿 (179-251 AD), the head of the house and a general who had served Cao Cao for decades, was entrusted by the dying emperor Cao Rui 曹叡 to guide the young emperor’s rule in 239.5

Within a decade, Sima Yi had outmaneuvered his rivals. In 249, after a coup d’état and ruthless persecutions, he destroyed the other co-regent, Cao Shuang 曹爽, making the Sima clan the de facto ruling power.

The Western Jin 西晉 dynasty was founded by Sima Yi’s grandson, Sima Yan 司馬炎, in 265, just three years after Ji Kang’s death.

Ji Kang and his friends had to endure the worst of this slow-motion transfer of power. They were not peripheral figures who could manage to ignore public affairs. All of them served in the government, and all of them were watched. Their carefree mingling in the bamboo grove, in this context, could only ever exist as a pastime, a temporary gathering, and secluded them from a world that demanded allegiance and positioning.

In this sense, how they conducted themselves, in writings, conversations, and social associations that they chose or refused, very much carried a weight beyond the personal.

The poet Ruan Ji 阮籍 (210-263 AD), Ji Kang’s close friend and another renowned member of the group, was discreet in public, speaking only of the “mysterious and remote,” never commenting directly on political affairs.6

There has long been a perspective among scholars and historians that the rise of “pure talk” (qingtan 清談) — the turn toward Chuang Tzu and Lao Tzu, was largely a passive reaction to the cruel, unbearable aspects of social and political life at the time.

This reading has merit because the risks were real for these individuals. And to some extent, the Taoist spirit of non-contention and independence offered an expedient cover, as well as a sort of benumbing and soothing effects from communing with nature.

Still, it captures only part of the story. What is equally visible in Ji Kang and his circle is something more affirmative: a genuine philosophical consciousness, awakening to their inner individuality, and a kindled agency to question inherited conventions and prevailing values from the inside rather than simply evading them. In this sense, their literary works and their unconventional behavior, on a fundamental level, were acts and symptoms of self-discovery.7

Perhaps these two explanations do not conflict with one another. A culture discovers what it needs to discover when circumstances make particular questions unavoidable. While seeing themselves entangled with the muddy waters of a tricky political and social reality, the Wei-Jin literati, luckily, found in Taoism not just a shelter, but a mirror.

A Taoist way of living

This spirit of self-knowledge is visible in Ji Kang’s life. In a self-revelatory passage, he described the Taoist influence plainly:

I was long left to my own devices, and my disposition became arrogant and careless, my bluntness diametrically opposed to etiquette; laziness and rudeness reinforcing one another…my taste for independence was aggravated by my reading of Chuang Tzu and Lao Tzu; as a result any desire for fame or success grew daily weaker, and my commitment to freedom increasingly firmer.8

The language here is direct, confessional. It’s not just a philosophical position, but a lived experience of transformation.

Into the mountains

One aspect of this was his relationship with nature.

Communing with nature is an essential element of Taoism. It’s not simply an aesthetic preference, but a practice, a way of attuning oneself to the rhythms that underlie everyday life. Ji Kang took this seriously:

He used to make excursions to the mountains for gathering magic herbs, and when he found the right ones, he would forget to return. Sometimes wood cutters and grass gatherers met him, and they all thought him to be a supernatural being.9

Strangely enough, he also personally experimented with elixirs that allegedly could help purify the body. This adventurist spirit also took him to the deep mountains, where he associated with hermits:

Hsi K’ang also met Wang Lieh (a famous recluse); and they were together to the mountains. Wang Lieh had obtained a stalactite shaped like a sweetmeat. He himself ate half of it, and the other half he gave to Hsi K’ang. Then both “froze,” and became like stone.10

Miraculous as this account appears, Ji Kang was actually frank about entertaining ideas such as transcendence. One can probably imagine that, in another life, without the constraints of social conventions, Ji Kang would adopt the life of a recluse. But on the flip side, it is exactly this unbroken, continuous struggle between ideal and reality that makes his life legendary. Such a pursuit is evident in his poems, as he clearly knew what kind of life was proper to him:11

Apart from these nature exploration and “drug” experiments, Ji Kang had another way of occupying himself:

By nature he was very clever, and he was fond of forging iron. In his garden there was a willow tree with luxuriant foliage. He dug a gully around it, and during summer he sat under this tree and worked at his forging.12

Here we have the picture of a philosopher-poet, sitting in the shade of a willow tree, working on iron and metal forging. It is said that his friend, Xiang Xiu 向秀 (227-272 AD), another member of the bamboo grove, used to join Ji Kang in doing this. And it is imaginable that they had spent days philosophizing while doing the blacksmith work together in the summer.

As an intellectual leader of the time, Ji Kang had numerous followers. Yet sometimes an admirer could be turned into an enemy if his wish is not well received.

The influential politician and scholar Zhong Hui 鍾會 (225-264 AD) was once known as an admirer of Ji Kang. He wrote a book and wanted Ji Kang’s opinion on it.13 While at Ji Kang’s home, Zhong Hui did not bring out his book, but when outside, threw it back from a distance, then walked away instantly. Perhaps Zhong Hui knew that his political affiliation with the Sima clan would encounter rejection from Ji Kang.

On another occasion, Zhong Hui came to visit Ji Kang with his entourage. This time, Ji Kang ignored him and kept working on his iron with his friend Xiang Xiu.

When Zhong Hui finally decided to leave, Ji Kang asked, “What had you heard that made you come, and what have you seen that now makes you leave 何所聞而來 何所見而去?” Zhong Hui replied: “I came after hearing what I heard, and I’m leaving after seeing what I’ve seen 聞所聞而來 見所見而去.”14

This exchange carries a mysterious flavor despite the hidden crossfire. Ji Kang’s contempt and Zhong Hui’s wounded pride eventually sowed the seeds of enmity when their paths crossed again.

The art of nurturing life

One of Ji Kang’s most important essays is “On nurturing life (養生論),” a reflection on how one might tend to the body and spirit in a way that is restorative rather than taking corrective measures after incurring much damage. This essay sparked a critique from his friend Xiang Xiu, and their exchange reveals much about Ji Kang’s approach to philosophical inquiry.

One of the big ideas in this essay is the question of “immortality.” Ji Kang argued that, in line with records in Taoist literature, there exist in the world beings of extraordinary longevity, shenxian 神仙, even though most people have never encountered one.

Xiang Xiu rejected this view, saying that many people have not seen an immortal being.15 In the natural world, some plants, like pine trees, could sustain themselves over a few hundred years because of their innate nature, instead of consciously, intentionally applying methods to “nurture” their lives.

Yet Ji Kang’s response reveals a different way of understanding the objective world. He replied to Xiang Xiu that even in the face of a thousand-year-old person, one may not necessarily tell the difference simply by appearance.16 Our perceptions could be constrained by our own experience and lifespan.

The morning mushroom cannot even know the alternation of the months and years, and the mayfly cannot believe the longevity of the tortoise. The implication is that one may not want to admit that ordinary human beings are subject to the same limitations, unable to see what exceeds the boundaries of limited experience.

Though the topic is mystical, Ji Kang’s logic is epistemological. The absence of evidence does not indicate evidence of non-existence. And he still believed that it is still within one’s control to prolong one’s life, given the constraint that the way of the shenxian cannot be learned by mortals.

But the deeper argument in this philosophy of life is about the mind. The fundamental problem, in Ji Kang’s view, is not desire as such, for he recognized that the body has natural inclinations, a point raised by Xiang Xiu. The issue is that the mind can amplify and rationalize desires, ultimately harming oneself:

…craving and desire, although they come from man, are not things that are proper to the Way. It is like the fact that trees have grubs; although they are produced by the tree they are not appropriate to it. Therefore when grubs abound the wood decays, and when desires win out the body withers.17

Ji Kang explains that desires, though part of us, should not guide the proper direction of our nature, just as the woodworm that lives in the tree causes damage to it.

And more dangerous than desire is actually the intellect in the service of desire. A mind consumed by schemes and stratagems will not stop working out various programs or making distinctions in categorizing external reality, fulfilling the egocentric ways of operating in the world.

In Ji Kang’s view, what makes the multitudes trapped in the state of chasing is a particular state of mind that can not find contentment within, or being conditioned by the feeling of insufficiency:

… the thing that is truly difficult to attain in this world is not riches, and it is not glory. It is simply to be concerned that your mind is not content. One whose mind is content, though he plough and till in the fields, wear coarse clothes and eat cooked beans, how could he not be self-contained?18

One cannot find ease and satisfaction in the accumulation of wealth or the attainment of status because of a lack of sufficient mind. The way toward this sufficiency is not ascetic discipline but a kind of clear-sightedness: seeing through the mechanisms by which the mind is captured, by external opinions, the fear of insufficiency, or the assumption that one more thing will finally be enough.

With this understanding and a clear view of the nature of things, one could find ease in a state of spacious presence. In Ji Kang’s words:

External things, because they ensnare the mind, he does not maintain. Spirit and breath, because they are unsullied and pure, on these alone is his attention focused. Open and unrestrained is he, free from worry and care, silent and still, devoid of thought and concern…self-contained in a state of wu-wei 無為自得, going with the ethereal with a mind profound 體妙心玄, he forgets happiness, and as a result his joy is complete.19

Admittedly, this kind of self-contained living is not easy to practice. Ji Kang knew this. He did not adopt a dogmatic stance in his writing; instead, he wrote with the awareness that each person must find their own way, in their own immediate circumstances.

This open awareness not just stays on an intellectual level. With the understanding that happiness in the conventional sense does not accord with his way of living, Ji Kang reaffirms the tranquil, tasteless state of the “utmost happiness (zhile 至樂),”20 dissolving one’s fixations of the self, suggested by Chuang Tzu.

For Ji Kang, this simple, serene state of living with wu-wei is best accompanied with the lute:21

My eyes send off the returning geese; 目送歸鴻

My hands wave across the five strings. 手揮五弦

I look up and down in self-contentment, 俯仰自得

And let my mind roam in the Grand Mystery. 遊心太玄

Primary texts:

Fang Xuanling et al., comps., Jin shu 晉書 [Book of Jin] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974)

Liu Yiqing, Shishuo xinyu jianshu 世說新語箋疏 [Commentary and Annotation on A New Account of Tales of the World], annotated by Yu Jiaxi 余嘉錫 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2007)

Ji Kang, Ji Kang ji jiaozhu 嵇康集校注 [Collated and Annotated Collected Works of Ji Kang], edited and annotated by Dai Mingyang 戴明陽 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2014)

Guo Qingfan 郭慶藩, comp., Zhuangzi jishi 莊子集釋 [Collected Explanations of Zhuangzi], ed. Wang Xiaoyu 王孝魚 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1985)

Secondary sources:

Ruan Ji and Xi Kang, The Poetry of Ruan Ji and Xi Kang, trans. Stephen Owen and Wendy Swartz, ed. Paul Kroll (Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2017)

Robert G. Henricks, ed. and trans., Philosophy and Argumentation in Third-Century China: The Essays of Hsi K'ang(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983)

R. H. Van Gulik, Hsi K’ang’s Essay on the Lute (Tokyo: Sophia University, 1941)

Richard B. Mather, Shih-shuo Hsin-yü: A New Account of Tales of The World (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan, 2002)

Fung Yu-lan, Chuang Tzu: A new selected translation with an exposition of the philosophy of Kuo Hsiang (Berlin: Springer, 2016)

Cyril Birch, ed., Anthology of Chinese Literature: From Early Times to the Fourteenth Century (New York: Grove Press, 1965)

Ying-shih Yü, "Individualism and the Neo-Taoist Movement in Wei-Jin China," in Chinese History and Culture, Volume 1: Sixth Century B.C.E. to Seventeenth Century, ed. Josephine Chiu-Duke and Michael S. Duke (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016)

Donald Holzman, Poetry and Politics: The Life and Works of Juan Chi, A. D. 210-263 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976)

Burton Watson, “Chapter 18: Supreme Happiness,” in The Complete Works of Zhuangzi (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012)

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The redesign is done. “Taoism Reimagined” is now “Ink & Space.”

This whole process has been fun and time-consuming. But I think it’s worth it, and I’m satisfied with what it looks like now.

Apart from giving the publication a new outlook, I’ve also taken the time to review and organize some existing posts. Still, more time is needed to revise and structure some very early writings.

You can find more details in the Welcome & About page, where I explain the logic of the building process and the meaning behind this new name. It can also work as a resource page for our reference for now.

I hope you find it easier to explore the site now. The new URL is: inkandspace.substack.com.

Thank you for being with me on this journey of independent writing. I look forward to what awaits us in this space in the future.

All my best,

Yuxuan

The Forgotten Taoist Way of Living

Eight essays to experience the path of becoming spiritually sovereign in a world that never stops trying to define you.

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Reading Lao Tzu (Laozi 老子) and Taoism invites you into the mystery of mysteries.

On a surface level, when it comes to Lao Tzu the person, we know that he was the alleged author of the Tao Te Ching (Dao-de Jing). But like this book, we know little of his background.

Historical records say that he once served as the director of the Imperial Archive of the Zhou 周 dynasty (c. 11th cent. -256 BC) for decades.

This post allowed him to access ancient teachings and exclusive documents, and to gain a deeper, clearer sense of the state of affairs in the realm. And it is said that he eventually left the country and went westward, with no one knowing his trajectory thereafter.

Despite the mystery surrounding the person, Lao Tzu has been generally considered as one of the founders of early Taoism in the Spring and Autumn period (770-476 BC), with a distinct legacy crystallized as the school of Lao Tzu in traditional intellectual history.

And his short book, with only about five thousand Chinese characters, has exerted an enduring influence on Chinese culture and society over the next two thousand years.

Until today, the Tao Te Ching continues to spark interest and enthusiasm across cultures.

What is the secret of its long-lasting influence? Are there some hidden messages encoded in those old pages?

Although it’s almost impossible to have a comprehensive sketch of the person, we can still catch a glimpse, perhaps a crucial one, of his thinking and style from existing records about him.

From these old pages, we can extract some essential ideas and lessons that still speak to us living in the modern world.

Proven principles that the ancient Taoists lived by

Lao Tzu’s philosophy of life is known for its emphasis on simplicity, stillness, the value of softness,1 long-term and holistic thinking.

And most of his lines point to the essential ideas of wu-wei 無為 and ziran 自然. Even though generations of scholars over the centuries have said that the book is a hard read because it contains so many abstruse messages open to varied interpretations.

Yet Lao Tzu said that his words are easy to understand and put to use. He emphasized that the best student of Tao would practice the teachings assiduously, while the worst ones would only laugh out loud at them.

Because the character, Tao 道, literally means the path, or the way. It is inseparable from actual, concrete living.

So the question naturally becomes: how is one walking the path if one accepts that there is no escape from it?

And the answer is also tacit knowledge, as Lao Tzu said that those who know themselves are truly clear-sighted.

That means only you can know what your path actually is, and more importantly, how it aligns with your wu-wei and ziran.

Once you have that inner lucidity, you are in your natural flow.

All this denotes a range of possibilities for self-realization and self-determination. This is the state when your innate virtue (de 德) is revealed in a spontaneous and natural way of being.

And you are simply following the Tao, your own way.

This partly explains why reading Taoism feels like a voyage into the unknown.

Because you are constantly cultivating an intuitive awareness within, becoming conscious of how your inner self interacts with the external world and with the forces of conditioning that trap us in a loop of rigid formalities, credentials, and prevailing conventions.

It is also a dangerous journey because what is familiar can become unfamiliar and remote, and what is once rejected can be embraced.

Lao Tzu said that the Tao functions in reversion. Experience tells us that the impermanence of things in life is real. Following the Tao is to see our attachments, be it wealth, power, fame, relationships, social expectations, or even our own health, stripped away from us with quiet acceptance rather than spiritual paralysis, because that is the way things are.

Yet when all external things depart, what is most authentic, natural, and important will reveal itself to us.

The Taoist way of inner peace is obtained in such moments of seeing through the vicissitudes of fortune.

And there is no following the natural course or seeing things from a holistic level if we are still attached to the limits of the ego, operated by external opinions and ideas, or resistant to change.

What Lao Tzu, or Taoism in general, teaches is this awakened awareness. With it, you are liberated from within. And nothing in this world can harm you.

As you move through life, your perspectives and understanding of yourself and the world change. You’ve internalized the lesson that ups and downs, gains and losses, successes and failures, are all parts of the stream of life.

In other words, there really is no alternative but to be in it.

This means you have the innate power to pick yourself up after falling. And you do not overextend yourself when reaching the prime, just like the moon waxes only to wane.

You see things with clarity because you are aligned with your spiritual sovereignty. You embrace the spiritual power of the yin and the yang, the light and the shadow, within you.

You follow the Tao in your own path of being shapeless, undefinable, and mysterious, such that you are no longer captured by anything external.

This series opens the mystery of Lao Tzu through stories about him written in the Chuang Tzu (the text).

What to expect in this mini-series

Since the very beginning, Taoism has been both philosophical and experiential. In other words, it is the unity of contemplation and action. So you will find reflections and explanations on some of the important ideas and stories.

In general, “Stories of Lao Tzu” is a series of eight explorations into the forgotten Taoist way of unlearning. To rephrase Lao Tzu’s words, it is a guide to carrying the “jade within” while the world only sees “coarse cloth.”

To make the whole reading journey easy to navigate, this series is designed with a three-part roadmap:

Stage 1: The Inner Work (Essay 1-3)

• This is where you get to look within and see how society (or your external self) has been doing to your natural self. With the encounter of inward liberation and non-attachment, you can start preserving your “uncarved block” within

Simplicity as Inner Sovereignty

Guarding the “Uncarved Block” Within

Loving without Clinging

Stage 2: The Lucid Lens (Essay 4-5)

• The discovery here is about seeing the world as it is, not veiled by personal and social constructs. You will acquire Lau Tzu’s methods to re-engage with the world, your immediate reality, without escape, without overreach

Knowing the White While Keeping to the Black

Seeing the Way Things Are

Stage 3: Spiritual Sovereignty (Essay 6-8)

• How would a Taoist like Lao Tzu navigate the complex systems — cultural and political dynamics of modern society? Or, is it indeed possible to preserve spiritual autonomy in a complicated world? You’ll find your own answers as you move about the signposts in this section

Freedom by Unlearning

Awareness

Individual, Politics, and Self-Preservation

There is no escape from the complexity of living in today’s world. Yet we can choose how to make it simple.

We are conditioned by external, artificial forces, programmed by cultural and political trends, and shackled by expectations. Yet we can choose how we live with all this, rather than being passively controlled by them.

This is the reason this series exists. You can open it when your situation demands it.

Begin your journey now.

Read the full series

I am going to make some changes to my newsletter site, “Taoism Reimagined,” in the coming weeks.

The thought of a redesign has been on my mind for some months, but I waited, knowing I would need some open space to focus on it.

It’s time I get to it now.

The practice of writing here started with the single idea of Taoism. In the beginning, I just wanted to share what I know about Taoism, more like a public journal for reflections, a reference point for further research.

Like all creative endeavors, one thing can lead to another.

Changes in life can often, in unexpected ways, shape our attitudes toward things. When I look back on the past, I can still feel myself shaken by those encounters, reeling in the midst of drastic changes.

Often, I could find consolation and peace in these old pages of Taoism and Buddhism, in the lines of classical poets. To a certain extent, those “dead” words, in some unspeakable ways, become alive in my life.

I feel I owe them greatly. Perhaps the best I can do for now is to keep the records of my interactions with them through writing.

So, what’s next?

Writing here, on this platform, is having a conversation. I’m talking to my very own self. And I’m also communicating to whoever is reading these words.

This year, I want to devote more time to reading and writing about Wang Wei 王維, my favorite ancient figure. His works and the Chuang Tzu 莊子 have given me inner clarity, solace, and strength in my most helpless and hard times.

And I know a few of my readers can resonate with this. So I’ll keep this direction.

New beginnings

One big change is the sequence. I’ll shift from weekly posting to one or two monthly, theme-based posts. This would allow me to devote more time to the research needed for a few other important projects.

My training background is public policy and political science. One of the very first things I learned in policy school is that the audience matters.

I remember my professors would always emphasize the point that we should be clear who is reading those policy papers. A basic requirement for being a policy professional.

I think the logic applies to any writing practice. Still, it was quite a challenge to figure this out in writing on Substack.

But I am really glad we found each other here.

I know most of my readers are interested in Taoism. And I have some long-term plans in this direction.

The Wei-Jin Metaphysics (Wei-Jin Xuanxue 魏晉玄學) series is still an ongoing work. Perhaps a few words are needed here about “the why” behind this series, especially for my readers who are not that familiar with this topic.

Xuanxue is often considered the second stage of Taoism and, in fact, a most crucial milestone in traditional Chinese intellectual history, connecting pre-Qin (before 221 BC) thought with the rise of Neo-Confucianism in the Song and Ming dynasties.

And it was also the bridge that helped localize Mahayana Buddhism in traditional China.

Some of the foundational texts, such as the Diamond Sutra, the Vimalakirti Sutra, and the Lotus Sutra, translated by Kumārajīva (344-413 AD) from 401 to 406 AD, are still authoritative in academic research, as well as still widely popular in Chinese-speaking societies.

Kumārajīva’s time overlapped with the remaining years of the Eastern Jin 東晉 dynasty (317-420 AD). He was aware that the translated sutras would have to speak the language of the particular cultural and social circumstances.

That means he must have been proficient with the Chuang Tzu, as some of its core ideas, such as “forgetting the self (wangwo 忘我)” and “no-mind (wuxin 無心)” or the mind as a mirror were already there.

Kumārajīva’s translation is usually succinct yet poetic, blending metaphysical depth with a unique fluidity that resonated with the “pure conversation” (qingtan 清談) — with a focus on the philosophies of Chuang Tzu and Lao Tzu — of the Wei-Jin literati.

It is said that Huineng 惠能 (638-713) from the Tang dynasty, the Sixth Patriarch of Ch’an Buddhism, after hearing a line from Kumārajīva’s Diamond Sutra, “A bodhisattva should develop a mind that alights upon nothing whatsoever; and so should he establish it (應無所住 而生其心),” got his awakening. And hence, the founding and flourishing of the Southern School.

Though the philosophical pathways of Taoism and Ch’an are different, they converge in a shared state of spiritual liberation. With the heart-mind in a state of non-abiding, non-grasping, one enters a spontaneous course of action.

For now, I need to wrap up writing Ji Kang 嵇康. He will appear as a central figure in another planned writing series, as he was historically that important as a member of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove (zhulin qixian 竹林七賢), and a cultural icon for centuries.

And there is the Huang-Lao Taoism (Huanglao daojia 黃老道家).

I am sure that by now some of you have read in my posts that it is the third pillar of the Taoist intellectual tradition.

Yet, it is the school that is often misunderstood or overlooked. Huang-Lao Taoists were statesmen-thinkers. They adopted a multidisciplinary approach, fusing theories from different schools with practices, and embodied tried-and-tested principles to prevail in life, business, and politics.

I personally have mixed feelings about this stream, as some of its ideas are blatantly anti-intellectual and anti-democratic (when aligned with the Legalist thought). But it does not deny the fact that some Taoists in this school were extremely accomplished statesmen. So a thorough research on it is required.

Also, I know some of my readers are interested in the general ideas of Tao, ziran, wu-wei, and other relevant themes, and, more importantly, in how they can be integrated into life. So I will need to revise and rearrange previous posts to make them more easily accessible.

These are the ongoing writing projects.

But I will need to keep an open inner space for the unknown, for whatever it is to be explored and written.

I will share the updated site when it’s ready.

All my best,

Yuxuan

During the Warring States Period (475-221 BC), a central concern in the realm of thought was an inquiry into the problem of the individual amid political, social, and cultural instability. But with the founding of the Han dynasty, there lasted about four hundred years of relative stability, and the by-product of cultural collectivism.

Yet, with the dissolution of the highly centralized imperial system, a singular form of cultural and spiritual consciousness emerged. Professor Yü Yingshih observed, in both thought and action, that the rise of individualism became the defining feature of the Wei-Jin period (220-420 AD).1

And this individualism constituted the core of the Wei-Jin spirit and philosophy, which has shone through centuries and still towers over the cultural landscape in today’s China.

Amid these cultural and social fluctuations, the notion of “universal kinship,” or ruler-subject relationship, underwent a clear, dramatic change.

A crisis of legitimacy

In the year 164, Emperor Huan of Han visited Yunmeng, drawing a large crowd to the city. An old man from Hanyin did not care about this event and continued to till his land. One member of the imperial entourage asked why he showed no interest at all. Then the old man replied:

May I ask: What is our purpose in establishing the Son of Heaven? To bring order to the world? Or to bring chaos to it? Do we establish the Son of Heaven with the hope that he would treat us with paternal love? Or must we enslave the whole world in order to provide the needs of the Son of Heaven? Formerly, the sage-kings, in governing the world, had only thatched huts for shelter. Nevertheless, the people lived in peace. Now, look at your ruler. He forces the people to work hard so that he can live in self-indulgence and enjoy leisurely trips without limit. I am ashamed for you. Yet you have the nerve to ask me to look up to him with reverence.2

This response would not only shock those intellectual and practical defenders of political order but, in a straightforward way, reflect the rise of anarchism prevailing at the time.

Such a radical view on the ruler-subject relationship does indicate a full-scale reevaluation of one’s state of existence. In casting doubt on the legitimacy of a political authority, distancing himself from the “Son of Heaven,” the old man, presumably a hermit, brings forward the issue of a political, philosophical, and spiritual consciousness.

What is the proper relationship between the individual and the social, political order? What kind of order could help facilitate the self-determination of the individual?

There exists a contradiction here. On the one hand, by calling the emperor “your ruler,” the hermit actually questioned the legitimacy of the political authority of the system at the time.

Yet, in referring to the so-called “sage-kings” of ancient times, he still did not abandon the idea of “governing,” although we may question if such an idealistic or “utopian” ruler-subject relationship has ever existed, or could be put into practice.

At the same time, his answer, in an indirect way, raises another relevant issue: the meaning of human action. Compared to the crowd, the old man was working in his field. He chose not to be a “spectator,” and in doing so, refused to subject himself to social conventions.

Guo Xiang must have been familiar with this story and the intellectual trends of the time. Compared to this recluse, he can be defined as a political conservative.

In commenting on the Chuang Tzu, he developed a political philosophy that not only justifies the necessity of order but also humanizes that order, accommodating individual differences and possibilities.

The art of self-realization

Guo Xiang’s vision of good governance is invariably linked to the ideal of minimal political order, one that at least offers a basic guarantee of security.

And he also emphasized the agency and initiative of the individual, as in his system, the body politic and the individual mutually support one another.

We can see this by first examining his life philosophy. His fundamental life principle is about living in accordance with one’s inborn nature:

… as principles (li 理) define the absolute capacity of things, so things have fixed limits, but each thing’s capacity is sufficient for it to behave as it should; thus the way things operate is the same for all.3

This is a philosophy of self-knowledge in the midst of living. Through concrete experiences, one constantly develops knowledge and understanding about what is within one’s capacity and one’s limits.

In other words, living naturally is to proactively navigate life with that understanding, while adjusting oneself in varied circumstances:

It is by trusting to the inevitability of principle that a perfect tally with the mean (zhongyong 中庸) is effected, which is the perfect way to interact with others.4

Here, Guo Xiang suggests that, by fully exercising one’s innate capacities without going to extremes, as the idea of choosing the middle way entails, one can be at ease with immediate realities. Therefore, with this anchor, Guo Xiang redefined Chuang Tzu’s idea of xiaoyao 逍遙, often loosely translated as free and easy wandering, as a spontaneous way of living that does not betray one’s inborn nature:

If one is sufficient unto one’s own nature, then the great Peng (the great bird in the Xiaoyaoyou chapter) will have no reason to think itself more noble than the little bird, and the little bird won’t covet the Pool of Heaven, for each will have more than enough to fulfill its desires. Thus it is that although the small and the great differ, spontaneous freedom (xiaoyao) is the same for all.5

It’s not hard to find the implication that the relative comparisons between the great and small birds are merely subjective evaluations. And such assessments can be misleading, as actions can be misguided by insufficient understanding.

It can also be said that we often fail to find clarity from within or be at ease with our inborn nature as a result of a self-encapsulated reality. Thus, we mistake external standards for internal possibilities, forcing ourselves to react, imitate, or conform:

People never desire to be small because they are great but surely envy greatness because they are small…how the difference between small and great is a matter of fixed allotment (ding fen 定分) and not something that desire or envy can do anything about. It is this realization that allows one to sever entanglement with desire and envy.6

In other words, we forsake what is natural for ourselves — the innate “fixed allotment,” just to follow the conventions, something that is imposed on us, something beyond our limits.

Yet still, the individual and the society at large are located in a dynamic system. What happens when the environment — a malicious social and political system — coerces us into unconscious conformity?

Governing through wu-wei

In explaining Chuang Tzu’s political thought, Guo Xiang was quite aware of the contradictions in the text. In the Inner Chapters, Chuang Tzu recognized the inevitable responsibility of a minister for the ruler (the necessity of order), quite sympathetic to the Confucian principles of human-heartedness and duty. Yet, in the Outer Chapters, we can find cynical statements about the alleged sage-rulers.

Guo Xiang’s solution was to make Chuang Tzu’s ideal of governance by non-governing (bu zhi zhi zhi 不治之治) more accessible. This is the application of wu-wei in governance. He argued that it is not about “doing nothing,” but actually requires a subtle political skill:

In following along with the nature of things, and not attempting to forcefully control, then the innate disposition is not violated, and what is natural can be preserved.7

Such a view is consistent with Guo Xiang’s metaphysical idea that everything has a spontaneous, natural agency and capability within. And the wise and virtuous ruler, if they understand the nature of things, instead of being blinded by subjective views, can actually apply wu-wei to facilitate the evolution of a spontaneous order:

If it had been declared that one should be called a master of unselfconscious action (wu-wei) only after he has folded his hands and keeps silent deep in mountains and woods, such a statement would have provided a reason to have the sayings of Master Zhuang and Master Lao rejected by those who hold power. Those who hold power regard themselves as necessarily involved in the realm of self-conscious action from which there is no turning back.8

Guo Xiang makes it quite clear that wu-wei in governance is not the absence of action, with “hands folded.” And the proper application of it depends on two things:

1. Rulers need to be able to select the right ministers

2. They must respect the boundaries by not interfering with the minister’s work

Here, Guo Xiang’s thought resonates with the Huang-Lao Taoism (huanglao daojia 黃老道家), another branch of the Taoist tradition, in operationalizing wu-wei as a political technique. And a critical, relevant caveat of good governance entails vigilance against autocratic rule:

Both parties, the individual ruler and his entire populace, prosper only by relying on one another. But if a ruler, a single person, tries to exercise autocratic control over the entire populace, the entire populace will be held down. So how then could he alone make things go smoothly!9

This view reveals an interdependent relationship between political authority and the general public. With this light, order is a mutual accomplishment. If the authority becomes autocratic, the spontaneous order is destined to perish.

Political realism

There has long been a misguided perception that Taoist political thinking is either purely laissez-faire or anarchist.

On an analytical level, the former misreads political wu-wei as simply non-interference and non-forcing, while missing the critical emphasis on leadership qualities and political wisdom required to apply the idea. The latter view holds that wu-wei suggests the absence of political authority, with everyone acting for themselves.

Through the workings of the neo-Taoist thinkers, the political ideal of governing through wu-wei (wu wei zhi zhi 無為之治) is actually made explicit: it is not the absence of order, nor the rejection of a political authority, but a test of political merit. This idea sounds similar to “wu zhengfu zhuyi 無政府主義,” the Chinese translation of anarchism. But they are fundamentally different.

Despite the perceived harm of the rulers, Guo Xiang, echoing Wang Bi, recognized the necessity of political authority:

Anywhere a thousand people gather, if they don’t make one man the ruler, they either fall into chaos or scatter. Therefore, though many worthies exist it is impossible to have many rulers, and though no worthy exists it is impossible to be without a ruler.10

Guo Xiang’s political eclecticism is represented in a reconstruction of one’s relationship with the political order. Not only is the utility of political authority confirmed, but a normative preference of order over anarchism is made clear, despite acknowledging the “necessary evil” brought about by the so-called “sage-ruler:”

…it yet won’t do to get rid of “the sages.” Since it is not yet possible to rid the world of self-conscious knowledge, the way of “the sages” must be used to keep it under control. If the world is not rid of all other forms of self-conscious knowledge but only rid of the wisdom of “the sages,” more harm would be done to the world than when there was sageness involved. That being so, though harm caused by “the sages” is great, this is still better than the disorder that would result if “the sages” were done away with.11

So we see a clear shift in attitude toward political authority from the old man in the story to Guo Xiang. And this happened over about a century, amid the rise and fall of regimes and the evolution of the intellectual and cultural environment.

In light of this, Guo Xiang’s own writings and his participation in politics have perfectly illustrated the Taoist principle of recognizing the importance of change and adapting to the shifting of times.

This is part of an ongoing mini-series on Wei-Jin Metaphysics (weijin xuanxue 魏晉玄學) where I write about three representative philosophers of the Wei-Jin period: Wang Bi 王弼, Guo Xiang 郭象, and Ji Kang 嵇康.

Unlike Wang Bi and Guo Xiang, Ji Kang represented Xuanxue and Taoism in both experiential and intellectual dimensions. And his influence was historically much more significant than that of the philosophers of the time.

The next section of this series will focus on Ji Kang.

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Yet Wang Bi’s system did not provide a full account of the actual individuality (its multiple possibilities) of the myriad things.

Guo Xiang carved out a new sphere for the neo-Taoist discourse on cosmology: the limitless, spontaneous realm of being.

Generally speaking, he questioned the validity of non-being as the source of the myriad things and claimed that everything spontaneously emerges and transforms. And with everything becoming the way it is, there arises a spontaneous, natural order.

Non-being vs. being

For the Wei-Jin thinkers, the problem of individual freedom was not merely an abstraction. It was fundamentally a lived necessity, as expressed in poetry, untrammeled social behavior, breakthroughs in art, and the emergence of spiritual and philosophical consciousness.

For Guo Xiang, such an inquiry is crystallized in his vision of the self-sufficiency of the individual. It is remarkable to consider how his philosophical reflections, in unimaginable ways, interacted with his immediate circumstances.

On a practical level, his status as a scholar and, later, his service in government could give him grounded life experiences, in the sense that one is invariably positioned within a network of relationships.

And on a larger, societal level, at the time of his writing, the Western Jin 西晉 society was still an agricultural economy. Dependence on the critical resources of production, such as land and human labor, as well as the maintenance of a hierarchical relationship between ordinary subjects and political authority, was an everyday, concrete experience.

Yet, Guo Xiang came up with a rather radical, even subversive view: things are not in a state of ontological dependence. They simply generate themselves spontaneously, without even knowing how or why:

…Nothingness (wu 無, non-being) is just that — nothingness — so it can’t generate phenomenal reality. Just as generation of the extant is not caused, something extant cannot cause anything else to generate…Actually, clodlike (kuairan 塊然, “intrinsically”) things generate themselves…When something is so by itself, we call it “natural.” The natural is not made or caused…Thus it is that everything generates itself — there is no other source from which things come — such is the Dao of Heaven.1

Here, Guo Xiang disputed with Wang Bi on the cosmological view that non-being is the source of all beings. He argued that things come into being in their own natural, “intrinsic” ways. Most importantly, there is no such thing as a “creator” behind all creations.

Another implied point is that things self-generate without a particular plan. Echoing Wang Bi, Guo Xiang rejected the teleological view that things are produced to fulfill predetermined purposes. In other words, individuals have an innate power, or virtue (the Taoist idea of de 德), for self-determination.

The idea of self-generation

But, how exactly does the mechanism of self-generation work? And how do we make sense of the point that things just emerge randomly, suddenly?

Guo Xiang’s answer lies in the unknown, mysterious realm of potentiality:

…may I ask whether this Creator is something existent or is it nothingness? If it is nothingness, how can it create anything? If it is something existent, it will fall short of being a thing that could manifest all bodily forms. Therefore, we must clarify that all bodily forms first have to derive from things themselves before we can begin to speak with such people about any Creator. This is why when involvement with the realm of extant things occurs, although we get a penumbra again and again, this never happens but that it is occasions of self-transformation operating within arcane obscurity (xuanming 玄冥). Therefore, the Creator is no master, for all things create themselves, and, since all things create themselves, they don’t depend on anything else for this to happen…2

Here, Guo Xiang put forward a few related insights that helped produce the obscure and “mysterious” flavor of Xuanxue:

1. If a single, all-mighty “creator” existed, how could it account for the infinite individual differences we see, as well as the limitless possibilities in the realm of being which we can not yet perceive or imagine?

2. If we accept the hypothesis that being is not created by an external force, since non-being cannot create, then everything must come into being through itself.

3. Everything originates and transforms independently from an arcane, inexpressible, unfathomable realm of potentiality. This is the meaning of self-transformation.

Nevertheless, Guo Xiang’s notion of transforming independently does not negate the interconnectedness of all things. Since things can manage themselves through internal causality and agency, our normal perception of causation is often flawed.

With all things locked into their own rhythms of transformation, their respective spontaneous actions become the sufficient conditions for other things. This is the idea of “mysterious coincidence (xuanhe 玄合).”

The penumbra and the shadow

We can turn to Chuang Tzu’s famous metaphor of the penumbra (wangliang 魍魎) and the shadow to understand Guo Xiang’s point.

In general, we would assume a direct, dependent relationship between the penumbra (the faint edge of a shadow) and the shadow, or the shadow and the body. If the body moves, the shadow follows, and accordingly, the changing shapes of the penumbra.

Guo Xiang questions this perceived model of dependency. He argues that the penumbra, the shadow, and the body are all independent beings. The sensual impression that one causes the other is a misguided perception, a coincidence that forms into a mutually beneficial relationship:

Nothing in all the world fails to stand in opposition to something else as other and self. As such, as other and self both tend to spontaneous function (ziwei 自為), so do east and west find themselves in opposition. However, when an other and a self happen to be the lips and teeth, though lips and teeth never care for one another, when lips are gone the teeth grow cold. Thus it is that as the other (the lips) spontaneously function the salutary effect it has on the self (the teeth) is great, which means such opposed pairs can’t do without one another.3

The “lips” do not exist for the “teeth,” yet they are functionally linked, supporting each other. To rephrase this in terms of Guo Xiang’s metaphysical thinking, the lips and the teeth originate and transform in their own mysterious ways, forming a spontaneous, symbiotic relationship.

In other words, the teeth and the lips do not view each other as this or that, as they are fundamentally parts of a holistic system, with each side “being” and determining for itself, which provides the conditions for the other to exist.

The “inevitability” dimension of ziran

The spirit of self-sufficiency and self-determination, in Guo Xiang’s system, is invariably linked to the idea of ziran, naturalness.

Here, ziran entails a cosmological view and a way of life.

If things emerge and transform spontaneously, in their distinctive yet often unfathomable ways, then this denotes a state of evolution.

Applying this view to social and human affairs can lead to a sobering realization: the cycle of stability and disorder, prosperity and poverty, freedom and tyranny, is the inevitable vicissitude of fortune beyond any single individual’s will. One may not extract a clear sense of the immediate circumstances because the seemingly sound causations may not hold in understanding the constantly evolving, essentially fluid social phenomena:

Since everything that happens to me happens naturally, whether order or chaos, success or failure, whatever encountered or not encountered, nothing is ever “my doing,” for everything happens only occurs naturally.4

Living in a particular era or environment, we are positioned within a context of cultural, social, and political outcomes inherited from previous generations, from various identified and unrecognized factors. We can certainly attempt to pinpoint a chain of dependency, a pattern, or a mechanism to solve this or that problem, assuming things are “within our control.” Yet, burdening oneself to control is to lose it:

…The current of history, combined with the contemporary circumstances, is responsible for the present crisis. It is not due to certain individuals. It is due to the world at large. The activity of the sages does not disturb the world, but the world itself becomes disorderly.5

Yet, quite often, we find ourselves in situations where we just cannot help ourselves. We just want to do something, make some “changes.” For instance, in the modernization theory, we find such an intention of “design.” We assume that “economic development” would lead to “liberalization,” which could facilitate democratization.

Guo Xiang may very likely question such an artificial project that is often imposed on a society. Such a paradigm may have proved itself in one or two cases, yet it can still overlook the “mysterious coincidence” of a thousand other factors.

That is to say, if we focus on one obvious, perceived chain, we miss the underlying, perhaps more vital social totality, such as the incumbent regime’s nature, the dynamic cultural interactions, and, still, unidentified yet important social forces.

Then, how do we identify and bridge what is necessary and proper to the innately spontaneous, natural path of evolution?

Guo Xiang’s focal point lies in the individual. His understanding of ziran sees the person not as a fixed entity, but as the embodiment of unrealized possibilities.

In a passage in the Chuang Tzu about preserving what is genuine and natural for oneself, Guo Xiang provided a new dimension to understanding ziran:

…That oxen and horses refuse not to have noses pierces or be bridled is an inherently appropriate aspect of their natural fates (tianming 天命), and since this conforms with their natural fates, even though dependent on the works of man, it is still rooted in Heaven (what is natural).6

Here, he is suggesting that it is within the inborn nature of oxen and horses to be constrained with the pierce and halter. Therefore, such an arrangement cannot be said to be “artificial” or excessive.

Likewise, if one could find a proper medium to fully exercise one’s nature, then it reaches a perfect match of what is spontaneous with what is external.

Yet, reality tells us that it is often the case that one either gives up too soon before finding that very external thing to suit one’s “natural” self, or one is unfortunately thrown into a malicious, abysmal circumstance.

Hence, one is deprived of that rare, precious opportunity, because opportunity, personal or political, when it comes, can serve as the vital factor in mysterious self-transformation.

This is part of an ongoing mini-series on Wei-Jin Metaphysics (weijin xuanxue 魏晉玄學) where I write about three representative philosophers of the Wei-Jin period: Wang Bi 王弼, Guo Xiang 郭象, and Ji Kang 嵇康.

Part 3 will focus on Guo Xiang’s political thought, an extension of his metaphysics.

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His most important work is the commentary on the Chuang Tzu. Until today, serious reading and research on Chuang Tzu’s thought cannot avoid Guo Xiang’s interpretations.

In the Chinese commentary tradition, classical works are also inseparable from their scholarly reconstructions. In some cases, these commentaries become stand-alone thought systems. Such is the case with Guo Xiang.

On a structural level, his contribution was fundamental and transformative. The Chuang Tzu was more than thirty-three chapters, containing divergent, often contradictory streams of thought. Guo Xiang’s redaction knitted together the whole text, making it philosophically sound and coherent.

In this sense, Guo Xiang was instrumental, alongside Wang Bi, in the rise of “the three classics” (sanxuan 三玄) — the Tao Te Ching (Dao-de Jing), the Chuang Tzu, and the I Ching (Book of Changes) —as the prevailing intellectual phenomenon of the era.

Guo Xiang’s philosophical exposition was exemplary, succeeding Wang Bi’s pioneering effort to build a metaphysical system alongside the early texts. Together, they revitalized intellectual and social interests in Taoism through redefining core concepts, such as Tao, being, non-being, and ziran, within a structured, rigorous system.

A brief bio note

Guo Xiang was born several decades after Wang Bi. His childhood began when the country was on the eve of a regime change. The Sima 司馬氏 clan’s usurpation of the Cao-Wei 曹魏 dynasty (220-266 AD) occurred in his youth.

As an ordinary individual and as a scholar, the young Guo Xiang clearly understood the consequences of defying or rebelling against political power.

From an early age, he was known for his dedication to studying the classics. His contemporaries considered him a worthy successor to Wang Bi:

With an exceptional talent and philosophical discernment, he was drawn to the Tao and fond of learning. Thus, he committed himself to the works of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu. His contemporaries all regarded him as second only to Wang Bi.1

Perhaps because of his observations of the politics of the time, he lived a rather reclusive early life, repeatedly rejecting invitations to public office. Nevertheless, he eventually accepted an important post.2

Given the Sima family’s ruthless way to quell intellectual and political dissent, one may wonder: was Guo Xiang’s later political participation a pragmatic concession or some kind of philosophical evolution?

Life experiences often shape one’s philosophical understanding. Yet a thorough understanding of the nature of things could, in unexpected ways, regulate the often unconscious, random course of one’s life.

In Guo Xiang’s case, we find a distinctive voice of philosophical and political eclecticism. Throughout his remarks, he sought to dissolve the tension between the Confucian ritualism and Taoist natural individualism, the so-called conflict between the teaching of names (mingjiao 名教) and the teaching of naturalness (ziran 自然).3

Philosophical approach

In Wang Bi’s work, we find that he was dealing with multiple ways of understanding and interpreting the Tao Te Ching. In explaining Chuang Tzu, Guo Xiang faced a more complex textual challenge.

On a basic level, Guo Xiang undertook the task of distilling a coherent message within the Chuang Tzu by sorting through its textual ambiguity: the original writings of Chuang Tzu himself (the Inner Chapters), Outer and Miscellaneous chapters (most of them considered as the works of his disciples and followers, but still containing Chuang Tzu’s thought).4

There is the next difficulty of explaining Chuang Tzu’s thought within context and with precision. Chuang Tzu’s writing style differs significantly from Lao Tzu’s or that of any other pre-Qin (before 221 BC) thinkers. He fused philosophy, poetic expressions, and elements of mysticism. Yet he cast doubt on the very function of language in expressing meaning and truth. His writings, on the surface, are just a collection of stories:

Words attributed to outsiders are effective nine times of ten, and weighty words seven of ten. But goblet words (zhiyan 卮言) keep on appearing day after day in accord with Heaven’s distinctions.5

Yet, beneath these parables and strange words lies a most penetrative beauty and depth unmatched in the Warring States period (475-221 BC).

And more importantly, but often overlooked, Chuang Tzu was not consciously writing about Taoism, unlike other scholars constrained by disciplinary boundaries. His scope of inquiry was transcendent of the various schools.6 And Taoism, as a label, was a retrospective designation that only appeared in the early Han dynasty.7

So to bridge the gap between metaphysical accuracy and poetic parables, Guo Xiang’s method was “placing meaning beyond words (ji yan chu yi 寄言出意).” In his own words:

Scholars who look at things with equanimity and insight should concentrate on the deep and universal significance of what is said and disregard the particular words that convey it. One should not have to come up with something to say for every little detail, for as long as such omissions do no harm to the main idea, they are always acceptable.8

Strictly speaking, this is capturing the substantive meaning while forgetting the traces of the language. It works in understanding the Chuang Tzu due to the idiosyncratic nature of the text.

Guo Xiang’s methodology resembles that of Gu Kaizhi 顧愷之, a renowned painter at this time. In a portrait, Gu’s approach is to capture the spirit (shen 神) of the subject through the pupils of the eyes. It is said that he would often wait for days before finishing this final touch.9

It should also be noted that Guo Xiang was greatly influenced by the work of Xiang Xiu’s 向秀 (ca. 227-272), a member of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove (zhulin qixian 竹林七賢).

Though Xiang Xiu’s commentary on the Chuang Tzu has been lost, his contribution to the neo-Taoist movement was by no means small:

Chuang Chou 莊周 (Chuang Tzu) wrote several dozen chapters. Although talented scholars had read them throughout the ages, none were able to accurately articulate his central philosophical ideas. Then Xiang Xiu extracted a rather obscure message from it, uncovering its marvelous insights while revitalizing the spirit of Xuanxue 玄學 (the metaphysics behind neo-Taoism)… During the reign of Emperor Hui, Guo Xiang further expanded upon and transmitted these ideas. Afterward, the “traces” of Confucianism and Mohism became sidelined, while the teachings of the Taoists flourished.10

Therefore, even today, we would often associate Wei-Jin Metaphysics with the major thinkers like Wang Bi and Guo Xiang, but we still cannot overlook the work of Xiang Xiu and those unnamed individuals, as they may have, in unrecognized ways, contributed to this critical milestone in intellectual history.

This is part of a mini-series on Wei-Jin Metaphysics (weijin xuanxue 魏晉玄學) where I write about three representative philosophers of the Wei-Jin period: Wang Bi 王弼, Guo Xiang 郭象, and Ji Kang 嵇康.

Part 2 of Guo Xiang will focus on his metaphysics of being, where he differs from Wang Bi.

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It is the art of moving through the world with spontaneity, a perspective rooted in the Mahayana Buddhist notion of universal emptiness (sunyata).

This “emptiness” does not imply that the phenomenal world does not exist, but rather that all things exist in a state of constant flux, yet are included in the dharma body. In this sense, it describes a state of mind liberated from grasping, in that we cannot really hold air in our hands but see it as it is.

Reality, as we tend to perceive it, is a fluid process of rising and falling.

This understanding is often defined as co-dependent origination: everything comes into being through a web of external causes and conditions. Therefore, the individual, like the flowing river, the pine tree, is inherently empty of something permanent, independent.

Among the poets of the Tang dynasty, Wang Wei 王維 (701-761) has been traditionally viewed as the embodiment of the Ch’an spirit.1 In his works and art, Buddhism is not a doctrine but a lived experience. He was the grandmaster of fusing Buddhism and Chuang Tzu’s philosophy with natural imagery to generate a distinctive style of poetics.

Reading his poems, we are often drawn into a tacit harmony with nature, with a continuous flow of inspiration within his poetic world.

The Vimalakirti connection

Wang Wei’s Buddhist path started when he was young. His mother, a devout Buddhist practitioner, was perhaps the earliest Buddhist influence on him.

She gave him the courtesy name Mojie 摩詰. When combined with his given name, Wei 維, it forms Wei-mo-jie, the Chinese transliteration of Vimalakirti.

Vimalakirti was the legendary lay Buddhist practitioner from India known for the concept of non-duality. In doing so, Wang Wei’s mother perhaps wished that her son would adhere to the pure and clean doctrine (Vimalakirti means “untainted”), or she hoped that the Buddhist teachings would protect Wang Wei when he was destined to go through the “dusty world,” but not to be captured by it.

Still, Wang Wei was influenced by the classical education and followed the traditional Confucian way of social participation. Public service was invariably the expected venue for a young man of his talent, as well as a viable path of his family tradition.

Yet even in his earliest poems, we can find clear traces of detachment, unusual and distinct in a teenager.

It was only after decades of living that the Buddhist mentality within him became fully apparent.

The poetics of emptiness

When he was young, Wang Wei associated with the Northern school of Ch’an. This sect emphasizes continuous, gradual cultivation and sitting meditation.

Later, he acquainted himself with the Southern School, known for sudden awakening (dunwu 頓悟), through “direct pointing,” collection of the heart-mind in the present, without grasping.

While working in the court, Wang Wei would often visit Buddhist temples and engage in conversations with the monks and scholars. In his existing poems, we can find some records of this aspect of his life.

On one occasion, Wang Wei visited Qinglong Temple 青龍寺, which still exists in today’s Xi’an, to see a monk.

The temple is located in a position that allows visitors to look into the distant city center. From afar, one could see the rising smoke, the dense, distant trees that seemed to be aligned in a line.

The azure mountains beyond the villages and the setting sun paint a continuous horizon, escaping the limits of the sensual perceptions.

Here, Wang Wei uses natural images to evoke the Buddhist state of mind, boundless, seeing but not attached to the myriad things:

His field of vision today is without taint (眼界今無染):

Empty-minded, how can he be deluded (心空安可迷)?2

The empty mind, in quiet meditations, does not seek to grasp, but roams with the changing reality, like seeing and feeling water flowing through fingers.

The notion of emptiness (kong 空) frequently appears in Wang Wei’s poems. This was even more so since his thirties.

On the one hand, his understanding of the Buddhist idea is derived from serious studies and observations from being in nature:

Sitting at night in the empty forest, silent (夜坐空林寂),

Pine winds seem like those of autumn (松風直似秋).3

Yet, on a deeper, experiential level, events in his personal life served as catalysts for that major spiritual shift.

The crucibles

The young Wang Wei started his political career at the age of twenty-one. After passing the state exam, he was appointed Tai Yue Cheng 太樂丞 (Assistant Master of the Imperial Music) in the central government due to his musical talent. Like any aspiring person at the beginning of one’s career, Wang Wei was also full of expectations.

Yet, after serving on the post for a few months, he suffered the first major political setback: banishment for misconduct involving a royal prince. In the next five years, he worked as a warehouse manager in Jizhou 濟州 (a region in today’s Shandong province).

The young poet, then, began to experience the unpredictable pulse of imperial politics, a theme of instability that would haunt his later years.

Wang Wei eventually resigned after serving there for about five years and came back home. Around this time, he got married and lived a few peaceful years with his family and friends.

Fate, again, entered to play a joke. Just when he was happily expecting to be a father around the age of thirty-one, Wang Wei lost his wife and the unborn child.

This personal tragedy further hastened his devotion to Buddhism. In the following years, his life was characterized by communing with mountains and rivers, court duties, Buddhist cultivation, and simply being with himself.

From the existing works, we cannot find any poem dedicated to his wife. All we know is that he never married again and lived alone until his last day.

Choosing not to write poems to his wife was possibly an intentional act. Yet this silence suggests a grief too deep for words.

Perhaps in nature, that grief can be dissolved to some extent, where he could find her in the “dharma world,” where they used to walk in the forest, breathe in the scent of flowers, hear the wind in the pines, and observe the carefree flying of the egrets. He must have known that their shared memories were also part of the flux, with her departure, as he witnessed the ashes of time in the burning incense in his quiet moments of chanting sutras and meditations.

This was not the first time Wang Wei had experienced loss. When his father died from a small accident, Wang Wei was only nine years old.

We cannot imagine the changes in the young poet’s inner world during those six years before he left home for Chang’an at the age of fifteen. As the oldest son in the family, he was responsible for taking care of his mother and four siblings.

And judging from what he had become later, it’s not hard to imagine the hardship he went through during those silent days, which helped shape his personality and art.

At the age of seventeen, Wang Wei became a household name nationwide. In a poem to his family, he wrote:

Alone in a foreign province as a foreign guest (獨在異鄉為異客),

Each time I come to a holiday, doubled my thoughts of home (每逢佳節倍思親).

From afar I know my brothers have climbed on high (遙知兄弟登高處):

Putting dogwoods everywhere but missing one person ( 遍插茱萸少一人).4

Being alone in a strange city, the young Wang Wei obviously felt the weight of solitude. But on this Double Ninth Festival (Chong yang jie 重陽節), when people would often write poems and observe rituals for the dead, he knew his brothers were thinking of him while climbing a mountain. Here, his spirit allows him to empathize with them rather than be overwhelmed by personal feelings.

Later, while Wang Wei was still alive, his character and bearings, poetry, painting, music, and aesthetics came to represent the High Tang culture.

Yet, still waters run deep.

Only in a few remaining works from his final years do we find traces of his heart.

In writing about the visit to his Buddhist teacher, Wang Wei expressed his inner thoughts:

My early years are not worthy of words (少年不足言):

When I saw the Tao I was already old in years (識道年已長).

How can I regret past affairs (事往安可悔)?

The rest of my life luckily can be nurtured (餘生幸能養).

I vow from now on to cease eating garlic and meat (誓從斷葷血)

And never again to get tangled in worldly nets (不復嬰世網).

Floating fame I shall leave to tassels and girdles (浮名寄纓珮):

The empty nature has no restraining halter (空性無羈鞅).5

Strictly speaking, the “Tao” here refers to the Buddhist teachings. At this time, Wang Wei had realized the impermanent, fragile nature of the things we pursue and cling to in life: fame, power, attachments.

Yet he was not the type of person who could be swayed by emotions, passions, or personal views. His poems reflect the penetrative sensibilities of a poet, perhaps more importantly, but often overlooked, the depth and inner lucidity of a philosopher.

Beyond emptiness

For Wang Wei, resonance with emptiness was not a retreat into passivity or nihilism. Throughout his thirties and forties, he continued to fulfill family duties and court responsibilities.

Knowing the idea of non-duality is one thing. But practicing it in life requires more. That means no distinction between samsara and nirvana, between emptiness and forms (the appearances of things), or engagement and withdrawal. And the idea of emptiness is also empty. He wrote:

Wishing to ask about the principled mind’s meaning (欲問義心義),

From afar I know the disease of voidness is empty (遙知空病空).6

Existentially, Wang Wei recognized that liberation of the spirit comes from non-fixation of the heart-mind:

Illusory specks gather and scatter (空虛花聚散)

The forest of Kleśa grows sparse or thick (煩惱樹稀稠).

If you annihilate thought, then things remain too neutral (滅相成無記);

But if the mind arises, then that leads to desire (生心坐有求).7

He observed that when thoughts emerge, the heart is disturbed by seeking, and when fixations are let go, one enters a state of spontaneous freedom and ease.

By his late thirties, Wang Wei not only wrote about Buddhism but also became a dedicated practitioner. That early spiritual encounter, as it turned out, was destined to accompany him through the eventful remaining years.

This essay is part of my ongoing writing about Wang Wei.

In his monograph, The Life and Art of Wang Wei (王維の生涯と藝術), Kobayashi Taichirō (1901–1963), a scholar of Japanese and East Asian art history, stated that Wang Wei shaped the cultural character and psychological archetype of the East Asian personality.

This influence is often displayed through a sophisticated, nuanced empathy across his poetry, letters, and art, and its reception and evolution in Japan.

When examined through the lens of our multidimensional social world, Wang Wei ceases to be an ancient figure and becomes more of a contemporary.

In his works, we find not just the inner dimensions of a poetic voice but also shared sensitivities among us all, in the face of the complexity, confusion, uncertainty, and the inevitable chaos in life.

In my spiritual world, Wang Wei stands alongside Chuang Tzu 莊子. In writing these essays, I’m re-reading and investigating his world, with the hope of presenting his life, reflections, and art in an accessible and helpful way.

Currently, I’m constrained by the Japanese language, so I’m relying on vital external voices to enrich my understanding of Zen and Japanese philosophy. For those seeking to dive deeper, I highly recommend the following:

• Romaric Jannel’s Japanese Philosophy Course: For a grounded understanding of the broad, foundational currents, approaches, and themes of Japanese thought.

• Peck Gee Chua’s Zen-Taoist Living series: An insightful synthesis of intellectual history and experiential reflections, exploring the aesthetics and philosophical traditions underlying the Way of Tea.

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If non-being is the ontological ground of reality, then the architecture of the state must align with this deeper structure of existence, instead of being constructed arbitrarily.

Wang Bi summarizes this political principle as honoring the root to institute the branches (Chong ben er xi mo 崇本而息末, see below for more details).

His political philosophy can be approached on two levels:

1. The foundation of a political order lies in following the Tao/wu

2. Laws, regulations, and institutions of enforcement, as part of the “branches,” are necessary, but secondary

The ideal political order is one that functions in accordance with the Tao. When governance is grounded in the ontological source of non-being, order emerges through spontaneous coordination rather than relying merely on force and coercion.

But how could such a political vision become practical?

We will need to begin with Wang Bi’s interpretation of ziran 自然 (naturalness).

The bridge of ziran

In the Tao Te Ching (Dao-de Jing), we find the author imagines the realm (tianxia 天下), or the state, as a “sacred vessel” (shenqi 神器).1

This vessel, like all forms of existence, regardless of its various forms and character, emerges from the shaping force of non-being, the infinite, creative source of potentiality. Its vitality depends on the de 德 (virtue), the power through which beings actualize their own nature.

Lao Tzu describes the interdependent relationship between the Tao and virtue as follows:

The way gives them life;

Virtue rears them;

Things give them shape;

Circumstances bring them to maturity.

…

It gives them life yet claims no possession;

It benefits them yet exacts no gratitude;

It is the steward yet exercises no authority.

Such is called the mysterious virtue.2

Two pieces of information can be derived from this:

1. Despite having the fountainhead of the Tao, the formation of the myriad things still depends on circumstances and conditions

2. The liberating spirit of the Tao is revealed in empowering and enriching the myriad things without dominating or appropriating them.

Put differently, the political implication is that the Tao liberates, and it does not evoke fear.

In this sense, following the Tao is not obeying some higher personalized authority,3 as no political or religious authority could partially claim to monopolize it. It is foundational.

On an individual level, this means it is up to oneself to carve out one’s own path and determine one’s own meaning by following what is natural.

Wang Bi also makes the relationship between Tao and virtue explicit:

Tao 道 is the source from which things arise. De 德 is what things receive from it.4

That is to say, the realization of one’s virtue is to attain what is innately possible. And the process of attaining one’s integrity, substance, or character requires a spontaneous actualization.

This entails personal interpretations and experiences. What is spontaneous and natural requires experiences, intuitive comprehension, and often, tacit knowledge.

In explaining such a nature of ziran, Wang Bi states:

The Tao does not deviate from what is natural. This is how it stays connected to its true nature. To model after what is spontaneous means this: when one is positioned in a square, one follows the square, and when one is situated in a round, one follows the round. One does not go against what is natural.5

Tao comes about naturally, with no force behind its operations.

To be natural is to become one with the circumstances without losing one’s inner core, as one possesses the innate capacity to adjust and transform.

In this sense, life becomes a rigorous process of cultivation and discovery/exploration, which entails a range of self-realization through the embodiment of one’s innate nature and adherence to it.

Wang Bi describes this as understanding with non-arbitrariness, abiding by the natural patterns and principles:

Things occur not arbitrarily. Each thing proceeds according to its principle (li 理).6

Investigating the principles — the inherent nature of things — enlarges one’s scope and depth of understanding, particularly the connection between one’s mode of existence and the whole realm of being. And with such a developed knowledge, there arises prudence and awareness as one steers oneself in the midst of living:

When the myriad things do not act recklessly, they should be able to preserve and realize what is within their own nature.7

Still, governance is much more complex than simply focusing one’s vision on self-discovery. It requires a disciplined stance toward reality that knows the limits and the distinctive nature of the myriad things. In Wang Bi’s words, an order that works spontaneously is one that respects the spontaneous individuality and creativity of those instituted within:

Heaven and Earth allow things to follow their natural bent and neither engage in conscious effort nor start anything, leaving the myriad things to manage themselves…Heaven and earth take no conscious effort with respect to the myriad things, yet because each of the myriad things has what is appropriate for its use, not one thing is denied support.8

In other words, an order that allows all to coordinate and function naturally on their own is the application of ziran in governance.

The necessity of order

One interesting finding in investigating these classical books is that ideas can embody multiple layers of meaning. Such is the case with Taoism.

Wu-wei 無為 is often taken as a political technique of non-forcing or non-arbitrariness, a kind of normative evaluation. Yet it also works as a spiritual ideal, represented as a tranquil, quiet state of being.

In the Tao Te Ching, we also find that Lao Tzu describes wu-wei as the principle of praxis of the Tao:

The way never acts yet nothing is left undone.

Should lords and princes be able to hold fast to it,

The myriad creatures will be transformed of their own accord.9

The wu-wei of the Tao is connected to the spontaneous, constant movement of the myriad things. Therefore, the Tao does not, on the surface, engage in actions. And this becomes the model for virtuous leaders: by being non-active, individuals can realize self-transformation on their own.

Wang Bi did not adopt the explanation that wu-wei indicates a sort of laissez-faire approach, or “doing nothing,” but an act of following along with the natural course.10

The tension between order and naturalness

Politics in the Wei-Jin period was shrouded by constant political instability. Amid the disorder associated with regime changes and high political pressures, in the social and cultural spheres, the transition from Confucianism to neo-Taoism was often represented by the individual’s inner quest, reflected in philosophy, poetry, art, and social behavior.

In the political sphere, the issue of self-discovery is translated into an ongoing inquiry into the relationship between the political order and the individual. Thinkers at the time had already raised questions about these matters: what are the foundations of a political order, and what justifies it?

The shared response of the neo-Taoist philosophers, including Wang Bi, Guo Xiang, and Ji Kang, is that a political order can be justified on the ground that it enables self-fulfillment.11 In other words, the state comes into being because of individuals, and it should exist for each person, not vice versa.

This understanding of political order is invariably associated with the idea of following the Tao, re-grounding the character of a state in non-being. Deviating from this direction would cause it to become rigid, limiting, domineering, and then, close to decay and crumbling.

Despite the emphasis on the primary role of individual freedom and self-determination, the neo-Taoists did not reject the necessity of political authority, nor the legitimacy of a political order. Wang Bi recognized the function of political leadership:

… the sage would institute officials and leaders. The virtuous are made models, and the unvirtuous are turned into instructive examples. Through reforming social customs and reshaping morals and norms, the sage sought to guide them back to unity.12

The smooth functioning of a political system depends on clear roles, responsibilities, and the division of labor. Wang Bi affirmed the utility and necessity of such distinctions within political institutions, but warned of the potential overreach of the system:

In instituting offices and authorities, one could not but establish proper names and roles, so as to determine hierarchy. Thus, in the beginning, distinctions are created. Beyond this point, people would contend even over the tip of a knife or an awl.13

This critical awareness of the expansion of political power denotes an idealized form of order: one that is limited and does not step beyond its boundaries. In this sense, Wang Bi’s vision of the proper political arrangements is a minimal political order.

Yet, the multiplication of offices and mechanisms within institutions, just like insatiable human desires, tends to be self-generative. People would invariably fight over the “tip of a knife,” a tiny advantage, as the derivative political order gets even more derivative.

The constitution of the Tao

Wang Bi’s interpretation of ziran does not indicate a nonchalant or non-conformist gesture toward conventions. His approach is to build a structured, multi-layered philosophical system, and in doing so, accommodate the tension between ritualism and naturalness.

In this sense, institutions and governance mechanisms operate in accordance with the spirit of ziran, and the key to effective governing lies in the approach of yin 因 — relying on the natural patterns of things:

The myriad folk follow nature (ziran) in forming their natures. This is why one can act in accordance with them but not act on them (ke yin er bu ke wei 可因而不可為), can identify with them but not interfere with them.14

With this precondition, the success of governing depends on knowing priorities by upholding the principle of ruling with the Tao (yi dao zhi guo 以道治國):

To govern the state with the Dao means to encourage growth at the branch tips by enhancing the roots. To govern the state with governance is to attack the branch tips by establishing punishments. With the roots not firmly established, the branch tips wither, and the common folk will have no means to cope with life. This is why things will surely develop to the point where one will “use the military with perversity.15

In reaffirming the primary importance of Tao in governing, Wang Bi raises the question of what kind of leadership qualities are essential for the endurance of a state.

That is to say, simply setting up effective institutions and maintaining political order is not enough. Tyrannical and autocratic regimes can do that. Yet these regimes primarily serve the interests of small factions rather than the realm.

One must inquire further what exactly the spiritual core underlying a political system is: is it empowering and liberating (embodying the Tao), or coercing and subjugating?

So the virtuous political leadership, in Wang Bi’s mind, embodies wu by applying wuxin 無心 (dissolving subjective views). By not fixating on personal views (and interests), such leadership grasps the hinge of governing:

..do not try to govern what the people do, but encourage their disinclination to do anything depraved (使其無心於為也). Do not try to forbid their desires but encourage their disinclination to desire anything. Plan for things while they are still in a premanifested state and act on them before they begin.16

Then, leaders recognize their assisting, not dominating, role, and therefore, abide by the principle of yin, or relying on, observing and carefully abiding by the natural order of things.

Yet, it does not mean passively accepting everything without critical examination or prudently weighing circumstances, but keeps to the principle of ongoing diagnosis of the world:

Replacing the old with the new, this is something the sages must never neglect.17

Thus, Wang Bi’s ideal political leadership is one that functions like the Tao itself, practicing the principle of wuxin, dwelling in a state of being non-active, yet allowing the multitudes to self-transform:

Dwelling in the center, what is proper, one reaches the utmost depth. Let things follow their natural course, and they will become what they are to become. Without artificial, contrived effort, the work actually completes itself.18

In essence, Wang Bi’s political thinking makes Lao Tzu’s statement — “I practice wu-wei, and the people transform themselves”19 — more accessible to actual affairs.

And the Tao, being foundational and primary, guards and regulates the guardians, namely, those instituted within the political order.

Previous posts on Wang Bi can be found here:

If the ruler/political authority follows the principle of wuxin and wu-wei to withdraw from imposition and overreach, what makes the transformation of a society, each person’s development, possible?

This is where Guo Xiang 郭象 enters. The next section of this series will focus on his philosophy.

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Historically, the neo-Taoist movement was closely associated with the reinterpretation of Taoism as developed by Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu. In doing so, these Wei-Jin thinkers conducted a comprehensive and critical reexamination of the scholarship of the previous Han 漢 dynasty. As a result, Taoism was pushed to the second stage of evolution.

A remarkable feature of this philosophical reconstruction is the rejection of the Han cosmological system.

The Han cosmology envisioned Heaven (often interpreted as Tao in Han scholarship) as the source of things with a predetermined purpose while imposing a hierarchical order on them.1 And the representation of this order is a Son of Heaven (tianzi 天子), a political authority.

Following this view, the Son of Heaven obtains the legitimacy to rule by monopolizing access to Tao, presenting himself as the rightful intermediary between the average person and the Tao.

The neo-Taoist thinkers dismantled the foundation of this cosmological view by redefining Tao as wu at the cosmological level. So not just heaven and earth are produced by Tao, all the myriad things, including humans, can be attributed to the natural function of Tao.

In this sense, Tao is not just identified as wu — “ontological creativity of non-being,”2 but also ziran 自然, naturalness.

Therefore, based on the neo-Taoist cosmological system, things are not brought about by a higher creator with a predetermined purpose. They emerge spontaneously, following their own causes and paths. Teleology has no place in this new mode of thinking.

What follows is a refreshed vision of the individual’s relationship with the cosmological order, with the social and political order, and with the realm of being.

Since Tao is immediate to everyone and no one can claim a monopoly over it, a newfound confidence in individual sovereignty, creativity, and agency arises.

In this sense, the neo-Taoist vision of individual freedom is composed of two interconnected parts:

1. The ontological basis of non-being (as the creative ground for the emergence of the myriad things)

2. Self-determination, self-reliance, and self-fulfillment of the individual (more elaborated in Guo Xiang’s system)

It is due to this spirit of relying on oneself that Ch’an Buddhism (chanzong 禪宗), which emphasizes that Buddha nature is within everyone (echoing the Tao’s immanence in humans), found its spiritual companion in Taoism.

The creativity of wu

It’s challenging to recognize that, as individuals, we have an ontological basis in non-being. For everywhere we are entangled with the appearances and distractions of the material world, constantly pulled by its force.

To see through these forms is to step into the realm of wu, a process of reaching the essence. This is what Lao Tzu refers to as the way of the Taoist, which lies in the practice of dissolving (wei dao ri sun 為道日損),3 a spiritual practice of disentanglement and disenchantment, like meandering through the thick, spreading clouds on a mountain top, toward the sunlight and the blue sky.

In other words, to follow the Tao is the process of realizing and embodying wu in life, an intellectual and experiential confirmation.

And this very act of dissolving or disentangling involves reshaping relationships with oneself, with others, and the world.

In this sense, the actualizing of wu denotes a conscious practice of re-grounding in the source of creativity. This creativity operates through a concurrent process of rejection and confirmation: the act of possessing already entails an intention to subtract and exclude. Wang Bi commented:

The myriad things arise as a result of being, but being relies on non-being for its ground. If one intends to preserve the wholeness of being, one must return to non-being.4

That is to say, to actualize the being, applying the utility of a thing, involves going back to wu.

We can examine this with everyday examples. A room is livable because the empty space is carved out. In painting, using brushstrokes are acts of rejecting the blank space while creating a vision, an image, simultaneously.

At the same time, the vision, shared by creative work, also emerges from something invisible, ungraspable, from the tranquil state of the heart-mind, a refreshed and calm spirit.

Thus, Wang Bi summarized:

…as for nothingness (non-being), that what is there can be of benefit always depends on its achievement of functionality through what is not there.5

The manifestation of being takes endless forms, yet the nature of non-being is one: it limits and creates at the same time. It is shapeless yet capable of producing forms.

The principle of returning

Wang Bi pointed out an important idea: returning (fan 反), which reveals the act of moving and revolving and involves a critical reflection on things. It symbolizes a way of holistic thinking that transcends the dichotomies inherent in phenomena and distinctions in the human mind. This line of thinking is consistent in Taoism and the tradition of the I Ching 易.

Tao is the unity of the yin and the yang, the being and the non-being, or action and stillness. In Lao Tzu’s words:

The myriad creatures carry on their backs the yin and embrace in their arms the yang and are the blending of the generative forces of the two.6

From the perspective of the Tao, there lies an interconnectedness of all things beneath surface-level differences. In this sense, “returning” is to embrace and dissolve discrepancies, finding harmony in blunting one’s edges.

In commenting on the hexagram of fu 復 (returning), Wang Bi reaffirmed the idea of recovering the ontological source in non-being:

Returning means to revert to the source. Heaven and earth take the root as their heart…The utmost silence of non-being is this source.7

When one affirms whiteness (correctness), one assumes a categorical conclusion in rejecting perceived blackness (wrongness). Yet in doing so, one runs the risk of falling into rigid thinking that closes off possibilities for creativity, leaving no room for reassessment.

Rigidity leads toward closure, like dead water in a secluded well, cut off from the streams underground.

This way of thinking and doing things is reflected in the I Ching. The sixty-four hexagrams resemble changing, varied life scenarios. Within each hexagram, the forces of the yin and the yang are constantly interacting with one another, resulting in a fluid state.

That is to say, not a single one of them is good, nor are they bad. Interpreted differently, any life situation, comfortable or unbearable, which is the workings of the mind, the function of the ego, offers an opportunity to practice “returning.”

And “returning” to non-being denotes a practice of letting the heart-mind go back to the indeterminate, tranquil, silent state of being, to dwell in open awareness.

These lines of thinking, in different ways, echo Chuang Tzu’s idea of forgetting the self (wangwo 忘我), seeing egocentricity as an obstruction to liberation. And the dissolving of the narrow self allows the heart to roam in the myriad things without being trapped and tainted.

The function of non-being

The properties, qualities, and traits of the myriad things are derived from the rejecting act of wu.

At the individual level, one serves oneself best by consciously and clearly rejecting what does not resonate, following a cultivated, intuitive awareness to engage in a creative, natural way of living.

In this sense, Wang Bi’s exposition of de 德, or virtue, understood as innate potentiality, is straightforward and clear:

Virtue means attainment. Constancy indicates attaining without losing, benefiting without self-injury, thus it is named virtue. How is virtue obtained? Through the Tao. How is virtue fully realized? By the function of wu (yi wu wei yong 以無為用).8

Here, to embrace one’s virtue, inborn nature, is to follow the Tao. And to fully exercise one’s virtue or natural talent depends on the function of wu.

In other words, the process of self-knowledge— discarding what one does not align with and embodying one’s natural path—is to allow the destructive and creative process of non-being to work.

At this point, we can see that “returning” involves a range of self-realization: discovering what is inherently within one’s virtue and what is authentic in everyday life.

“Returning,” thus, is the creative use of agency. And this brings us to another level of the function of wu.

When referring to the trait of the Tao, the Tao Te Ching states:

The way is empty, yet use will not drain it.

Deep, it is like the ancestor of the myriad creatures.9

Wang Bi’s comment on this state is classic, more explicit than the original text:

To rigidly hold to the measure of a household cannot preserve the family. To hold the measure of a country cannot keep the country intact. And to exhaust oneself to lift a weight is not proper. Keep to vacuity, and use cannot be exhausted.10

Here, Wang Bi reveals a pragmatic principle: preserving an unoccupied space in life. It can be taken as not overextending oneself or designing a personal ritual, undisturbed from the external world.

But it also indicates rising above self-imposed limitations to change one’s ways of doing things, either applied to sustaining one’s family or preserving a state.

In this sense, non-being is even more important than being, the actual thing. And applying it in life indicates the constant, cyclical act of carving out space in various life situations through creative endeavors.

Put differently, stillness, seen as returning from action and engagement to being non-active and tranquil, is the precondition for effective and meaningful action.

Wang Bi’s metaphysics of wu does not stop on the philosophical and personal level. Like other Wei-Jin thinkers who lived amid the rising tension between Confucian ritualism and Taoist individualism (a simplified description), he had to find a new way to envision the relationship between individual freedom and order.

This is part of an ongoing mini-series on Wei-Jin Metaphysics (weijin xuanxue 魏晉玄學) where I write about three representative philosophers of the Wei-Jin period: Wang Bi 王弼, Guo Xiang 郭象, and Ji Kang 嵇康.

For the neo-Taoist thinkers of the Wei-Jin period, Tao is foundational, while political order and rituals are secondary, derivative. Part 4 will focus on Wang Bi’s political thinking.

Next in this series:

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In the Taoist system, wu and you 有 (being), like yin 陰 and yang 陽, work as conceptual pairs, the constitutive parts of the oneness of Tao 道.

For the purpose of clarity, I use wu and you, or non-being and being, interchangeably in this article and throughout my reference to Wang Bi’s philosophical system.

The realm of being entails the concrete, the tangible, the interconnected things in the ordinary world. In a sense, we can feel, know, and name the myriad things in this sphere through the interactions between the senses and the objective world, a process of rationalization and understanding.

At the same time, the myriad things are limitless and countless in their origination and presentation. Like trees or flowers, they arise and fall in their distinct rhythms, following natural patterns.

On the flip side, the incessant, continuous emergence of things could pose an obstruction to the human mind in the effort to grasp what really matters, or the essence of reality, on a personal, subjective level.

Although Wang Bi did not make such explicit distinctions, it is still possible to build a framework based on his thinking. The metaphysics of wu can be approached from three angles:

1. Cosmological: wu as the generative source of beings

2. Ontological: wu as the ground (ti 體) of reality

3. Practical: integration of wu as a method in life

Wu in the Taoist system

As a fundamental term in Taoism, non-being is invariably associated with the mystery of the infinite, indeterminate, and indescribable phenomena. Yet its characteristic manifests as generative and enabling.

The rise of the Wei-Jin Metaphysics (weijin xuanxue 魏晉玄學), as part of the neo-Taoist intellectual movement during the Wei-Jin period, was marked by Wang Bi’s writings on wu:

During the zhengshi 正始 reign (240–248) of the Wei dynasty, He Yan 何晏, Wang Bi, and others followed the teachings of Laozi and Zhuangzi. They established the theory that Heaven, Earth, and all the myriad things have the individualism and the neo-daoist movement basis of their existence in nonbeing. That which is called nonbeing is the beginning of things and the completion of affairs: it exists everywhere. It is by virtue of nonbeing that the yin and the yang transform into life, all the myriad things take their forms, the worthy establishes his moral worth, and the unworthy (i.e., the common man) keeps his person from being injured.1

The notion of wu was historically significant, such that when Buddhism began to circulate among Chinese intellectuals around the third century, they had to borrow from Taoist language to translate and interpret Buddhist metaphysics.

In the case of Tao-an (道安, 312-385), a leading Buddhist of the time, interpreted the philosophy of prajna with wu as the original source of all changes and the Buddhist idea of emptiness (kong 空) as the beginning of all things.2

In particular, the idea of wu, which entails the dissolution of limitations in the realm of beings, and Chuang Tzu’s philosophy of non-distinction (qiwu 齊物) provided a bridge, a metaphysical basis, and a philosophical presupposition to connect with Buddhism.

Wu in the Tao Te Ching (Dao-de Jing)

The first chapter of the Tao Te Ching states:

The nameless was the beginning of heaven and earth;

The named was the mother of the myriad creatures.3

The nameless, or what cannot be named, in Lao Tzu’s conception, is the beginning of heaven and earth.

Wang Bi’s comment makes the relationship between being and non-being clear:

All that exists arises from non-being. Therefore, before there were forms and names, it was the beginning of all the myriad things.4

In other words, the myriad things rely on the wu for their existence. Through his interpretation, Wang Bi makes the structure within the original text clear to follow.

In chapter 40 of the text, Lao Tzu further states:

The myriad things arise from being 天下萬物生於有,

and being comes from non-being 有生於無.5

In this sense, wu also indicates the unfathomable, limitless potential and process of creation in multiplying the myriad things. Here, Lao Tzu does not explicitly state that wu can be defined as something not being there at the cosmological level.

That is to say, with A, we can infer, investigate, and pinpoint how and where it originates, perhaps designated as B. As we inquire further about B, we may ask where B is derived.

In this sense, tracing a determinate thing back through its sources and causes leads not necessarily to another fixed entity, but to the open condition that necessitates the emergence of entities. This open condition is what Wang Bi refers to as wu.

Therefore, we can infer that Lao Tzu’s reference to wu indicates a cosmological state of creation: the myriad things, as forms of being, are born from the source of non-being.

Since Tao is also the fountainhead of the myriad things,6 it can be redefined as wu, although Lao Tzu did not make such a claim.

Wu as the embodiment of Tao

In Wang Bi’s system, non-being is identified with Tao, and it represents the ground of all things in the realm of being:

Tao is a name for wu (non-being). There is nothing it does not penetrate, and nothing that does not pass through it. This is why it is called Tao. Silent and still, without a form (ji ran wu ti 寂然無體), it cannot be made into an image.7

The essence of Tao, thus, lies in its qualities of being invisible, ungraspable, yet silent and empowering, quiescent and moving. It seems to be an independent entity, yet immanent in the myriad things in the realm of being.

Based on Lao Tzu and Wang Bi’s writings, we can reach this understanding of Tao. It is full of ontological mystery as the basis for the myriad beings. At the same time, since the Tao (wu) is all-inclusive, in the sense that all the relative distinctions in the realm of being, such as good and evil, right and wrong, are all dissolved, it can be said that it is impartial or amoral, at the axiological level.

Wang Bi does not limit the metaphysics of wu to understanding alone, but also extends it to experiential practices.

Thus, to embrace the Tao, or non-being, one is actually modeling after its characteristics. In Wang Bi’s words:

The Tao, by being formless and non-active (wu-wei), brings to completion the myriad things. Therefore, one who engages with Tao takes wu-wei as a model and silence as instruction. Subtle and continuous, through it, things attain their authenticity. Embracing the Tao this way, as the text says, is to be one with Tao.8

Here, Wang Bi points out the movement of the Tao as wu-wei (non-active), as we can infer that to be active and intentional runs the risk of falling into fixations. And fixations, as the result of subjective actions, can only capture a part of the holistic view.

In commenting on Lao Tzu’s ideal-type of Taoist, in terms of managing social and political affairs, Wang Bi states:

…the heart-mind is not fixed (xin wu suo zhu 心無所主), it becomes one with the whole, with an open awareness having no particular inclinations or aversions.9

This practice of seeing through the limitations of perception is exactly the act of returning to wu. Thus, we can derive two insights from Wang Bi’s non-being as practices:

1. Rising above fixations, preconceived notions, and partial views (the limitations of being)

2. Seeing through and overcoming emotions by returning to stillness (the tranquil state of wu) and understanding the nature of things (more in Chuang Tzu’s system)

We cannot forget the historical background of Wang Bi’s writings. During 240 and 249, the Wei dynasty was undergoing a series of political changes, amid intense pressure and anxiety in the intellectual circles and society.

If we perceive philosophy as an inner quest amid an external, changing environment to extract clarity and order from external circumstances, then Wang Bi’s application of wu as a philosophy of life certainly serves as a compass for navigating uncertainties.

In commenting on the hexagram Tai 泰, Wang Bi said:

When heaven and earth are about to close, when the level road begins to tilt, when an age stands on the brink of great change, to remain without losing one’s proper ground in stillness (or dwelling properly 居不失其正), without missing to respond in action, to endure hardship yet remain steadfast, to suffer strain yet not abandon what is right, this is how to be without blame.10

Change always comes, for better or for worse, just like the rotation of the yin and the yang, the silent workings of the Tao. The adjustment of the mind, instead of contending against circumstances and being captured by the limits of the ego, brings back clarity and inner stability.

And from Wang Bi’s perspective, if we can overcome the limitations imposed on us by the realm of being, we are practicing an existential reorientation to return to non-being and then reshape our course in life.

This is part of an ongoing mini-series on Wei-Jin Metaphysics (weijin xuanxue 魏晉玄學) where I write about three representative philosophers of the Wei-Jin period: Wang Bi 王弼, Guo Xiang 郭象, and Ji Kang 嵇康.

Part 3 will be focused on Wang Bi’s conception of non-being as a guiding principle for life.

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On a summer day, before dawn, Chang’an was still asleep. Yet, something was happening in the inner circle of the court.

The emperor Xuanzong 玄宗 had notified his close family members, a few loyal ministers, and associates a few days earlier.

In that high summer, hours mattered.

The decision that would shape the course of events over the next seven years, ultimately changing the dynasty’s fate, had come.

But most of the city was kept in the dark.

A thought lingered over the minds of all the people in the city: Will we survive this? Can we hold the rebel attacks?

Before the daylight broke in, before everyone found out, Xuanzong and his associates were already out of the city.1

Within days, Chang’an fell.

Where to go?

By the early 750s, rumors of An Lushan’s 安祿山 (703-757) ambitions had thickened. Li Bai, like others, sensed what was fermenting in the northeast of the country.

But Chang’an was too far. How could he, now as an ordinary person without political influence, persuade those in power to take this seriously?

Some ministers in the court had attempted to convince the emperor that An Lushan had been preparing for war for some time.2

Yet, the emperor Xuanzong disapproved of such accusations against his sworn son. An Lushan was also protected by the emperor’s most favored consort, Yang Guifei.

It was recorded that he had mastered the art of camouflage, playing stupidity, and secured the emperor’s favor. In one conversation, he told Xuanzong that he had no special talent, but was only willing to die for him.3

Like those who had already felt the weight of the political storms, Li Bai was deeply unsettled. He probably had hoped that his suspicion about An Lushan was wrong. Or maybe he hoped that the court was still impregnable, even if against a formidable, imminent rebellion.

In 753, at the invitation of a friend, Li Bai came to Xuancheng 宣城 (in Anhui Province), considering relocating his family there.

Now he was not only dismayed about his unfulfilled political ambitions, but also the precarious fate of the dynasty lying ahead. His heart was shrouded by constant anxiety, fear, and unease:

What left me yesterday

Can be retained no more (棄我去者 昨日之日不可留);

What troubles me today

Is the times for which I feel sore (亂我心者 今日之日多煩憂).4

How could he forsake his ideal? What else could he do? The anguish of the heart forces the poet into a state of unbounded spiritual outbursts:

Cut running water with a sword, ’twill faster grow (抽刀斷水水更流);

Drink wine to drown your sorrow, it will heavier grow (舉杯消愁愁更愁).

If we despair of human affairs (人生在世不稱意),

Let us roam in a boat with loosened hairs (明朝散髮弄扁舟)! 

The long war

In 755, the An Lushan rebellion erupted.

At the beginning, the emperor Xuanzong and some ministers greatly underestimated An Lushan, assuming the rebellion could be easily suppressed.

An Lushan rose to power through military achievements. Over the years, he also built a strong military base in Fanyang 范陽 (a district covering part of today’s Beijing), with the surrounding regions under his jurisdiction.

Before the outbreak of the war, he had already amassed an enormous army.

From Fanyang to Luoyang 洛陽, a critical city for the Tang defense, lies a roughly 800-kilometer distance. An Lushan’s army marched to victory in roughly a month.

The following year, An Lushan declared himself emperor of the Yan 燕 in Luoyang, with vast territories in the eastern part of the country under his rule.

A variety of factors led to the initial setbacks of the royalist defense. First, Xuanzong’s misjudgment of the situation and problematic military decisions. And there was the mishandling of the defense by some generals.

After Tongguan 潼關, the crucial city that connects Chang’an to the east, fell into the hands of the rebel forces, the capital was laid bare, basically defenseless.

So, on that early morning of 756, when the court ministers, including most of the royal family, found out that the emperor had already fled the capital, the war was destined to be dragged into deep waters.

Li Bai witnessed the fall of ancient cities and the dispersed people fleeing:

Throughout the realm’s heartland, tigers and jackals roam,

fierce flames devour the ancestral shrines (中原走豺虎 烈火焚宗廟).

Venus crosses the sky in daylight

the failing sun veils what’s left of its light (太白晝經天 頹陽掩餘照)

The royal cities were destroyed, swept away,

the roads of the world all turned steep (王城皆盪覆 世路成奔峭).

All under heaven looks toward Chang’an

brows knit, few can force a smile (四海望長安 顰眉寡西笑)5

Temples in flames, the capital overturned, and ordinary roads became unrecognizable. It was not just city collapses, but also the fall of an era.

Despite the eventual victory of the royalist side, Chang’an was never the same.

After the outbreak of the war, Li Bai brought his family farther south, like many ordinary families. No one could be certain that the rebel armies would treat the people of the Tang dynasty decently.

But even during such times of chaos, Li Bai was also hoping to contribute, to do whatever he could to save the realm. Writing to a friend, he reaffirmed his will:

I stroke my long sword with one lift of my brow

…

I take off my cap and laugh toward you.

I drink your wine and sing for you

Zhang Liang has not yet gone off to follow Chi Songzi

the yellow stone at the bridge understands my heart.6

Inside the storms

In the chaos, Li Bai once again drifted toward politics—this time as a staff member of Prince Lin 永王 (Li Lin 李璘).

Whether out of hope, misjudgment of the shifting political circumstances, or being forced, he joined the camp of Prince Lin.7

Li Bai may have assumed that he was still fighting alongside the royalist forces, openly expressing his wish:

The drifting clouds are to be cut in one sweep

I swear to cleanse the rebel forces at the You 幽 and Yan 燕

I wish to sit with the gentlemen here in this hall

and calmly talk about the “Golden Casket” chapters.

With one heart we bear the court’s favor,

we would not spare our humble lives.

All we hope is that the war-star will be extinguished,

and when the work is finished, follow the steps of Lu Lian.8

Unfortunately, in a war that lasted about seven years, politics was often more complex and consequential than temporary battlefield gains and losses.

While the emperor Xuanzong was on the run to Chengdu, one of his sons, Li Heng 李亨, declared himself the new emperor, known as Suzong 肅宗.

Before long, the internal conflict between Prince Lin and the new court ended in disaster: the prince was defeated, and Li Bai was punished for having “followed the wrong side.”

He was imprisoned for a few months at Xunyang 潯陽 (a district in today’s Jiujiang, Jiangxi province) and then sentenced to exile.9

Final years

In 758, Li Bai started his journey of exile from Xunyang to Yelang 夜郎 (in today’s Guizhou province). This year, he turned 58.

On his way there, Li Bai often thought of his wife, who was far away but actively seeking ways to save him. He wrote to her:

I grieve my life apart as Yelang is beyond the edge of heaven

in a tower under the bright moon, news grows scarce.

The northern geese return with spring, soon traces gone,

yet no letter from home comes south to me.10

The roads and mountains stalled family letters. Li Bai probably envied the birds that could fly wherever they wished.

In 759, he was released due to the court amnesty.

Near the end of his life, Li Bai was still preparing to join the forces of Commander Li Guangbi 李光弼 to fight the remaining rebels. Eventually, illness stopped him.

In 762, Li Bai died in Dangtu 當塗 (today’s Dangtu county, Anhui Province). His tomb is still preserved there.

Ending thoughts

As a Taoist at heart, a romantic poet, Li Bai was well aware that life was a mysterious yet natural course.

The vicissitudes of fortune, dynastic or personal, are often beyond our control and imagination.

The myriad social and personal factors at play with one another could corner us into an unbearable, clueless situation. We could still charge forward, with a relentless spirit and will. Yet, we sometimes cannot help but sense that the wheel of trends, regardless of our preferences and wishes, can be set on an irreversible trajectory.

So we are often at a loss, at times awestruck, gazing at the turning of personal fate as it is swept along by the flow of time, tossed around by something unidentifiable, something higher than our own will, often manifesting itself as a wonder, a surprise, a crisis.

Perhaps, in his times of exile, in those quiet moments, with wine, with moonlight, Li Bai contemplated the fate of the Tang dynasty, the misfortune of the individuals, all enmeshed in the mystery of the currents and cross-currents of life:

Grass does not thank spring for its wind (草不謝榮於春風)

Trees don’t blame autumn for their leaves (木不怨落於秋天).

Who wields the whip that urges the seasons (誰揮鞭策驅四運)?

All things rise and fall by themselves (萬物興歇皆自然).11

He was not like the professional politicians working at a stable post. His life was undeniably characterized by wandering, but deeply pulled by the aspirations for achievement. It was his way of making sense of the ever-evolving social and political changes, and his own way of being during this temporary stay.

Li Bai wrote more than one thousand poems, which is only based on the surviving records. We do not know how many, perhaps even more, diverse forms of writing have been lost due to the years of war and later efforts of preservation.

When I was young, I liked the poem “What left me yesterday” from Li Bai’s works the most. It felt cathartic and refreshing. Yet I did not understand, not have tasted the bitterness, the helplessness, underlying it. I was naive and inexperienced.

Now, when I think of Li Bai, after lifting all those romantic layers of imagination, I keep to this poem to the moon and wine:

When did the moon come to the blue sky?
青天有月來幾時 
I pause my cup and ask.
我今停杯一問之
…
People of today don't see the moon of ancient times
今人不見古時月       
yet the moon of today once shone on the people of old.
今月曾經照古人 
Ancients and moderns pass like running water
古人今人若流水
together we gaze at the bright moon, always the same. 
共看明月皆如此
Only this I wish: singing with wine before me
唯願當歌對酒時
may moonlight always shine into the golden goblet.
月光常照金樽里

To nature and the moon, we are only temporary travelers, guests.

This is not to negate our existence. With the short life we have, it is still within our reach to preserve what is good, precious, and imperishable in this human life.

Li Bai would have hoped, like all of us, that generations after him would live in a world without wars and conquests, with peace and harmony cherished, not torn by scheming and machinations.

It is a world in which it is safe for simple joys. With wine and moonlight, with family and friends, with the things we care about. And that is enough.

Previous posts on Li Bai:

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As the representative philosopher of the Wei dynasty 魏, Wang Bi is generally known for his conception of wu 無 (non-being) as the core of his philosophical system.

In essence, Wang Bi’s metaphysics is grounded in non-being, and his philosophy of life takes returning to the root (fan ben 反本) as the ultimate aim.1

A brief bio sketch

Despite a short life (died at the age of 24), Wang Bi’s influence has been significant and enduring.

His commentary on the Tao Te Ching was pioneering in that he constructed a philosophical system within the classical commentary tradition.

As a teenager, Wang Bi excelled in speech and debate and was well-versed in the Tao Te Ching (Dao-de Jing).

He Yan 何晏 (195-249 AD), another intellectual of the time, once invited Wang Bi to comment on some philosophical views.2 As a result, none of the assembled scholars at the meeting could challenge Wang Bi.

Another anecdote reveals Wang Bi’s early philosophical acuity.

A friend of Wang Bi’s father met him for the first time, and he asked why Confucius refrained from discussing wu 無, whereas Lao Tzu explicitly spoke of it.3 Wang Bi replied that Confucius embodied wu with the understanding that it cannot be expressed, while Lao Tzu, in contrast, remained partially bound to the realm of being.

This judgment suggests that, in Wang Bi’s estimation, Confucius may have occupied an even more distinguished position than Lao Tzu. This view reflects two closely related considerations:

1. The boundary between early Taoism and Confucianism was not that sharply divided. Both systems emerged from a shared cultural tradition rooted in the I Ching 易 and the ritual system (li 禮) of the Zhou dynasty 周 (ca. 1046-256 BC).

2. Wang Bi’s philosophical ambition extended across multiple classical traditions. His intention to write commentaries on the three foundational texts — the I Ching 易, the Tao Te Ching 道德經, and the Analects 論語, suggests a deliberate effort to reexamine their underlying unity rather than to reinforce sectarian divisions.

In a sense, Wang Bi probably attempted to bridge the conceptual gap that later developed between Taoism and Confucianism. The original teaching of Confucius, after all, differed from its reception and reinterpretations several centuries later.

In short, Wang Bi’s genius lies less in inventing new concepts than in reorganizing how Tao 道 and wu 無 function as the ontological ground behind all determinate forms and terms.

Works and methods

On top of the commentaries on the three classics, Wang Bi also wrote three important articles: “An Outline of the Principles of the I Ching 周易略例,” “A Brief Guide to the Lao Tzu 老子指略,” and “Clarifying Doubts in the Analects 論語釋疑.”4

Textual discipline

Unlike most later interpretations, Wang Bi’s approach is strictly loyal to the original text, offering a systematic view of Lao Tzu’s philosophy.

At the same time, he was also building a metaphysical structure on the hermeneutic principle beside the text.

The Tao Te Ching itself is open to varied interpretations. But Wang Bi worked on it through exposition rather than subjectively correcting or rearranging the text, largely limiting the scope for reinterpretation.

This is different from other interpretive methods. For instance, Han Fei 韓非 (ca. 280-233 BC), the Legalist philosopher, adopted a heavy-handed political and utilitarian approach to explaining the Tao Te Ching, instead of first explaining the meaning of the text.

Language, naming, and the “nameless”

A shared understanding among the philosophers during the Wei-Jin period is the limits of language. This is consistent with the early Taoist thinkers, such as Chuang Tzu and Lao Tzu, in their use of language to refer to the Tao, or the ultimate reality.

In Taoist writings, the Tao is often described as invisible, ungraspable, and intangible, yet immanent in the myriad things. The author of the Tao Te Ching, in attempting to describe it, recognizing the constraints of words, named the nameless, the shapeless, as Tao, characterized by being big, remote, and revolving.5

In this sense, the issue is whether language can express the fundamental meaning of a phenomenon or the essence of ultimate truth.

On the one hand, the unreliable nature of language invites exposition and inquiry, but the act of explanation reveals the very limitations of words (yan bu jin yi 言不盡意).

But the limitation, or failure of language, is not the end of understanding. What remains is an intuitive comprehension of the meaning associated with words.

To some extent, what is left unsaid can be more significant than what is stated. This approach is aligned with Chuang Tzu’s saying, capturing the meaning while forgetting the words (de yi wang yan 得意忘言).

This intuitive grasp, as an approach, not only influenced Wei-Jin philosophers but also the poetics and the artistic reconstruction of their perceptions of the world.

But Wang Bi did not stop here. The act of naming is the act of fixing. It involves the interactions between the subject and the object.

This interactive act of understanding requires active labor in the form of exercising reason, examining, and reexamining common sense and what is accessible, while still keeping the space for what cannot be expressed. Wang Bi thus writes:

Names are used to define objects. To name is to conform to what is generally called. Names are derived from the objects, but naming comes from the subject (ming shenghu bi cheng chuhu wo 名生乎彼，稱出乎我).6

Names are what we use to refer to objects. By designating a thing, we are also rejecting what it is not, limiting its scope of being defined.

The act of naming, from the subject, despite being active and intentional, can still be insufficient in the face of complex phenomena, of things beyond our understanding. In Wang Bi’s words:

Names come to mind from appearances, and the act of naming arises from seeking. Names do not come into being out of nowhere, and naming is derived from a certain reason. Therefore, names can often fail to capture the essence, and naming does not necessarily encompass the utmost end of things. This is the reason the text (the Tao Te Ching) refers to mystery (xuan 玄) as “the mystery of mystery (xuan zhi you xuan 玄之又玄)”.

Where naming cannot reach, the remaining depth is called the mysterious, the infinite, captured in the character xuan 玄. And wu 無 — the core of Wang Bi’s metaphysics — is precisely what naming cannot grasp.

This is part of a mini-series on Wei-Jin Metaphysics (weijin xuanxue 魏晉玄學) where I write about three representative philosophers of the Wei-Jin period: Wang Bi 王弼, Guo Xiang 郭象, and Ji Kang 嵇康.

Part 2 focuses on Wang Bi’s treatment of wu 無 (nonbeing) as the ground (ti 體) of reality, of the realm of being, and why its metaphysical implication becomes a philosophy of life.

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Even as the poet of wine and moonlight, Li Bai remained stubbornly drawn to the ideal of service with his knowledge and experience.

The three years of political involvement in Chang’an probably made him realize that, after all, he could not force himself to belong to a world that did not resonate with him.

Ten years of drifting and beyond

Being away from politics opened the space for Li Bai to embrace the mountains and rivers.

Distance gave him room to study and understand himself: what he had done, his way of living, and where he was going.

Sometimes it takes profound failures and heartbreaks to develop a deeper sense of self-knowledge.

New beginnings

After leaving Chang’an, on his way southward, Li Bai briefly stayed at Luoyang 洛陽, where the two literary stars of the Tang dynasty finally met.

At forty-four, Li Bai was at the crossroads of his life. He probably had contemplated how he was supposed to live the rest of his life. At this point, the door to politics seemed permanently shut. He needed time to think through things and recover from this.

Du Fu (712-770 杜甫), about thirty-three, was a rising talent in the literary circle. He had long admired Li Bai. This time at Luoyang, he finally had the chance to meet the legendary poet in person.

From the surviving records, particularly their exchanges of poems, it’s clear that Li Bai and Du Fu recognized each other at once.1 At different stages of their lives, Du Fu was still actively seeking ways to enter politics. They most likely made a promise to each other to meet again.

Du Fu was sympathetic to his friend’s life and political experiences in the capital. In one poem often associated with their exchanges, a note of concern appears:

The hard roads, the storms on lakes,

One man against the elements in a single, tiny boat;

And then as you went, you stood up and looked at me;

Rubbing your head as if regretting unrealized ideals;

This, the dream and now I think of all the host of proud

Officials who throng the capital;

Knowing well you are lonely and sad.2

After parting, Li Bai also wrote back to Du Fu, reminiscing about their time together, with the hope of meeting again to drink and wander together.3

The following year, Li Bai traveled to Qizhou 齊州 (today’s Jinan 濟南, Shandong Province), under the instruction of the Taoist master 高天師, and became an ordained Taoist.4

Ruins and remembrance

In these years, Li Bai was traveling places and dwelling in the mountains with Taoist recluses.

Mountains, ancient cities, historic sites, and a literary mind are often the ingredients for poetry.

In Suzhou 蘇州, Li Bai saw the ruins of the Gusu Palace, where the King of Wu 吳 and his wife Xi Shi 西施 used to stay. The place was destroyed after the state of Wu was annihilated by the state of Yue 越 during the Warring States period.

Seeing the deserted buildings, new willow trees, Li Bai sighed:

All are gone but the moon o’er West River that’s seen

The ladies fair who won the favor of the king.5

Visiting these sites reminded Li Bai of the ancient historical episodes. The weeds and graves witnessed the vicissitudes of dynastic changes, the songs and cries of figures long buried. The poet could not disassociate his thoughts from the current state of affairs:

As floating clouds can veil the bright sun from the eye,

Imperial Court now out of sight saddens my heart.6

A wanderer still watching the court

Despite now living as a wanderer, Li Bai was well aware that the country was run by a powerful faction that launched constant military campaigns at the expense of the people’s general welfare.

In his late years, the emperor Xuanzong 玄宗 immersed himself in lavish living while entrusting the management of the state to questionable ministers.

Hiking on top of the Tiantai mountain 天台山,7 Li Bai was still troubled by the fact that the country was now on a misguided path:

Mounting the height,
I gaze afar.
…
Celestial palace is a dream unwoken
Emperors sought in vain.
…
The bandits came to rob your jewels of value high.
What could you do, imperial lier?
Such is the end you warmongers obtained.
Could immortality be ever gained?

Li Bai may not necessarily possess the essential skills for public affairs, yet he was still well-versed in historical lessons, especially the ones that could shape the rise and fall of dynasties. He may be alluding to the emperor being drowned in illusions, misled by those around him.

Strictly speaking, Li Bai has now become a man of rivers and lakes (jianghu 江湖)8 — a phrase in traditional Chinese culture that refers to society, but is still widely used today.

But he has heard stories and news about political persecutions in the capital, the court’s military crusades, and the suffering of ordinary families and people due to poor governance.

Li Bai was infuriated by all this. In a penetrative poem, he lambasted those high in the court without reservation:

You cannot do as the eunuchs fond of cock fight,

Who blow their breath like rainbow bright.

You cannot do as the general with sword in hand,

Who won his violet robe by slaughter on the land.9

He knew that the slanders and whispers of the eunuchs could easily drive the waves in court politics. He suffered from this. And he was sticking to his ground without submission:

Proud all my life long, with them I’m not in accord;

In disfavor, I’m alienated from the lord.

The hermit said to the emperor goodbye.

Why should he serve with his long sword in palace high?

Knowing that political power is in the hands of those he disagrees with, Li Bai was deeply wounded, but at the same time, disillusioned with political participation:

While young, I wished to wander on the lake;

Now older, from the dreams of glory I’m awake. 

Certainly, poems like this would attract not only criticism from the powerful but also vindictive actions.

Li Bai was chased.

Gathering storms

But wandering also opened new doors for him.

In 749, he encountered a local Zong house (宗式) while touring southern China and remarried that year.

The Zong family was once influential at court but was punished and has since remained low-profile in their newfound shelter. Li Bai’s new wife was said to be a Taoist practitioner, wise and serene, who often gave Li Bai advice and support.10

Yet, in these years, Li Bai was still restless, concerned about the fate of the realm. He was still partially driven by the inner fire to do whatever within his power to serve.

Some time into his married life, a former colleague, He Changfa 何昌法, came to visit Li Bai and invited him to visit Youzhou 幽州 (today’s Beijing), where he was serving the local government. The district was under the jurisdiction of An Lushan 安祿山, the man who was about to unleash a political storm.

At this time, An Lushan was trusted by the emperor. He also controlled about half of the nation’s military power.

Li Bai had some inner struggles before accepting this invitation. Or perhaps his wife advised against this trip. In the departing poem, he clearly expressed his concerns:

I venture into the tiger’s lair, press on toward the desert

With a ringing whip, I spur my horse and charge across the Yellow River.11

Perhaps, in his mind, this was a precious opportunity to investigate the rumors about An Lushan, despite the potential danger involved.

Unfortunately, his deepest suspicion was confirmed by a colleague who had discovered An Lushan’s secret ambition to rebel against the central government.

The warlord had built his political capital with growing military strength. No one in the capital dared to openly challenge him.

With this discovery, Li Bai probably had sensed the imminent political storms and the havoc brought by an unimaginable civil war to follow. And the storm would turn out not to shake the foundation of the Tang, but also determine the fate of many, including Li Bai.

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A change in our life situations is reflected in our minds, emotions, and decisions.

Perhaps, in such occasions of departure, the notion would dawn upon us: the world we know looks like a place we are passing through.

Impermanence becomes a lived reality.

We may even question whether we can claim that familiar space as home, as a shelter, or somewhere secure.

A door closes in the heart. And the mind is already set on what’s next.

Sojourning (ji 寄)

There is an old character for this in Chinese poetry and Taoist writings, ji 寄,1 meaning to sojourn, lodge, or stay as a guest.

It suggests a Taoist view that we are temporarily housed in a place. The world is like an inn, and we are simply living in a borrowed room.

There is a sober, inner lucidity in this Taoist perspective. If life is like a temporary lodging experience, then it is not meant to be clenched. And if we get this, then we are not likely to get ourselves tangled in a story of possession.

Untangled. Detached. And internally liberated.

But it is always easier to process this intellectually than experientially. Tao Yuanming 陶淵明 (365-427) expressed such feelings and his sorrows:

Luxuriant is the tree in blossom

It has planted its roots here (caicai rongmu jiegen yu zi 采采榮木 結根於茲).

In the morning it displays its flowers;

By the evening it has already lost them (chen yao qi hua xi yi sang zhi 晨耀其華 夕已喪之).

‘Man’s life is like a traveller’s stay’”

Yet there is time for suffering (rensheng ruoji qiaocui you shi 人生若寄 憔悴有時)

Quietly, I deeply brood;

In my heart I am sad (jingyan kongnian zhong xin chang er 靜言孔念 中心悵而)2

In the face of the traces of time on us, the greying hair, unfulfilled wishes in the heart, and the uncertainty lying ahead in this life, who can remain unperturbed?

Indeed, we are troubled by the sense of weariness, the quiet ache, that often arrives when we withdraw and look too closely, when we are most unprepared.

Despite viewing ourselves as guests, travelers, we continue to be troubled by interactions with our immediate realities.

Even though one learns to take oneself less seriously, that feeling of pain, suffering, fear, and anxiety still comes back, even more acute.

Cao Zhi 曹植 (192-232 AD), a poet from the early Cao-Wei 曹魏 dynasty (220-265 AD), was deeply troubled by the sense of rootlessness, the reality of a floating life. He wrote:

The whirling thistlebrush separates from its root and trunk

And is whirlblown, twirlblown, by the continual wind (zhuanpeng li ben gen piao yao sui chang feng 轉蓬離本根 飄搖隨長風)

Suddenly caught up in a gust of whirling wind,

I am blown up into the clouds (he yi hui biaoju chui wo ru yunzhong 何意回飈舉 吹我入雲中);

Higher and higher, unendingly upwards,

The paths of the heavens, how can they be exhausted?3

Cao Zhi resonated with the “roaming stranger” because he felt that he was drifting alone in this world.

This is sojourning with self-awareness still intact. The poet suffered from knowing it.

This shared sentiment reflects the tension between temporary staying and the wish to cling to something that fundamentally cannot be held. The mind can see the impermanence of things, but it still reaches for what is stable, guaranteed.

This is self-inflicted suffering. Seeing clearly is still not inner freedom.

Unoccupied (xian 閒)

The wanderer, or the traveller’s mind, cannot be liberated if it is deeply attached to the idea of the self, being driven by feelings, emotions, and varied sentiments, in changing life circumstances.

In other words, self-awareness guides toward inner clarity.

Yet it can still be captured by egocentricity and the senses in its interaction with the external conditions of the world.

There is the alternative path: to see through the world of appearances, including the perception of the self.

That is emptiness. The Buddhist notion of emptiness is written as kong 空 in Chinese. It denotes a state of mind, seeing the world as the impermanent flux of change, with everything in a process of construction and destruction, like the human cell renewing itself constantly, beyond our will, like the bubble that shatters, and the wind that flies away.

Emptiness is taken as the ultimate reality beneath the phenomenal world because the myriad things are locked in by external causes and conditions beyond themselves.

In this sense, all things, including the human person, are positioned in the state of dependent origination (hetupratyaya, yinyuan 因緣) — meaning the contingent relationships naturally arise and disappear, beyond individual wish, ungraspable, and therefore, are empty.

When the idea of emptiness becomes experiential, the mind becomes empty, allowing the Buddhists to rise above the illusions of phenomena.

This understanding of emptiness does not equal having an absolutely negative view of things. It indicates the practice of not anchoring.

The heart is no longer anchored to sentiment associated with the past, worries, fear, and anxieties about the future, and restlessness of the now. All emotions, desires, and expectations are fleeting, like particles that dissolve and disappear.

This is where the idea of being unoccupied (xian 閒) comes in. It does not mean having nothing to do, or choosing to do nothing, but a state of allowing the heart not to be captured by external things.

Wang Wei 王維 (701-761) describes this state of mind in his poem:4

Here, natural imagery is not only a sketch of what the poet sees, but also evokes the Buddhist state of mind.

To remain inwardly unoccupied suggests a tranquil state of being, an inner lucidity and calm derived from non-entanglement.

The traveler’s stop somewhere within the clouds, the distant mountains, the lone skiff, and fire on the shore constitute a picture of calm, harmonious arrangements. They register in the poet’s mind as peaceful, as the poet himself understood the empty nature of his own self, a temporary being.

In moments like this, the idea of xian 閒 is lived and tasted. It becomes a shared practice of the Taoists and Buddhists.

Parting can hurt, as it reminds us of the very act of clinging.

No matter how hard life can get, even if it often means going through the dark chapters, we know it will pass.

And, sooner or later, we may understand that to wander, drift, and get temporarily lodged somewhere in the world is unavoidable.

Yet, the heart will not be controlled by fear, as it is now liberated and released.

With constant practice in dissolving the self, we can still cultivate an inner space, inwardly unoccupied, with the heart flowing with the white clouds.

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By the age of forty-six, Xie Lingyun’s pattern was unmistakable: public service, temporary retreat, a brief return of hope, and then disappointment.

Politics requires compromise, careful reading of human nature, and adaptation to shifting times and circumstances. Yet, Xie Lingyun was also restrained by his own temperament, a personality too proud, too sharp-edged, very unfit for an ordinary official life.

Throughout the ups and downs of his career, Lingyun had probably come to understand that a seemingly minor incident or decision could, in unexpected ways, catch us off guard.

Back at his family estate, he sought court approval to renovate his family villa. The local magistrate, who had long viewed Xie Lingyun with suspicion, obstructed the project.

Annoyed, Lingyun publicly mocked the official’s Buddhist practice itself, turning an administrative conflict into a personal, moral confrontation.

The quarrel, as it turned out, offered the magistrate an opportunity: he recast a normal dispute as a matter of loyalty to the court.1

The charge alarmed him. Being derelict in duties is one thing, but “rebellion” was barely tolerated in imperial politics. Then he went to the capital to defend himself, in the hope of clearing this accusation.

Reentering politics

So in 430, Lingyun was back at the capital. The emperor was actually sympathetic to him, both because of his literary talent and his influence in the cultural circle.

To defuse this situation, the emperor assigned Lingyun the task of revising the Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra (大般涅槃經).2 In the next two years, he worked on this text.

In 432, at forty-eight, he received another appointment: administrator of Linchuan 臨川內史 (Linchuan, today’s Fuzhou 撫州, Jiangxi province).3 This time, he could not decline the assignment. This became his “third return” to office in his on-and-off political life.

Before departing, he wrote a poem for his family and friends at the capital. An old sorrow returned in a new form. He remembered that about ten years ago, before being sent to Yongjia 永嘉, he had already gone through this kind of parting. Now he must re-live it:4

Once again I pass through the partings of my life 
(chongjing pingsheng bie 重經平生別)

And I bid farewell to friends and those who know me. 
(zaiyu peng zhi ci 再與朋知辭)

My old mountain home grows farther day by day 
(gushan ri yi yuan 故山日已遠)

How could the wind-tossed world ever be as it was 
(fengbo qi huan shi 風波豈還時)?

A lone sail goes drifting beyond ten thousand miles 
(tiaotiao wan li fan 苕苕萬里帆)

Vast and boundless, where am I going? 
(mangmang zhong he zhi 茫茫終何之)

The journey ahead is unknown.

The question is unspoken but heavy: Will I return?

He probably had felt the difference, the weight, in this departure. He was no longer young. And the opportunities for political establishment grew less and less while he was away from the capital.

It was an existential confrontation with what is left in his life.

A final exile

By this stage, at forty-eight, Lingyun must have felt the cumulative weight of over two decades in politics. And sadly, it seemed he could not really find his way in that world.

Partly, this is because his house once served the Eastern Jin dynasty, and the new dynasty could not really entrust him with significant political responsibilities. And it can also be explained by his own circumstances.

During this time in the new post, he still traveled, wandered, and wrote poems, often at the expense of his daily official duties.

Eventually, opponents seized upon his repeated neglect of public responsibilities as grounds for prosecution.

Xie Lingyun, perhaps too proud to admit fault, perhaps entirely fired up by his deep discontent, arrested the official sent to capture him and began to organize a small resistance!5

An impulsive move, reckless, with unimaginable repercussions to follow. In an often-cited poem, he frames himself within an older moral dilemma:

When Han fell, Zifang sprang to action

Lu Lian felt Qin emperor was a disgrace.

I am by nature a man of rivers and seas

But loyalty and righteousness move all gentlemen.6

In this poem, Lingyun referred to two figures in the past: Zhang Liang 張良 (ca. 262-186 BC) and Lu Zhonglian 魯仲連 (ca. 305-245 BC).7 They both acted in their own ways when faced with state collapse.

This allusion brings one question to the surface: in times of dynastic change, how can one preserve loyalty and righteousness (yi 義)?

Yet, upholding them in Xie Lingyun’s circumstances requires sacrifice. He has most likely reflected on this many times: Was working for the Liu Song dynasty a betrayal of the previous Jin dynasty?

His path differs from that of Tao Yuanming, who permanently withdrew after the fall of Eastern Jin, choosing not to participate in politics.

Despite the false accusation and his resistance, the emperor remained lenient toward him, taking into account his grandfather’s contribution to the survival of the southern realm. His punishment was exile to Guangzhou.

Even then, exile did not mean peace and safety.

His enemies did not stop chasing him. At the far southern edge of the empire, more accusations and “evidence” were gathered to end him. In 433, he was again accused of involvement in rebellion and finally sentenced to death.

Xie Lingyun was famed for his long beard. Before his death, he asked that it be donated to a temple and used as the beard of a Vimalakirti statue.8

And he recounted his wish in a poem:

Though I still regret my resolve for our people

didn’t end among those mountain cliffs of home.

Giving mind up without that utter awakening:

this is the fear that haunted me all these years,

and now my lone hope turns to some future life

where friend and foe share that mind together.9 

He had wanted the ending of a recluse: to die somewhere in the mountains. But the poem did not end in hatred. It turns toward his pursuit of awakening/enlightenment (zhengjue 正覺), a Buddhist notion of release (from samsara toward nirvana, or a nondual awareness of this distinction). He hoped that, in another life, enmity and kindredness could be reconciled.

In his last lines, one can hear an echo of Ji Kang 嵇康 (223-262), the very embodiment of the Wei-Jin spirit, executed for refusing to bend to domineering power. Perhaps, in the final moment, Xie Lingyun saw this light and joined these spiritual ancestors.

Xie Lingyun’s legacy

While reading his works for this biographical sketch, I often thought that, given more time, perhaps Xie Lingyun would be able to write more marvelous poems, more than the one hundred or so in the existing records.

Yet, his short volume is still legendary.

A later literary critic, Huang Jie 黃節 (1873－1935), summarized Xie Lingyun’s literary significance with clarity:

Before Han-Wei times, narrative and landscape descriptions were relatively rare in poetry; in the Six Dynasties (the Wei-Jin period), the techniques of fu began to appear in verse. And it was the Duke of Kangle (Xie Lingyun) who truly carved out this mode.10

It’s not that accounting of nature was totally absent in poetry before Xie Lingyun. The creation of an entirely new literary genre, or philosophical thinking, often involves generations of diving into the old traditions before reemerging with new faces.

Xie Lingyun’s voice became the representative of the poetics of mountains and rivers at a turning point in literary history. Liu Xie 劉勰 (ca. 480-538), a literary critic of the time, captures this change of pulse:

At the beginning of the Sung (420-479) some development in the literary trend was evident. Chuang and Lao had receded into the background and the theme of mountains and dreams then began to flourish.11

And Xie Lingyun was the hinge at this literary juncture.

Despite repeated political failures, he did not entirely betray his family’s expectations. Not in the way the court demanded — through public service or military achievement, but in another way: he founded a new literary world.

As a poet who grew up in a Taoist culture and was well familiar with Buddhism, Xie Lingyun was well aware of the illusory, temporary nature of floating reputations, ranks, and titles, and of the worldly pursuits of power and wealth, which dissolve and vanish like bubbles in the phenomenal world. He may not have internalized the Buddhist teaching, yet, an intuitive awareness of it may have consoled his heart in the very end.

Those who wielded power for the time being, where are they now? The dynastic record closes.

Yet Xie Lingyun’s name remains luminous, outlasting the very world that condemned him, that probably did not deserve him.

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I sing, and moon rocks back and forth;
(wo ge yue paihuai 我歌月徘徊)
I dance, and shadow tumbles into pieces.
(wo wu ying lingluan 我舞影凌亂)

Sober, we’re together and happy. Drunk,
(xing shi tong jiaohuan 醒時同交歡) 
We scatter away into our own directions:
(zui hou ge fensan 醉後各分散)

Intimates forever, we’ll wander carefree
(yong jie wuqing you 永結無情遊)
And meet again in Star River distances.
(xiangqi miao yun han 相期邈雲漢)

David Hinton, trans., “Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon,” in The Selected Poems of Li Po (New York: New Directions, 1996), 43.

This is one of Li Bai’s most recognizable gestures: turning solitude into a personal ceremony.

Drinking wine alone can feel bitter for some, yet it is when Li Bai enters the mode of poetic creation. With the moon and his shadow as companions, it became his own ritual of being with himself.

If wine is the medium through which Li Bai releases himself from the weight of worldly expectations, the road reminds him of the immediate, concrete reality.

The road in his poems is not just a road. It reflects his sense of obstruction, a political map of what refuses to open.

Quite often, his wandering is romanticized as freedom, with moonlight, shifting landscapes, and carefree drifting within and beyond society. On the surface, it is so. But the deeper truth is harsher.

He wandered because the world he wanted a place in did not easily admit him.

The road as diagnosis

About 735, the year when he turned thirty-four, Li Bai was still struggling to find his path in politics. After staying in Chang’an for several years, he decided to travel south. A question still lingered in his mind: how can he proceed when the gate just did not open?

Two important poems from this period are records of his inner journey. The first is “Hard is the road,” a title that already carries assessment. Perhaps, sensing that he was at the crossroads of his life, in the face of unfulfilled ambitions, the poet was at a loss for how to proceed:

Pure wine in golden cup costs ten thousand coppers, good!

Choice dish in a jade plate is worth as much, nice food!

Pushing aside my cup and chopsticks, I can’t eat;

Drawing my sword and looking round, I stamp my feet.1

The setting in the poem is literal, with food, wine, and a heart disturbed, but the emotion is existential.

Li Bai probably understood better than many of his contemporaries that sometimes it depends on the right circumstances and conditions to exercise his talent. Or perhaps, the difficulties he faced in his political pursuits, ironically, became the material he worked with in his poetry.

If he pushed harder against those invisible structures, the more he would feel the road as a wall. In this sense, the images of obstructions strike deeper than travel notes:

I can’t cross Yellow River: ice has stopped its flow (欲渡黃河冰塞川),

I can’t climb Mount Taihang: the sky is blind with snow (將登太行雪滿天).

This blockage is both geographical and experiential. No one was there to point him in a clear direction. He had to first figure it out by himself.

Yet he still refused to give up in despair. Self-rescue was all he had:

A time will come to ride the wind and cleave the waves (長風破浪會有時),

I’ll set my cloud-white sail and cross the sea which raves (直挂雲帆濟滄海).

To rise above the present shackles, Li Bai chose to be fearless and defiant with sobriety.

The impossible passage

We often imagine that once we climb over one mountain, the slope will get easier to walk through. Yet, life is hardly a linear path.

The next crisis does not arrive with notifications. The wave does not ask whether we have rested.

Li Bai seems to know this early: even after one ascent is completed, another begins, often steeper and more overwhelming.

The second poem, “Hard is the Road to Shu,”2 expands the sensation of obstruction into a vision of impossibility:

Oho! behold! how steep! how high!

The road to Shu is harder than to climb the sky. 

…

Above stand peaks too high for the sun to pass o’er;

Below the torrents run back and forth, churn and roar.

Even the Golden Crane can’t fly across;

How to climb over, gibbons are at a loss.

What tortuous mountain path Green Mud Ridge faces!

Around the top we turn nine turns each hundred paces.

Looking up breathless, I can touch the stars nearby;

Beating my breast, I sink on the ground with long sigh.

This perilous nature scene is symbolic and metaphysical — a picture of what it feels like to move through a world where the path is full of uncertainty, and the slightest misstep means irreversibility.

Perhaps some paths in life are structured as refusal.

Li Bai was aware of the dangers involved in this adventure, as he asks why he would come this far in the poem.

We all ask similar questions, though our objects differ. Do we engage in activities for their intrinsic value, or for some intended result? Only we can know the struggle. Only we can measure the range of our trajectories.

A second return to Chang’an (742-745)

Throughout his life, Li Bai was driven by the ambition to establish himself in public life. When reality ran counter to his wishes, he would wander, mingle with Taoist practitioners and recluses, and dwell on mountains.

By 742, he had already lived one cycle of active engagement and retreat. Yet, fate brought him once more toward the capital. This time, the political world opened the door for him not through conventional bureaucratic channels, but through a Taoist connection.

At this time, Li Bai was living in reclusion with the Taoist Wu Yun 吳筠, in Shanzhong 剡中 (near today’s Shaoxing, Zhejiang), a place historically known for its recluse culture.3 When Wu Yun was invited to court, he recommended Li Bai to the emperor Xuanzong 玄宗. Naturally, the poet was summoned to serve as a literary attendant, a court poet.

This opportunity sounds really like fulfillment. And Li Bai was full of hope and excitement:

I’ll leave my family and journey to the west.

Looking up at the sky, I laugh aloud and go.

Am I a man to crawl amid the brambles low?4

After years on the road, the poet finally steps into the heart of the world he intended to be. However, the Tang court was already showing some visible signs of inner rot.

Under the new prime minister, Li Linfu 李林甫 (683-753), the political atmosphere had grown corrosive. With the emperor growing less attentive to state affairs, Li Linfu and his faction started to dominate court politics, purging political opponents who did not bow to his influence.

The year before was a turning point in Tang’s political history. Zhang Jiuling 張九齡 (678-740), the last chancellor who helped build the Heyday of Kaiyuan (開元盛世) — a period of growth and prominence, was exiled. This produced a chilling effect in the capital’s political circles.

Yet, it is here that the Tang presents its paradoxical face.

Culturally, the dynasty still projected its openness and confidence. Taoism was esteemed by the court. Religions and ideas circulated widely. The capital hosted flourishing communities of Buddhism, Christianity (the Nestorian sect, 景教), Islam, and Manichaeism (a 3rd-century religion from Persia). The surface looks bright.

But a luminous surface could not prevent decay beneath it. The building of an empire is slow, but its crumbling can be swift.

While working in the capital, Li Bai also had time to slip out of the court’s sphere, walking into the mountains. In one well-known poem, he described the joyful, peaceful trip to Mount Zhongnan 終南山. There, he spent the night with his recluse friend, temporarily forgetting worldly concerns:

At dusk I leave the hills behind,

The moon escorts me all the way.

..

We sing the songs of wind and pine,

And stars are set when singings end.

I’m drunk and you’re merry and glad:

We both forget the world is sad.5

In this simple moment, the poet’s heart is temporarily relieved from the toxic political environment.

After the court incident with Gao Lishi (see part 1), Li Bai had faced constant slander and political pressure, allegedly from Yang Guifei, the emperor’s favored consort. Perhaps he did not expect that a poem, a literary creation in praise of beauty, could eventually be used to turn against him.

By 745, he resigned from office.6

Leaving (745 and after)

These two years of working at the center of power gave Li Bai firsthand experience in politics. His withdrawal from it, perhaps with a sense of relief, brought a sharper clarity and a moral boundary.

Soon after, he expressed open contempt for the coercive use of power and a circle he could not identify with:

How can I stoop and bow before the men in power

(an neng cuimei zheyao shi quangui 安能摧眉折腰事權貴)

And so deny myself a happy hour?7

(shi wo bude kai xin yan 使我不得開心顏)

From now on, he could finally leave Chang’an behind.

For the next ten years, he became what the court could not contain: a wandering poet—leaving footprints across mountains and rivers, drinking and mingling with scholars and recluses, and slowly letting the Taoist way move from ideas into lived practice.

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Mountain hiking is often arduous, yet joyful, especially when shared with a few kindred spirits. Sometimes it is a solo journey, if the climber is experienced and well-prepared.

That’s how we assume it to be.

Xie Lingyun’s hiking was different.

Stories were told about his adventurous, often reckless behavior in the deep mountains.

One day, a local magistrate named Wang Xiu 王琇, after receiving a report, saw a vast procession carving through the mountainside.1

Alarmed, the magistrate mistook it for a band of mountain brigands (shanzei 山賊). He then set the city under emergency alert.

Only later did he realize it was Xie Lingyun’s party.

To open new hiking routes, Xie Lingyun would often cut paths through dense forests with a few hundred attendants.

This became one of the defining images attached to his name.

Mountain dwelling amidst political failures

Being dispatched to Yongjia in 422, Xie Lingyun tasted his first major political setback (see part two). The official term was three years, yet he resigned after only one year in the post.

Lingyun could do so because he was not bound by any material constraints. He then moved back to his family estate at Shining 始寧, withdrawing once more from public life.

Back at Shining, he now had time to explore the coastal mountains and ravines of the region. And the “mountain brigand” style of climbing emerged during this period.

Yet his withdrawal was not really quiet, as his poems and eccentric behavior circulated back to the court.

By 426, with political changes settled in the capital, the new emperor summoned Xie Lingyun. This year, he turned forty-two.

He probably thought that his time had finally come: to make some political contribution with his passion, training, and experience. Yet he was appointed as the director of the Imperial Library (mishu jian 祕書監), with the main responsibility of helping compile and write the history of the Jin Dynasty.2

This was, on paper, a prestigious post: stable, respected, and significant.

But it was everything Xie Lingyun did not care for.

He knew that the dynasty was still under threat from the north. And he certainly remembered his family’s glory in defending the realm when the northern army attempted to invade a few decades ago.

In a poem attributed to his grandfather Xie Xuan 謝玄 (see part one), he captured the mood of the age:

The heartland once sank into turmoil (中原昔喪亂)

And how could that turmoil ever truly end (喪亂豈解已)3

Wang Xizhi 王羲之 (303-361), the renowned calligrapher from the Eastern Jin Dynasty 東晉 (317-420), once lamented that his ancestors’ tombs were destroyed in the north in a draft letter, resonating with Xie Lingyun’s own reflections.

This overwhelming sentiment has, throughout history, reverberated in the Southern Song Dynasty 南宋 (1127-1279) and, after 1949, when the Republic of China (ROC) government retreated to Taiwan, it continued to echo.

In 428, Xie Lingyun resigned from his post, leaving the emperor with a letter and his thoughts on national defense and northern expedition.

Writing the mountains into poetry

Once more, Xie Lingyun returned home at Shining, this time without official duties or political expectations.

And this period marked the most productive and distinctive phase of his poetic creation. The majority of his mountain-and-river poems (shanshuishi 山水詩), the works that would later define his genre, were awaiting him.

In his poems, we would see again and again how he interacted with nature scenes in movement, wandering and meandering, climbing, overlooking the sea, losing the path, pausing, and looking back.

Landscape witnessed by foot

One of his most beloved destinations lay southwest of his Shining estate: Stone-gate mountain (shimen shan 石門山), a narrow mountain pass.

In his travel notes, he described the route in detail:

At Shimen are six ravines. Going upstream, one enters between two mountain mouths. Rock walls rise on both sides; on the right, a stone cliff; below, the waters of the ravine.”4

He frequented this place, and the poem moves like the hike itself:

I started thinking of impossible cliffs at dawn
and by evening was settled on a mountain-top,

scarcely a peak high enough to face this hut
looking out on mountains veined with streams,

forests stretching away beyond its open gate,
a tumble of talus boulders ending at the stairs.

Mountains crowd around, blocking out roads,
and trails wander bamboo confusions, leaving 

guests to stray on clever new paths coming up
or doubt old ways leading people back home. 

David Hinton, trans., The Mountain Poems of Hsieh Ling-yun (New York: New Directions Books, 2001), 56.

Cliffs, ridges, deep, dense forests, and winding paths can feel intimidating. Yet Xie Lingyun enjoyed such wilderness touring, despite the physical challenges:

Climbing perilous paths, I build a dwelling in seclusion

Parting the clouds, I lie beside the Stone Gate.

Moss so slick, who could tread upon it?

Vines so frail, how could one grasp them?5

Overcoming the small difficulties — the slippery moss, the fragile vines, he could see rare scenes unknown to the many:

Bending down, I rinse in the pool beneath the rocks

Looking up, I watch the gibbons in the branches.

In the morning I can hear the evening winds rise swift

At dusk I see the morning sun glow.

The leaning cliffs let light linger only briefly

In the deep forest, echoes rush and scatter with ease.6

In this unmanned mountain corner, he saw the clear pool beneath the rocks and gibbons moving among trees. And the sense of time seemed to be blurred by the intersection of evening winds and morning sun.

Suddenly, he realized that light could not linger too long on the leaning cliffs, and sounds were anxious to race through the remote forests.

Throughout these journeys, solitude remained his constant companion. Dwelling on the mountain top, he lamented: “in this regret no one here’s kindred enough to climb this ladder of azure clouds with me (惜無同懷客 共登青雲梯).”7

Seeing nature unfold in time

At the same time, he was also crafting travel poetry. To some extent, mountain dwelling and walking became a way of being. In these travel poems, landscape is barely a static object. It is something experienced through motion, angle, light and shadow, colors, and sound.

In a poem titled “Crossing the lake from south mountain to north mountain,” he described the changing views from a boat:

Where the pitched trail enters recluse depths

Above ringed dragon-jade isles all ashimmer,

I see treetops tangling away into sky below,

Hear rivers above flooding the Great Valley.

Streams branch past rocks and flow away.

Forest paths are grown over, tracks gone.8

The curved islands in the flowing river, the side path, and the roaring ravines — the wonders of nature — walked into Xie Lingyun’s poetic mind in moments of quiet observation.

And he absorbed the smallest details of mountains with care. In another poem titled “Following axe-bamboo stream, I cross over a ridge and hike on along the river,” he experienced nature unfolding in time:

Though the cry of gibbons means sunrise,

Its radiance hasn’t touched this valley all

Quiet mystery. Clouds gather below cliffs,

And there’s still dew glistening on blossoms9

In these carefree moments, the poet seemed to have merged with nature:

Reaching tiptoe to ladle sips from waterfalls

And picking still unfurled leaves in forests,

I can almost see that lovely mountain spirit

In a robe of fig leaves and sash of wisteria.

Perhaps in these brief, simple, and tranquil moments of being with nature, his heart was purified and released from the aspirations, anxieties, and terrors of the political world.

By this point in his life, Xie Lingyun had failed repeatedly in politics. Despite his talent, his somewhat self-willed, excessive temperament made him political enemies easily.

In politics, he could not accomplish as much as he expected.

Yet, in the poetic world, he fulfilled his own wish — “To the end of mountains and seas I’m going, farewell, my friends! (jiangqiong shanhaiji yongjue shangxin wu 將窮山海跡 永絕賞心晤!).”10 — establishing the mountain-and-river poetry that would reshape the entire Chinese poetic tradition for centuries.

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