Wang Wei and the Origin of Buddha
Born in an official family, Wang Wei is well educated in traditional culture, good at poetry and painting, proficient in temperament and versatile. In his early years, he had the ambition of Confucianism to rule the world, and in his middle age, he had the elegant demeanor of Taoist seclusion. In his later years, he got the essence of Buddhism to govern his mind, which was in line with the ideal personality of the ancient traditional scholar-officials.
Wang Wei's addiction to Buddhism in his later years was related to his early family environment. The gentle and honest mother has been chanting scriptures for many years, imperceptibly. His younger brother Wang Jin is a disciple of Master Dazhao. The rich family atmosphere deeply influenced Wang Wei's thoughts.
Wang Wei's belief in Buddhism was also related to the social atmosphere of Buddhism at that time. During the Kaiyuan and Tianbao years, Zen flourished. When Shen Xiubei came to Chang 'an, he was treated by Wu Zetian and Tang Zhongzong, and it was very popular before the Anshi Rebellion. However, Wang Wei's belief in Buddhism is more influenced by his personal experience. In the 13th year of Kaiyuan, he was demoted to Jeju because of his involvement in the lion dance case. He was appointed as the treasurer to join the army, and was taken away by Zhang Jiuling. After Zhang Jiuling was demoted, Li came to power and politics became increasingly dark. In his early years, Wang Wei lost his political dependence and ambition of fame and fortune, and his hermit thought dominated the mainstream. An Shi Rebellion, "Lushan was trapped in two capitals, and Xuanzong was lucky. (King) Wei's followers are not as good as thieves. Taking Uygur medicine to treat dysentery is called hidden disease. Lushan was very pitiful. He sent someone to meet Luoyang, stayed at Pushi Temple, and forced him to be a fake agency. " After the rebellion, Wang Wei's work as a puppet agency during the Anshi Rebellion was exposed, and he faced a felony. Wang Jin, the younger brother, cut his official position in order to atone for his brother's sin, while Wang Wei was only demoted as Prince Zhong You, and later became an official, known as "Wang Youcheng" in history, which was a great blow to him. He is a completely honest, loyal and patriotic man. If Zhang Jiuling's demotion has made him extremely disappointed politically, then this indelible stain on his life will make him even more disheartened. In order to repay Tang Suzong's kindness and adjust his inner pain, he devoted himself to Buddhism and meditated.
The influence of Buddhism on Wang Wei
Wang Wei is a poet who is proficient in Buddhism. Friends before his death rated him as a "contemporary poet, proficient in Zen". Zen advocates "self-nature since the enlightenment", and emphasizes that monks can understand Buddhist principles through self-nature epiphany. This kind of Zen enlightenment is similar to the wonderful enlightenment in artistic creation. Zen thought has played a positive role in the formation of the unique style of Wang Wei's pastoral poems.
Zen interest, also known as "Zen Yue", refers to the quiet, carefree and natural meaning experienced when entering meditation, which embodies the purpose of Zen to pursue "meditation". Zen is often negative in content, but when it is used to express the beauty of mountains and rivers, it helps to highlight the quiet, quiet and solemn poetry in nature. The "Zen Yue" caused by the realm of "emptiness, silence and quietness" in Wang Wei's poems is manifested through the artistic expression of "moving in quietness". He vividly and delicately expressed this spiritual realm in his poems, such as "My Retreat in Zhongnanshan": "It's good to be old at the end of the year, and I'm coming to live at the foot of this mountain. Interest concentration is often unique to play and have a happy thing to enjoy self-appreciation. Sometimes go to the end of the water to seek the source, or sit and watch the ever-changing clouds rise. One day I met an old woodcutter, laughing and laughing, and never came back. " The first couplet shows a kind of loneliness, a kind of formal loneliness. However, this formal loneliness marks an evolutionary process from "many" to "one" and then to "nothing". The "loneliness" and "nothingness" in form become endless in nature, which can only be obtained through understanding. In the poem, the two images of "water poverty" and "Yun Qi" are used to pick up the dynamic fragments of flowing water from the hearing, to look for a "static picture" reflecting the vast blue sky from a distance from the vision, to arouse a quiet and lofty synaesthesia effect in the blending of dynamic and static, to slowly dissolve the stream into a long white cloud in the distance, to arouse a sense of nothingness from the ethereal so as to integrate oneself into the evolution of the universe, and to realize these two things in an instant.
Another example is an autumn night in the deep mountains: "After the rain, the mountains are empty and stand in the autumn night. The bright moon shed clear light from the cracks and cleared the fountain on the rocks. The bamboo forest is sonorous, the washerwoman returns, and the lotus leaves are swaying to get on the canoe. My friend's prince, what does it matter if spring is over and you are still here? "The first couplet points out that it is an early autumn night and everything in Shan Yu is new. They look so pure that they are not polluted by the world at all. At this time, the author's feelings for nature are aroused, and he perceives them with a perfect and flexible self-mind, savoring the inner rhythm of cosmic life and the inner emptiness, and enjoying himself. At that time, there must be a sacred feeling in his heart, a bit like what Christians call sacred love, which melted into the deepest part of the universe. "Empty mountain, bright moon, clear spring, pine and bamboo, violet" seems to be purely objective and intuitive, but due to the accumulation of history, such images have ethereal, quiet and elegant internal aesthetic significance. When combining these group images, the poet takes "empty mountain" as the core image, surrounded by bright moon and flowing water, forming a multi-level three-dimensional spatial structure with "empty mountain" as the center and then looking up, down, left and right. Wang Wei looks at nature in a more detached way. He combined the heart with the whole universe, which is neither a human point of view nor a material point of view, but a position that "the heart is the universe". This is obviously the artistic realm of Zen, and the subjective spirit tries to achieve the same universality as the universal spirit. Here, the boundaries between foreign objects and souls, heaven and earth have disappeared without a trace, showing a brilliant light and harmonious atmosphere, and the so-called "nirvana" is the best embodiment of this realm. In the state of "nirvana", the poet put an end to foreign things, returned to the soul, and entered a dreamland full of Zen.
Another example is his "Wu Xinyi", which reads: "hibiscus flowers with wooden ends, red calyx in the mountains, flowers blooming in solitary households." This is a dynamic and beautiful natural scene, but it falls quietly beside the uninhabited mountains. It has no purpose and no consciousness. It does not need people to appreciate its beauty and freshness, nor does it need people to express regret and sympathy for its decline. There is no joy in life and no sorrow in death. They come from nature, and they can't hear a trace of spiritual tremor, as if even the boundaries of time and space have disappeared. This kind of quiet and ethereal realm is not only the Zen realm presented by Zen, but also the ethereal realm of "quietness in motion" in Wang Wei's art.
The "moving" in "moving with quietness" is to achieve "enlightenment" and is an intellectual experience. Therefore, it is often described as a kind of "flip" of the mind, just like one end of the balance is placed on a heavy thing, and the other end suddenly flips, freeing a person from the usual tension and illusory persistence. The whole rigid structure used by human beings to interpret life suddenly shattered completely, so they had the feeling of gaining infinite freedom. It is an experience that often appears after persistently and intently pursuing the artistic conception of Zen. At the same time, "moving" also shows Wang Wei's inner emptiness and quiet "quiet beauty". Use "dynamic" to express "static", and finally reach the realm of "static" where things and I forget each other. The realm of "quietness" is a poetic atmosphere. They experience Zen from the slightest bit of a scene and the tone of everything, which often contains some kind of poetry. It is this Zen that enriches the artistic conception of Wang Wei's poems.
Blending of Buddhism and Poetic Mind
The highest expressive art of China's poetry is artistic conception. Artistic conception, also known as realm, is a Buddhist term, and realm has been mentioned many times in Buddhist scriptures. The realm in Buddhist scriptures generally refers to the ideal kingdom, nirvana. Wang Wei has made great achievements in artistic conception creation. He pursues Zen's "I forget things, I don't know what is me, what is the transcendental realm of things". His landscape poems are particularly eye-catching for their artistic posture. His images are rich and his brushwork is changeable, which is unmatched by any poet before him. Wang Wei's ability to develop his artistic conception to the extreme is inseparable from the infiltration of Buddhism. From the inspiration of creation, the artistic conception comes from wonderful understanding, and Zen has something in common with the wonderful understanding of poetry. Judging from the characteristics of poetic images, artistic conception emphasizes cutting and layout, and the virtual and the real coexist. Any practice of sticking things can't have a successful artistic conception.
Some landscape poems created by Wang Wei in Tianbao period have high attainments in artistic conception creation, especially the quatrains in Wang Chuan Bie Ji are regarded as the ultimate artistic conception. Wang Shizhen, a poet in Qing Dynasty, praised these poems as "Zen in every sentence". Wang Wei is very good at writing "emptiness" and "quietness" in his poems, and "quietness" is often associated with "emptiness". For example, "Bird Singing Creek" is a harmonious poem with a friend Huang Puyue's "Five Miscellaneous Poems of Yunxi", which describes the quiet scenery under the spring mountain and the moon, and shows the poet's quiet mood. In the first two sentences, the laurel tree falls and the spring night is quiet. "Sweet-scented osmanthus falls when people are idle", and the poet appreciates the night view in the mountains. In a quiet environment, he felt that the osmanthus fell and the flowers should be silent. However, because "man is idle" and there is no messy sound interference, he can feel the fine movement of nature, as if the spring mountain is empty, and only the poet is meditating and relaxing in this quiet mountain to experience the fresh air. In the last two sentences, the moon surprises the birds and the spring stream sounds. Watching, the moon rises, and Yin Hui is everywhere, illuminating the mountain stream and awakening the mountain birds living in the forest. Birds sing among the trees in the mountains, making the springs and streams quieter in spring. The poet successfully used the artistic technique of moving and writing static, and wrote moving and writing static in the overall quiet artistic conception, which set off a quiet environment. Wang Wei's writing in this way is not only a clever use of artistic techniques, but also a vivid expression of philosophical thoughts. It is to seek quietness in motion and carry forward the Zen thought of quietness and silence. The Buddhist in the Northern Dynasties wrote "On Zhao and Things Being Immobile", saying, "All things move, so if you move, you must be quiet. Don't move for the sake of silence, so don't move." It was Wang Wei who infiltrated the Buddhist theory into the description of scenery, "both motion and static" and publicized the idea that motion is static. Plum blossoms bloom and fall, and they are silent; Birds sing when they are frightened, and then they are quiet. The Flow of Birds is about Wang Wei's practice of "night meditation" and "meditation" (the original meaning of "meditation" is "meditation"). In the Ming Dynasty, Hu Yinglin's poem "Shi Pin" called "Birds in the Stream" and other poems into Zen, saying: "After reading, you forget your life experience, and all your thoughts are silent. "All the dust thoughts of fame and fortune in the world are purified in this quiet artistic conception.
Wang Wei, who has an indissoluble bond with Buddhism, has been looking for a balance between career reality and ideals and beliefs all his life, and finally found a spiritual home in Buddhism and Zen. Although he lived in the world of mortals, he obtained the separation of body and mind, the freedom of mind, the cohesion of enthusiasm, the harmony of mind and the echo of Zen, and expressed his loneliness in his own unique way. In addition, due to his profound understanding of the concept of Buddhism and Zen, Wang Wei used the thinking method of Zen to enrich and develop the creative techniques of landscape pastoral poetry, and opened up the field of landscape pastoral poetry, eventually becoming a generation of "Shi Fo" and shining brilliantly in the history of ancient poetry in China.
Extension: Introduction to Wang Wei's Characters
Wang Wei (70 1-76 1), whose real name is Moggi, whose real name is Shi Fo and whose real name is Vimalakīrti. Vimalakīrti is a layman of Mahayana Buddhism, a famous bodhisattva at home, and his free translation is famous for its cleanliness and pollution-free. It can be seen that Wang Wei's name has an indissoluble bond with Buddhism. Before Wang Wei's death, people thought that he was a "contemporary poet who was good at Zen." After his death, he got the title of "Shi Fo". Wang Wei was born in a devout Buddhist family. According to Wang Wei's "Please Make Shi Zhuang a Temple Watch", "My mother died, so Cui Shi, a gentleman in Boling County, was a teacher in her thirties." In Volume 25 of Notes on Wang Youcheng, there is an article "Ta Ming, a Buddhist monk in Dajianfu Temple", which describes the relationship between the poet and Daoguang Zen Master, a famous contemporary Buddhist monk: "Ten years later", it can be seen that Wang Wei really has an indissoluble bond with Buddhism and lived a monk-like life in his later years. According to "Old Tang Book", "In the capital, I spent quite a long time in Zhai, and I was taught not to wear clothes. I want to measure emptiness with tiny details, and I have nothing to do with it. I just want to focus on the relics. " More than a dozen monks, such as Cai, enjoy private conversations every day. They have nothing but a teapot and a mortar in the lent and are tied to the bed. After retiring from the DPRK, he burned incense and sat alone, taking Zen as his career. "This time, Wang Wei is like a monk.
Wang Wei had a literary talent when he was a teenager. In the ninth year of Kaiyuan (72 1), he was the first scholar, and he was very happy. I joined the army in Jeju for some reason. After returning to Chang 'an. In the 22nd year of Kaiyuan (734), Zhang Jiuling was appointed as the secretariat. Wang Wei was demoted to the right. At that time, he wrote a poem "Dedicating the Beginning to Prosper the People", praising Zhang Jiuling's political views against planting party member for personal gain and abusing his title, which reflected his mood of demanding at that time. Twenty-four years (736), Zhang Jiuling went on strike. The following year, Jingzhou was relegated to a long history. Li's appointment as the secretariat is a turning point in Xuanzong's politics from relatively clear to increasingly dark. Wang Wei was depressed about Zhang Jiuling's demotion, but he didn't quit the officialdom. In the 25th year of Kaiyuan, he was ordered to visit Cui, our envoy from Hexi. Later, he learned from the temple history that Wang Wei's official position was gradually promoted. Before the Anshi Rebellion, on the one hand, officials were tired and worried about the officialdom at that time, on the other hand, they were attached to the stack and could not leave decisively. So when in Rome, do as the Romans do, and live a semi-official and semi-secluded life for a long time.
There are many achievements in poetry, including frontier poems, landscape poems, metrical poems and quatrains. His poems were called by Su Shi as "paintings in poems and poems in paintings". He really has his unique attainments in describing natural scenery. Whether it is the grandeur of famous mountains and rivers, the grandeur of frontier blockades, or the quietness of small bridges and flowing water, it can accurately and concisely create a perfect and vivid image, with less pen and ink, high artistic conception and complete integration of poetry and painting.
Landscape pastoral poetry school is one of the two major poetry schools in the prosperous Tang Dynasty. This school of poetry is the successor of Tao Yuanming, Xie Lingyun and Xie Tiao. The poets of this school are famous for their good description of landscapes and pastoral scenery, and their artistic styles are relatively close. They reflect their peaceful mind or secluded thoughts by depicting quiet scenery, so they are called "the school of landscape pastoral poetry". The main writers are Meng Haoran, Wang Wei, Chang Jian, Zuyong, Pei Di and others. Among them, Wang Wei and Meng Haoran, also known as "Wang Meng", have the highest achievements and the greatest influence.