178 t He tang Dy na s t y
shadowed sun-soaked myriad gorges differ 陰晴眾壑殊 (yīn qíng zhòng hè shū)
wish find lodging man place overnight 欲投人處宿 (yù tóu rén chù sù)
across water ask wood -cutter 隔水問樵夫 (gé shuĭ wèn qiáo fū)
[Tonal pattern Ia, see p. 172]Unlike Du Fu and Li Bai, Wang Wei does not tell us about his emotional and physi-
cal conditions or his imagined feats of transcendence. Instead, he leads us through
successive acts of intense visual perception. In the first couplet, he points out the
Zhongnan mountains in the distance, first directing our gaze upward via Taiyi
Peak to heaven and then horizontally along the linked mountains all the way to
the sea. In the second couplet, he leads us away from the panoramic scene and
engages us in a hide-and-seek with two atmospheric images up close. By a turning
in the third couplet, he changes the object of observation from the mountains to
the vast plain below. This new panoramic scene delights us with its kaleidoscopic
formation of patterns and colors under the effects of the sunlight and clouds. In
the last couplet, he shifts back to a nearby scene and shows us traces of man: a
woodcutter and a call to him from the other side of a valley brook, asking for a
place to stay for the night.
A renowned painter credited with founding the Southern School of Landscape
Painting, Wang Wei is often praised for the painterly qualities in his poetry. This
poem is certainly an excellent example of the painterly qualities in his finest land-
scape poems. It alternates panoramic scenes with close-ups and delights us with
its delicate play of colors (“white clouds” versus “greenish haze,” the chiaroscuro
effect of the sun). It constantly shifts the angle of observation—now horizontal and
vertical, now from below upward and from above downward. All these painterly
qualities work together perfectly to yield a rare feast of visual pleasure. Moreover,
the depicted scenes and images trace the stages of a day’s journey of landscape
viewing: starting with a distant view (first couplet), continuing through an uphill
climb (second couplet) and the arrival at the summit (third couplet), and ending
with a descent into the valley at dusk (last couplet).
This poem is also a perfect example of an even more important quality of Wang
Wei’s finest landscape poems: their artistic embodiment of a Buddhist worldview.
Interestingly, if we direct our attention to the last word in each line of the two
middle parallel couplets, we notice a string of four terms frequently used in Chi-
nese Buddhist texts to explain the Buddhist worldview: he, wu, bian, and shu. The
word he is part of the term hehe (Sanskrit sāmagari), which refers to a composite of
causes and conditions (yinyuan; Sanskrit hetupratyaya) underlying the existence of
all phenomena, objective or subjective. The word wu is part of the term wu’er (nega-
tion of two sides; neither... nor), which denotes a Mahayanist exercise of double
negation aimed at preventing the reification of any thing or concept as the ontologi-
cal absolute. Insofar as all things, physical existences or mental constructs, arise
from a composite of causes and conditions, they cannot possibly possess any essen-
tial substance, and therefore are all subject to mutability (bian) and differentiation
(shu). It follows that Buddhist truth is neither being nor emptiness (śūnyatā).