From: Three Elegy Poems by Tao Yuanming [Wei and Jin Dynasties]
Excerpt:
Weeds are boundless and poplars are rustling.
In mid-September, severe frost sent me out of the outer suburbs.
No one lives on all sides, and the high graves wither.
The horse cries to the sky, and the wind is depressed.
It's not a thousand years since the secluded room was closed.
A thousand years later, there is nothing the wise can do.
Always send people away and return to their homes.
Relatives or sorrows, others have also sung.
What's the way to die? I'm on the same mountain.
The vast wilderness is yellow, and the bleak autumn wind shakes the poplars. It's already the middle of September. My relatives sent me to the outer suburbs for burial. There are no people around, and the grave is high and desolate. The horse is sad, and the wind is sad and bleak. The tomb has been sealed in darkness and will never see the dawn.
You will never see the dawn, and neither will the sages. Those who had just been sent to the funeral went back to their rooms. Relatives may still be sad, and others have long forgotten to sing. What can I say when I am dead? I'm stuck in the mountains.
Literary appreciation in Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties is a typical literature in troubled times. Sensitive writers are most likely to feel the shortness, fragility, unpredictability and impermanence of life in the war, thus forming the tragic tone of literature. Judging from Tao's poems, he is no longer a nobody who laments the short life, but has the identity of "Dahua" and a vision beyond life and death, so his poems of this kind have a new look.
The excerpts cover the whole process of funeral, and the undertaker is the key. Tao Yuanming saw through the secular human feelings, so he reversed the meaning of The Analects and truthfully wrote the performance of ordinary people from thought to action. This is where the author is really philosophical and unpretentious in his thoughts.
In the last two sentences of this poem, he wrote: "What is the way to die?" What is there to say after death? He entrusted his body to nature and turned it into dust, just like the soil at the foot of the mountain. This is a very valuable materialistic view at the turn of Jin and Song Dynasties, when the concept of reincarnation in Buddhism was very popular.