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.

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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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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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His name is often associated with romantic poetry. Stories about him revolved around literary talent, wine, and a Taoist-inspired freedom from social conventions.

In popular memory, an anecdote about him was repeated over time, becoming a myth in its own right.

One day, he was summoned to the imperial court. He showed up drunk, disregarding the formalities and decorum of the court, a usually unforgivable act in a time that valued rank and rituals.

More than this, he insulted Gao Lishi (684-762), a powerful eunuch, asking him, as the tale goes, to remove his shoes.

This is the famous Tang poet Li Bai 李白 (701-762), the esteemed Poet Transcendent (shixian 詩仙).

We do not know how the story ended that day.

Sometime later, the minister probably persuaded Yang Guifei (719-756), the emperor’s most favored concubine, that Li Bai’s “Qingping Melodies (Qingping diao 清平調) was not just a praise of her beauty but an insinuation — a critique of her negative influence on the emperor.

Words can cause waves in social relations. Perhaps, they travel even faster in the circles of imperial politics.

Li Bai was soon punished. Afterward, he spent much of the rest of his life wandering, with only brief political involvement intermittently.

On an experiential level, Li Bai is similar to us, experiencing the various forms of the human condition while finding our own ways to establish ourselves as we navigate the world.

From the Wei-Jin to the High Tang

The Wei-Jin era was characterized by prolonged political and social instability. Wars and conflicts recur in the realm for almost four hundred years. Amid this time of disorder, something significant was fermenting and emerging, eventually manifesting in the discovery of the self.

This inner awakening took many forms, as we see in the rise of Wei-Jin Metaphysics (Weijin xuanxue 魏晉玄學), neo-Taoism, the influx of Buddhism and its integration with the existing spiritual makeup, the reformation of poetry, artistic innovation in landscape painting, and the first climax of Chinese calligraphy.

A defining, shared thread among these forms of expression is the Wei-Jin spirit of freedom — individual sovereignty in the natural self against the restraints of rituals, represented by Ruan Ji (210-263) and Ji Kang (223-262), members of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove (zhulin qixian 竹林七賢), and many outstanding individuals.

The Tang culture offers a different flavor: grandeur, imperial confidence, stability, and prosperity, substantiated by a sturdy architecture of a civilization at its peak.

But still, the human condition persists, with its problems, when an empire is flourishing. To some extent, the more complete the political order becomes, the more suffocating its demands can feel for those outside the rigid frameworks of the cultural, social, and political systems.

Regarded as the symbol of Tang romanticism, Li Bai is often read through mountains, wine, moonlight, and the unrestrained poetic language. Yet part of his appeal lies in something older — a Wei-Jin state of being, where emotions, innermost thoughts, words, and actions cannot be separated.

It is on this experiential level that Li Bai, to some extent, inherited and embodied that spirit. In his poetry, as well as his life, we see this theme again and again: that the poet’s heart could not find a proper place inside the imperial ritual order.

A young man with ambition

Li Bai was born in 701, during the reign of Emperor Xuanzong (685-762) — a period often described as the Tang dynasty’s peak.1

At about four years old, his family — originally from Longxi 隴西 (a county in today’s Gansu province), but probably lived in exile in Tiaozhi 條支, near present-day Ghazni, Afghanistan — moved back to Sichuan.

So the young Li Bai grew up in Qinglian village, today’s Jiangyou county. Later, he called himself Qinglian Jushi 青蓮居士.

Apart from his love of swordsmanship, he was heavily influenced by the Confucian ideal—the scholar-official who applies his learning and abilities to serve the state. This is a path of meaning: being useful, recognized, and carving out a place in this world for oneself.

But too many hopes can sometimes end in profound disappointment and disillusionment.

In 725, at the age of twenty-five, Li Bai left home and began his adventures in southern China.

In 727, he married into the Xu family, an influential house in Anlu, Hubei province. At this time, his literary talent has earned him some local recognition.

We can guess that he was probably searching for access, for a doorway to enter into public life. In imperial politics, personal brilliance could be admired while still remaining unusable.

Around 730, at the age of thirty, Li Bai arrived in Chang’an, hoping to connect with someone who could help him realize his political ambitions. Chang’an, at this time, was not merely a city, but a living instrument of power. For a literary person like Li Bai, his future could be decided through networks and favors as much as through personal merit.

Around this time, Wang Wei 王維 (701-761), the poet-Buddha, had already been working in the central government for some years, with experience and a taste for political banishment between his first official post at the age of twenty-one and the year 730.

Du Fu 杜甫 (712-770), the poet-sage (shisheng 詩聖), who later befriended Li Bai, was just eighteen years old, struggling to pass the state exams to enter politics.

Li Bai probably believed, or at least hoped, that perhaps he could find his way in Chang’an by excellence. The tragedy is that the world is not always easily persuaded, and talent is never enough.

With a few years of groping, by 735, at thirty-four, Li Bai was frustrated with the stalled trajectory of his career. He decided to leave the capital.

While traveling in southern China, he wrote the famous poem, “Invitation to Wine” (Jiang jin jiu 將進酒), clearly expressing his deep-seated disappointment twisted with the sense of the flashing of time:

Do you not see the Yellow River come from the sky,

Rushing into the sea and ne’er come back?

Do you not see the mirrors bright in chambers high

Grieve o’er your snow-white hair though once it was silk-black?2

In flowing waters without an end, in the silent change of hair colors, Li Bai saw the passage of time.

Yet, he did not just indulge himself in such sorrows. The Taoist spirit began to penetrate him in moments when he was pinned down by reality. The poem then switched to a higher pitch:

When hopes are won, oh! Drink your fill in high delight,

And never leave your wine-cup empty in moonlight!

Heaven has made us talents, we’re not made in vain.

A thousand gold coins spent, more will turn up again.

Wine does not indicate simple pleasure. It becomes a necessary doorway through which the poet enters and roams in the spiritual realm, released from worries and concerns, from worldly expectations.

Still, Li Bai perhaps has sensed something darker in such hours of seizing the day:

What difference will rare and costly dishes make?

I only want to get drunk and never to wake.

How many great men were forgotten through the ages?

But great drinkers are more famous than sober sages.

Jade, exquisite meals, and all the delicacies may not be precious. But is it better to get drunk than to be awake in a vulgar world?

Li Bai probably, for the first time, felt and empathized with the difficulties and pains of those poets and sages before him, not from reading history books but from his firsthand experiences.

Perhaps in such moments, he felt the rising inner twists between his ideal and the urge to transcend.

He was still optimistic at this time. At the end of the poem, he calls on his companions to keep drinking, to trade belongings for more wine, in the hope that wine would wash away endless sorrows.

From then on, wine ceased to be a simple motif but became a medium connecting words and the poet’s inner world. Through it, the spiritual lineage of the Wei-Jin culture did not fade away, but found new life, flowering in the poetry and the wandering existence of Li Bai.

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Since relocating to southern China, the Xie family had been steadily building its estates in Shining 始寧 (today’s Shangyu, Zhejiang province), Kuaiji 會稽 (today’s Shaoxing 紹興), and in the capital region around Jiankang. In the midst of survival, they recreated a southern world where their aristocratic life, culture, and memory could continue.

After returning from his foster family at fifteen, Xie Lingyun finally came back to where he belonged as an acknowledged member of the clan. In Jiankang, he could play and grow with his cousins, moving through courtyards, gardens, and halls that all carried the name of Xie.

The Xie family had its own rituals of cultivation. During regular family gatherings, the elders would test the younger generation’s skill in conversation and verse. All this was part of qingtan 清談, or “pure talk,”1 a Wei-Jin style of discussion that involves metaphysics, the classics, poetry, and art.

His family was at Wuyixiang 烏衣巷, a lane that later became, in Chinese memory, a symbol of aristocratic refinement and fading glory. For the young Lingyun, this was the stage on which he was expected to shine: to display brilliance in speech, to preserve not only land and titles, but also a way of life.

Lingyun’s father probably passed away early. Later, he inherited his grandfather’s title as Duke of Kangle 康樂公.

Since he had been away from the house for many years and his father’s early death, the elders cherished him. It’s imaginable that they had high hopes for him, expecting the young Lingyun to continue both the cultural and political reputation of the whole family.

Still, in the first twenty years of his life, Lingyun experienced no material hardship. Even later, he was not hard-pressed by the daily anxieties of making a living. Yet, his pressures and worries were of a different kind: the expectations to live up to a family legend, and to find his place in this world, in his family history.

Political involvement and first exile

As the Xie family consolidated its life in the south, the dynasty itself was becoming more fragile.

Inside the Eastern Jin court, power shifted between factions and strongmen. Perfect for insurgencies. There was the domestic rebellion movement led by Huan Xuan 桓玄 (369-404), and then Liu Yu 劉裕 (363-422), whose rise would eventually end the Jin dynasty.

Liu Yu came from a humble beginning. Decades of groping in the corners of the world, along with his army experience, made him ruthlessly pragmatic and politically savvy. He learned the necessary skill of surviving in a chaotic political world: patience, prudence, and strategic acting.

Between 418 and 420, he first deposed Emperor An 晉安帝 (382-419), installed another young emperor, and, when the time was right, killed the last Jin ruler.

In 420, he founded the Liu Song dynasty (363-422), replacing the house he had once served.

Caught inside this shifting landscape, Xie Lingyun entered politics.

Together with his uncle Xie Hun 謝混 (ca. 381-412), he was associated with the opposition faction that had been fighting against the Liu Yu group for years.2

From roughly 405 to 412, he served this circle for seven or eight years.

After Liu Yu consolidated his rule, he moved ruthlessly against rivals. Xie Hun and his associates were killed. Xie Lingyun, however, was spared, perhaps because he was young, not that much involved in the political maneuvering of his uncle’s faction, or perhaps Liu Yu needed to keep some alliance with the great southern houses.

But we can reason that Xie Lingyun would never be trusted by the new political establishment. He was assigned some administrative roles, but they were brief and unstable, until soon he was stripped of his official duties.

From 412 to 416, between twenty-eight and thirty-two, he was jobless. This political setback, however, opened an unexpected space: he now had time to study, reflect, and deepen his involvement with Buddhism.

In the next few years, he associated with the Buddhist circles in Kuaiji and beyond, linked to influential monks such as Huiyuan 慧遠 (334-417), the first patriarch of the Pure Land School (jingtu zong 淨土宗), a branch of Mahayana Buddhism, on Mount Lu.

Huiyuan fled Chang’an and established the White Lotus Societies (Bailianshe 白蓮社) in 402. He once published an important piece, “Exemption of the Buddhist Clergy from the Requirement of Civil Etiquette” 沙門不敬王者論, arguing that the secular political and social order should not bind Buddhist practice. He used the traditional intellectual framework, “inward sageliness and outward kingliness” 內聖外王 to defend and carve out a legitimate and independent space for Buddhism in traditional China.

In 416, at thirty-two, Xie Lingyun returned to office. This time, he, along with the poet Yan Yanzhi 顏延之 (384-456), the monk Huilin 慧琳 (ca. 385-435), and one of Liu Yu’s sons named Liu Yizhen 劉義真 (407-424), formed a political circle.3 Their intention, reasonably, was hoping that Yizhen would someday sit on the throne.

Unfortunately, after Liu Yu died in 422, Lingyun’s small circle, along with their political hopes, was shattered. Another failed political attempt.

That same year, Lingyun was reassigned to a distant post as prefect of Yongjia 永嘉, a coastal place far from the capital. He turned thirty-eight this year.

On the surface, this was a new appointment. Yet, in reality, perhaps Lingyun knew it was a political exile.

Withdrawal and an inner turning

Yongjia was on the southeastern coast, a peaceful world of mountains, trees, and rivers, sloping down toward the sea.

For a man who spent his first 15 years in a family steeped in the simplicity and placidity of the Taoist life philosophy, and later in the courtyard, in the lavish life of Jiankang, this was a world of nature.

After his arrival, illness forced Xie Lingyun to spend several months in recovery at a mountain estate. Now he had time and space to quietly be with the wind, waters, and the changing light of nature.

Being exiled to this place became a rare opportunity for contemplation. He was pushed away from the center of politics. Perhaps the memories of early family gatherings and the moments of pure talk came back to him often. And he certainly reflected on his failed political plans.

As his health slowly improved, he began to venture out in the mountains.

To prepare for long-range mountain hiking, he invented a special wooden shoe, the famous xie gong ji 謝公屐 — with the function of removable frontal and rear parts for going up and down the ridges and hills.4 With his knapsack and broad-brimmed peasant hat, he would often disappear into the mountains for days, often shirking his public duties.

A poem at this period reflected his life at Yongjia:

Too simple-minded to perfect Integrity

and too feeble to plow fields in seclusion,

I followed a salary here to the sea’s edge

And lay watching forests bare and empty.5

He realized his naivety to fulfill the perfect Confucian official ideal, too weak to be a pure recluse in the countryside. He was stuck at life’s crossroads: the public servant path or the recluse. Where should he go?

Yet the vast and immediate nature scenes somehow helped him to open his heart outward:

That sickbed kept me blind to the seasons,

But opening the house up, I’m suddenly

looking out, listening to surf on a beach

and gazing up into high mountain peaks

Nature here is not a backdrop. It invites him to rest, to try to renew himself, perhaps discover something he could not obtain from politics. The seasons of change witnessed the transformation of things and the sorrow of Xie Lingyun:

Lakeshores newborn into spring grasses

and garden willows become caroling birds:

In them the ancient songs haunt me with 

flocks and flocks and full lush and green.

The poem ends on a tension he would never entirely resolve:

Isolate dwelling so easily becomes forever.

It’s hard settling the mind this far apart,

but not something ancients alone master:

that serenity is everywhere apparent here.

He knows isolation can probably harden into permanent distance. He feels how difficult it is for his heart to truly settle into peace, despite the serenity of the ancients around him, calling him to join them.

In Yongjia, exile and illness did not crush him. They somehow reoriented him.

What he has lost in political involvement, he has gained in a new discovery: a different way of inhabiting the world.

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On rainy days, the world around us feels out of focus. The normal pace of life is disrupted. Sounds blur. And time seems to have slowed down.

A cup of wine on the table, pages half-open, and the mind starts roaming, toward the past, the unknown, and all the imagined lives one could have lived, all the roads one did not take.

Among the poets in the Tang dynasty, Li Bai 李白 (701-762) is often regarded as the one who most vividly embodies the Taoist spirit in both his way of living and his poetry. Reading his poems is a very sensual, transcendent, and almost ecstatic experience: you flow with the rhythm of his lines as if riding the wind, wandering above worldly concerns for a brief moment.

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.

I can’t cross Yellow River: ice has stopped its flow

…

Hard is the way. 

Don’t go astray!

Whither today?

A time will come to ride the wind and cleave the waves,

I’ll set my cloud-white sail and cross the sea which raves.1

No wonder he was generally acclaimed as the Poet Immortal (shixian 詩仙) — a figure shaped by an independent spirit, who seems born to break from convention, unwilling to be tamed by parochial worldviews and prevailing opinions.

Tao Yuanming shares this Taoist undercurrent, yet his expression of it carries a different feel. There is no thunderous outcry, no straightforward cynicism. His refusal is quiet, but still stubborn in its calm. What he guards with determination is not necessarily being different, but his own way of living.

Reflections on life and death are a recurring theme in Taoism. Between living and the eventual disappearance lies a more uncomfortable, persistent question — how are we supposed to live?

In moments when I feel stuck, at a crossroads, or simply unable to see a way forward, I would sometimes return to this poem by Tao Yuanming.

It begins with a dark, gloomy reckoning, then moves into a kind of spiritual wandering, and eventually ends not in escape but in reconciliation.

Drinking Alone in Rainy Days

The course of nature ever moves on to its close:
‘Tis a truth that has come home to men of all ages.
The Immortals who once lived on earth
Are nowhere to be found nowadays.
An old friend comes with wine, and says
It will bring me immortality.
I drink, the hundred sorrows recede;
I drink deep and fall into oblivion.
Not that the skyey rim has fallen away,
But a son of nature is careless of the world.
Like the heron, mounting on strange wings,
I seem to touch the heavens
And have returned in an instant.
Since I have begun to cherish my will,
For forty years, anxious and striving,
Body and form should have long decomposed;
Yet, my heart being intact,
What more should I say?

Roland C. Fang, Gleanings from Tao Yuan-ming (Hong Kong: The Commercial Press, 1980),36. 

The crane that won’t carry me

In this poem, Tao Yuanming reflected on the legendary immortals.

Wang Ziqiao 王子喬 was a prince of the Zhou dynasty (ca. 1046-221 BC).2 He was said to be remarkably intelligent as a child. Later, he followed a Taoist master to learn the art of longevity and riding the crane.

Chi Songzi 赤松子, another wandering immortal, was said to live in the time of Shennong 神農, and served as the Master of Rain.3 He could practice the ingestion of water-jade (shuiyu 水玉), through which one could endure fire without being burned. Shennong was a mythological figure, a master of medicine and agriculture, in prehistoric China, usually dated to c. 3000-2800 BC.

They symbolize a shared fantasy: stepping out of this mortal world altogether and roaming freely beyond it.

For many people of that time, this image of riding a crane into the clouds was not just a legend. Instead, it was a popular script for escape, and perhaps, for some people, a means of cultivating transcendence.

Ji Kang 嵇康 (223-262 AD), a poet from the early Wei dynasty (220-266), once wrote of his wish to “wander in the eight extremes with Wang Ziqiao on the clouds” 思與王喬 乘雲遊八極, leaving behind the troubled world, politics, and all the constraints that come with being an ordinary human being bound by time.

Tao Yuanming was well aware of this popular myth. In his poem, he deliberately evokes it with the line about the heron and “strange wings.” For a moment, the fantasy seems within reach: wine in hand, emotions rising and receding, the person light enough to fly into the sky.

And then he returns to a sober realization: this promise is not his path.

There is no actual ascent. No pathway toward immortality. He refuses to be captured by this vision of escape. He must find his own way.

Philosophical core

In the face of prevailing external opinions, Tao Yuanming faced a hard choice: to conform or to stay true to himself.

At the heart of this poem lies a stance rooted in a Taoist spirit of renzhen — letting one’s genuine nature take its proper place. In the Taoist language, the notion of Heaven (tian 天) often denotes nature and what is natural.

So what is heavenly and natural is not actually removed from one’s self. “A son of nature is careless of the world (renzhen wu suoxian 任真無所先)” indicates connecting and harmonizing with one’s natural state.

He is not asking Heaven to rescue him, nor dreaming of an ideal, distant future where things will finally make sense. Instead, he is staying with that inner clarity, along with the suffering associated with it. What matters for him is living in a way that does not betray his own genuine nature.

Guo Xiang (252-312 AD), the neo-Taoist philosopher in the Wei-Jin era (220 - 589AD), explained this spirit this way:

As for one who complies with the natural and forgets right and wrong, his embodiment allows for nothing but natural authenticity [tianzhen]…4

In essence, following what is genuine within is to live in a spontaneous, natural way — a path toward inner freedom grounded in one’s own inner self.

Temptations take different forms in modern life. The scripts of the immortal legends find their patterns in contemporary space: career ladders, power and prestige, social recognition, or an enviable lifestyle on a screen — in a strange way, they become our new “cranes,” promising to lift us out of the “discomfort” of our present life.

They all seem to work in collusion, telling me that if I could just get there, I would finally be free.

Until I realize the hollowness of this manufactured vision and “freedom.”

Tao Yuanming understood, but quietly refused this logic of conforming to conventions. He did not deny the hardship of working in his fields, the suffocating aspects of countryside life. Yet, in the end, he chose to stay, to keep his feet in the fields, and to find his peace there.

I think he found a different kind of vastness, a unique spiritual freedom. Instead of placing his hopes and expectations on the outside, he practiced widening the space within the life he had: being content with his everyday activities, coming to terms with life’s shortness, and not deceiving himself by succumbing to external voices.

On rainy days, being with the quietness of the moment, this feels especially close.

There is nowhere spectacular to go. Just the sound of the rain, a cup of wine, and the vision in Tao Yuanming’s poem. Sitting there, I feel my spirit and senses lingering in the continuous rains, my heart cleared, and my eyes refreshed.

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Tao Yuanming built an idyllic poetic world in his garden and field poems (tianyuan shi 田園詩). The simple joy of being with nature and dwelling in country life, undisturbed by worldly concerns, very much embodies an essential part of the recluse tradition in China.

Wang Wei’s nature poems convey the harmony between humans and the natural world. As an accomplished musician and painter, he fused Buddhist and Taoist insights with the poetic medium, offering readers philosophical and aesthetic experiences.

Yet, it was Xie Lingyun who pioneered this particular genre of nature poetry in the Chinese literary tradition.

Before he was a poet wandering through mountain ridges and streams, he was a child caught inside the political world of the Eastern Jin dynasty 東晉 (317- 420 AD).

Early years

Born to a noble house, Xie Lieyun grew up without the warmth most children take for granted in a normal family.

His family, the Xie clan, was the most prestigious of the era. Because of the family’s Taoist beliefs and succession concerns, the elders sent him away to be raised elsewhere.

Zhong Rong 鐘嶸 (ca. 468-518), a scholar of Chinese poetics, in his Ranking Poetry (Shipin 詩品) recorded, “He did not return to the capital until he was fifteen, therefore, people all called him the ‘guest child (ke er 客兒).’”

He was forced to become a guest in his own house. A somewhat stranger to the place that should have shaped him.

Because of his family lineage, people around him most likely indulged the young Xie Lingyun. Few would dare to discipline the heir of a noble family.

Historical records described him as self-willed, self-contained, and cynical about the state of affairs.1 Yet, given his unusual childhood, we can see him as a young man who did not receive the proper love, care, and understanding he needed. He demonstrated early talent in literary and philosophical studies, yet he was probably deeply confused and alone.

If he had been born into an ordinary household, he might have learned early that the world could be indifferent, that one must rely on oneself. But growing up as the honored child of an aristocratic family only magnified his inner quest. Everyone respected him, yet perhaps no one truly understood him, or cared enough to tell him something about life.

There lies an inherent sadness and sorrow in his character. A sense of estrangement, tangled with silent observation, expressed in his poems, seemed to have accompanied him through life.

Even after years of Buddhist and Taoist study, he could not quite attain inner serenity, nor could he find happiness in society.

That inner void, shaped in childhood, never fully left him. He once wrote:

In the past when traveling in the capital,

I never forget about the hills and valleys.

Now returning to the mountains and rivers,

My heart and footsteps fall into solitude (xinji shuang jimo 心跡雙寂寞).2

It is a confession of someone who was alone in the crowd, but could not find inner peace in solitude.

A fractured world

Ironically, the turbulence of the age mirrored Xie Lingyun’s inner restlessness.

After the fall of the Han 漢 dynasty in 220 AD, China entered a long era of political fragmentation. It was only after nearly 400 years of conflict and division that China was reunified under the Sui dynasty 隋 (581-618), succeeded by the powerful Tang 唐 (618-907).

This in-between period is the Wei-Jin era 魏晉 (220-420), followed by the Northern and Southern dynasties 南北朝 (421-589). The political theme of this age was war, usurpation, and continuous struggles. The entire northern part of China, especially the ancient heartland around Chang’an, the cradle of Chinese civilization, had fallen to non-Han regimes with the fall of the Western Jin dynasty 西晉 (266-316).

In 317, the Eastern Jin court, carrying the remaining symbols of legitimacy, fled south and rebuilt itself in Jiankang (today’s Nanjing).

A new political order emerged at this time: the north occupied by the “outsiders” and the south as the last stand of Chinese civilization. The aristocratic clans, like the Xie and Wang families, found themselves the torchbearers of that cultural heritage while still having to manage a delicate balance with imperial authority.

It was the first time in Chinese history that the entire educated class — scholars, poets, thinkers, and officials — had to confront a painful truth: their ancestral homeland was no longer in their hands. And later generations in China would face a similar fate again and again.

For all the southerners and people fleeing from the north, this was not just a political crisis. It was a spiritual rupture.

This collective exile shaped a distinctive Wei-Jin mentality: a blend of spiritual anxiety, metaphysical contemplation, a continued process of self-discovery amid survival, and a longing for retreat — into philosophy, into aesthetic life, into high mountains.

And it was into this damaged, anxious world that Xie Lingyun was born.

The weight of heritage

His family was not merely prestigious. It literally stood at the center of a defining moment in ancient Chinese civilization.

His mother came from the Liu clan, an influential house of the time. She was the granddaughter of the famous calligrapher Wang Xizhi 王羲之 (303-361). And Xie Lingyun himself was also recorded as an excellent calligrapher.

His grandfather, Xie Xuan 謝玄 (343-388), was the brilliant commander of the Northern Expedition and the architect of the legendary Battle of Fei River (Feishui zhi zhan 淝水之戰) in 383.

And his great-grandfather, Xie An 謝安 (320-385), was the prime minister of the Eastern Jin. His establishment of the renowned “Northern Army”(beifubing 北府兵) proved to be decisive in shaping the balance of power between the north and the south.

At a time when Northern China was under the rule of non-Chinese regimes, the Eastern Jin court was fragile, constantly on the edge of collapse.

The battle in 383 decided the north-south divide for decades to come.

The invading Former Qin 前秦 (351-394) army was vast, allegedly about 800,000 (but likely around 250,000 directly engaged in the battle), seemingly unstoppable. If the Eastern Jin fell, the last remnant of Chinese political and cultural identity would perish with it.

With only about 80,000 soldiers, Xie Xuan’s victory changed everything. It was not only a military triumph. It was a civilizational turning point.

The win preserved the southern region as a refuge for Chinese culture, allowing philosophy, literature, ritual, classical learning, and the Chinese way of life to continue unbroken.

For Xie Lingyun, this was not distant history. It was family history.

He inherited the name of the general who held the last door of the Chinese world. Since his early years, people around him would have looked at him through this lineage.

He was expected to embody it.

Great families can often create unspeakable, ungraspable loneliness. Born into this legacy, Xie Lingyun carried a weight far heavier than titles or rank.

For a boy who came home at fifteen, he returned not just to a household, but to a family myth, something he may or may not know how to inhabit.

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On a late spring day, Tao Yuanming went out for a long walk, describing his feelings briefly:

Like a lonely shadow I wander about to find both joy and regret woven together in my breast.1

A sense of serenity is distilled from the nature scenes — a flowing river, light mist, and blue mountains emerging from it — complementing each other in perfect harmony.

Tao Yuanming captured the simple joy of being with such a picture:

Wide and deep the levelling fords;

I rinse my mouth, I wash my feet.

Lovely in the haze the distant scene.

With glee I smile, with joy I gaze.

As the common saying runs:

Self-content brings us peace of mind.

Thus I quaff off my cup of wine,

To find myself drunk with delight.2

Self-contentment, for the poet, arose from this stroll, with his wine and the company of this lovely spring day.

Yet, he was not completely carefree.

A vision from the Analects

When gazing at the river flowing afar, a story from the Analects came to Tao Yuanming. It was a conversation between Confucius and four of his disciples.

Confucius wanted to hear their wishes. The first three all talked about their ambitions for political participation.

But Zengxi spoke of his wish for an imagined day: with spring clothes finished, he would assemble six or seven companions, bathe in the Yi River, enjoy the breeze upon the Rain Dance Altar (a site for rain prayer ceremony), sing, and return at dusk. Confucius then sighs, “I am with Zengxi.”3

This anecdote indicates the ideal of personal ease and social harmony. And it probably has reminded Tao Yuanming of his reality: the world is not at peace.

Joy and sorrow in the heart

The year was 404 when Tao Yuanming turned forty. And the realm was in a mess.

Just the winter before, a usurper named Huan Xuan 桓玄 (369-404), overthrew the Eastern Jin dynasty (317-420).

Soon, another warlord and the emperor of the Liu Song dynasty (420-479), Liu Yu 劉裕 (363-422), raised troops under the banner of restoration.

The two armies had been fighting against one another from the spring to the summer. This poem of late-spring quiet stands as a contrast to the political and social circumstances.

Tao Yuanming’s joy of communing with nature is invariably colored by a sense of regret and sorrow. Did he feel better after this walk? Could he truly be at peace with himself?

In the fourth chapter, the poet described his lingering thoughts after coming back home:

This morn, and also this night,

A quiet heart within a quiet cot.

I see the flowers and herbs, row by row,

And the trees and bamboos, thick and shady.

The pure-toned zither before my knee,

And half a pot of unstrained wine.

Then my fancy roves to the age of gold.

But O, why am I left here all alone!4

He felt the harmony with nature, yet the time was harsh. His heart was capable of simple contentment, but this age could not. Even though he entertained the imagined “golden age” of the past, he knew that solitude was his reality.

I wonder how Tao Yuanming would reconcile his personal wish with the troubled times. When the autumn approached him in the year 404, did he find his way?

This poem of Tao Yuanming often reminds me of an old melody on the zither, “Wild geese landing on the sandbank (Pingsha luoyan 平沙落雁). The flying geese could find their resting place on the receptive sand, where will we be floating to, as travelers, temporarily lodged in this world?

Our world today is perhaps not so different. Is it not the case that some governments are still justifying their savage, aggressive actions with fundamentally artificial pretexts? Aren’t some autocratic governments still trampling on human dignity and liberty with impunity?

The appearance of an era can take different forms, yet the pulse and substance of it — human nature, individual aspirations and follies, wars and struggles, will remain in various subtle or blatant ways.

Perhaps the human world is doomed to sway between peace and chaos, like the sequence of seasons. But the vision of harmony with nature and a society at ease, no matter how idealistic, is still worth fighting for.

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Internally, it calls upon us to attend to the ritual of closure and a new beginning.

So is the rhythm of life. It is always in motion. What we love may lose that fervor with the passage of time, with the changing landscapes in which the heart dwells.

We ourselves can, at some point, feel that we are drifting in this world, like a leaf on the flowing river.

Those chapters are usually written with thoughts of grief, bittersweetness, and unspeakable silence. Tao Yuanming put it plainly:

This life of ours is but a rootless thing,

Swirling like dust above the roadways.

The winds drive us out in all directions;

Footing gone, we lose our bearings.1

If this life is indeed groundless, then what we do, seek, and strive for is but an instinct to grasp and cling to something out there.

The dissolution of this clutching, when the time comes, can feel like awakening from a dream, escaping from a maze, and seeing the mountain when the mists retreat.

Into the current

Floating reveals a state of mind. It is the realization that life itself is in a constant flow, liquid, ungraspable, and hence, we do not really have an alternative but to go with it.

Being lodged in this temporary life, we may drift with a sense of lacking direction, yet it offers unexpected encounters that inspire us to see, feel, and taste the varying flavors of existence.

The current of life will bring us to that startling moment of understanding. Su Dongpo, the Song Dynasty poet, once recorded his thoughts as he travelled for court duties:

I travel day and night toward the Yangtze and the sea.

Maple leaves, reed flowers — fall has endless sights.

On the broad Huai I can’t tell if the sky is near or far;

Green hills keep rising and falling with the boat.

Shou-chou — already I see the white stone pagoda

Though short oars haven’t brought us round Yellow Grass Hill.

Waves calm, wind mild — I look for the landing.

My friends have stood a long time in twilight mist.2 

The shifting shapes of nature scenes stir the inner waves of the poet’s heart. Leaving a familiar place can always spark unease, especially when we are entering the unknown.

We may not immediately realize what we have left behind. And we are often not prepared for what is to come. Yet, the winds know that there is still something to expect, the friend standing in the haze.

Nevertheless, the current of fate, in its unpredictable ways, can turn out to be ruthless.

Li Yu 李煜 (937-978), the last ruler of the Southern Tang 南唐 (937-975), felt the weight of understanding that he was just a temporary traveler in this life after the demise of his dynasty.

In his remaining years, he lived as a prisoner, thinking of his family, his country, his people, and the past that he could not go back to. Perhaps only the continuous rains could understand the poet’s sorrow and lament:

The curtain cannot keep out the patter of rain,

Springtime is on the wane.

In the deep of the night my quilt is not cold-proof.

Forgetting I am under hospitable roof,

Still in my dream I seek for pleasures vain.

Don’t lean alone on the railings and 

Yearn for the boundless land!

To bid farewell is easier than to meet again.

With flowers fallen on the waves, spring’s gone amain,

So is the paradise of men.3 

The spring, the railings, and the land were still the same. What has changed is the closing and descending of the poet’s heart.

After the loss of her husband and going through dynastic change, Li Qingzhao 李清照 (1084-1155), a great poet of the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279), expressed her innermost feelings of having to cope with the reality of hiding, floating, and enduring:

Tune: Spring in Peace-Blossom Land 

Sweet flowers fall to dust when winds abate.

Tired, I won’t comb my hair for it is late.

Things are the same, but he’s no more and all is o’er.

Before I speak, how can my tears not pour!

’Tis said at Twin Creek spring is not yet gone.

In a light boat I long to float thereon.

But I’m afraid the grief-o’erladen boat

Upon Twin Creek can’t keep afloat. 


Xu Yuanchong, Classical Chinese Poetry and Song Lyrics (Beijing: Dolphin Books, 2013),44.

Dispersed flowers, the setting sun, and the light boat all seem to be whispering to the poet’s tired heart in shared understanding.

Being with change

As we move about in life, we are constantly writing the chapters of floating.

In other words, we are also witnessing and turning the pages of impermanence.

Peck Gee Chua, the author of 72 Seasons of Tea, in her post “Tea and the Seasons: Japanese & Chinese Views,” wrote:

Such sensitivity to change and beauty lies at the very heart of Eastern thought. In Chinese thought, change moves as a natural, spontaneous rhythm, inviting us to flow with life; while in Japanese sensibility, impermanence stirs the tender ache of beauty and melancholy, encapsulated in the subtle grace of mono no aware.

Indeed, change is the inherent rhythm of nature’s transformation. We ourselves are invariably part of this harmonic tune.

Chuang Tzu said, “To be at peace with the time and follow the natural course, sorrow and joy cannot affect you (anshi er chushun ai le buneng ruye 安時而處順，哀樂不能入也). This is release from bondage.”

Self-cultivation, learning, and experiences can help us dwell in the state of inner lucidity. The formation of an internal order will arise from the collection of the heart-mind in the face of external disturbances.

And following the natural course of life is to recognize and accept the mysterious arrangement of fate, the cycles of parting and joining, wonder, and the unfolding of things.

Attachments, thoughts, and emotions would eventually dissolve and fade away.

Only the serene and silent heart remains.

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Tao Yuanming (365-427 AD) is remembered as the classical poet who made being with nature a way of life. Alongside Xie Lingyun (385-433 AD), his poems helped lay the foundations of Chinese landscape poetry.

In the general cultural imagination, Tao Yuanming is invariably tied to a humble, idyllic, countryside life — the thatched hut, chrysanthemum, tea, and wine.

His life was also intertwined with the regime’s collapse and social instability. After the fall of the Eastern Jin dynasty 東晉 (317-420 AD), Tao Yuanming was once summoned by the new government. Perhaps that’s why he took the name, Qian 潛 (to hide), to shift his course in life.

In times like these, people can get lost in political speculations, profiteering, willingly or unconsciously swimming with the muddy currents of social trends.

Yet, Tao Yuanming chose the alternative path, the road traveled by the few — radical reclusion, after many years of struggling and tumbling in politics.

Zhong Rong (468-518 AD), a scholar on Chinese poetics, when evaluating poets before his time in the Critique of Poetry (shi pin 詩品), commented that Tao was “the patriarch of poets of reclusion, past and present.”

It is not an exaggeration. Tao Yuanming’s failure in politics gave rise to an everlasting literary and spiritual legacy that has inspired generations of the best poets, scholars, and readers.

“Five measures of rice”— a watershed

Tao Yuanming came from a well-known family with a tradition of serving in the government.1 His grandfather was a scholar-official. But the family witnessed the vicissitudes of fortune over time. When it came to his turn, the young Tao Yuanming had to find a way to support himself and his family.

So he served in a few minor posts in his lifetime. Like many of us, he struggled to make a living while torn by the fact that he could not see the world he wanted to see. He once accepted the position of magistrate of Pengze, a county near his hometown in Jiangxi province.

Surprisingly, after just eighty days working there, a subordinate urged him to be well-prepared and pay his respects to a visiting inspector. Tao signed, “How could I, for the sake of five measures of rice, bend my back (bu wei wudou mi er zheyao 不為五斗米而折腰), and serve so obsequiously those petty men!”2

He resigned immediately and wrote that well-known article, “Leaving for home”(Gui qu lai xi ci 歸去來兮辭). In this self-narrative piece, he confessed that, for many years, he had compromised his ideals and inborn nature, without realizing his shackles in worldly entanglements:

I have allowed my heart to be enslaved by the body (jizi yi xin wei xingyi 既自以心為形役), why should I lament alone? I’ve realized the past cannot be changed, and what is to come can still be pursued.

With this realization, he was finally free, no longer bound by the past:

From my youth I have loved the hills and mountains,

Never was my nature suited for the world of men,

By mistake have I been entangled in the dusty web,

Lost in its snares for thirteen long years.3 

How many thirteen years do we have in this life? How often do we, tragically and unnecessarily, mistake the “dusty web” (chenwang 塵網) for the default mode of living, and later regret it?

Tao Yuanming found his way and stayed with it since 405 AD, the year he turned 41. Of course, many had tried to persuade him to cave in. Why choose a difficult life that is shunned by the many? Why not bend a few personal principles to enjoy a more comfortable life? His reply was gentle yet firm:

Cast away irrelevant chatter

Let me follow the way I have taken.

…

Let’s enjoy drinking this together,

But my carriage cannot be turned back.4

Poems reveal the traces of the heart, character, and spirit. And Tao Yuanming’s words allow us to see this self-determined individual, unapologetically being himself while harmonizing with his surroundings.

He was a poet tempered by the spirit of harmony, good-natured, easy-going, yet principled.

In the face of the tension between personal integrity and unbearable political realities, Li Bai (701-762 AD), the famous Tang poet, responded with his direct and thunderous contempt, like Beethoven’s forte: “how can I stoop and bow before the men in power and so deny myself a happy hour! (an neng cuimei zheyao shi quangui shiwo bude kai xinyan 安能摧眉折腰事權貴 使我不得開心顏!)”5

A life of reclusion in nature

So, Tao Yuanming withdrew from the political world and the familiar social circles. He had to give up the political ideals and ambitions cultivated in the heart of the young version of himself.

Reclusion, yet, was not a pose. It was an everyday practice of making peace with himself and finding simple joys in life:

‘Beneath a cross-beam door’

There is a lute, there are books.

…

In the morning I water my garden,

In the evening I recline in my thatched cottage.6

And the life of reclusion was certainly not easy. He worked in the farmland and was happy and content:

I rise early to clear away the weeds,

Till, hoe on shoulder, I plod home with the moon.

...

What matters if I am wet with dew,

So long as I enjoy my heart’s content!7 

Amid rural labor and personal time with books, he shared new wine with neighbors, farmers, not necessarily literati:

Now I strain my newly ripened wine,

And cook a chicken to share with my neighbors.

The sun goes down, my room turns dark,

I burn wild brambles in place of the candle.

Happy am I, but how brief the night;

Another day is dawning in the east.8

In one of his best and well-known poems, he shared his state of mind in finally being at ease with the life he chose:

Among the busty haunts of men I build my hut,
But hear no noise of wheels or trampling hoofs.
You would stop to ask me how
The distant heart creates a distant retreat (xin yuan di zipian 心遠地自偏).
Picking chrysanthemums under the eastern fence,
Leisurely I look up and see the Southern Mountains.
The mountain air is good both day and night,
And the birds are flying homewards together.
In such things I find the truth of life;
I would tell how, but have forgotten the words. 

Roland C. Fang, Gleanings from Tao Yuan-ming (Hong Kong: The Commercial Press, 1980), 88.

What is the “true meaning?” Did he mean wine? Nature? Or something else? I see his equanimity, his mellow, accommodating spirit in just being with the way things are.

His poems are not sentimental but filled with unspectacular honesty and authenticity, expressed in simple words. He refuses what does not go along with his nature and cultivates what is natural. That is perhaps why his poems feel spacious and leave a lasting impression.

Tao Yuanming’s fusion of poems and country life indicates that culture cannot be narrowly defined. It does not belong to the literati, nor is it the property of a court and a few. It is open to everyone willing to live attentively.

What I love about the poet is his genuine disposition, his love of nature, his unwavering spirit in the face of life’s challenges, and, of course, his obsession with wine.

For him, wine was the companion for inspiration and social mingling. He wrote twenty poems with the title of “Drinking Wine (yinjiu 飲酒),” mostly on occasions of imbibing alone and drinking together with friends. He described himself in a short autobiographical piece:

Drinking is his natural weakness, but being poor, he cannot afford to buy wine…Sometimes he writes to amuse himself, to express what is in his mind. He cares little for worldly gain or loss. It is thus he passes his allotted span on earth.9

Xin Jiaxuan 辛稼軒 (1127–1279) and Su Dongpo 蘇東坡 (1037-1101), two literary giants from the Song dynasty (960-1279), read Tao Yuanming with lifelong devotion. Su Dongpo once wrote a poetic series titled Poems Written in Response to Tao Yuanming’s “Drinking Wine” as a tribute to the poet he deeply admired. In his verses, Xin Jiaxuan scattered his contemplation of Tao Yuanming.

Whenever I feel overwhelmed by the chaos, uncertainty, and burden of this life, I am called upon by Tao Yuanming’s whispers, “The distant heart creates a distant retreat.”

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A distinctive feature of classical Chinese poetry is its fusion of philosophical insight, intuitive grasp of worldly life, and exquisite representation of nature. Some poets of the Wei-Jin period (220-589 A.D.) chose poetry as the medium for their philosophical expression.

Lin Yutang (1895-1976) once wrote,

“The whole tenor of Chinese thought, too, encourages the writing of poetry as the highest crown of the literary art…Poetry is essentially thought colored with emotion.”2

I often discover more eye-opening insights from these poems than from some academic works that tend to dull one’s senses.

So I begin this new adventure to share my wanderings through these old lines of the past. The selected verses, I believe, can find us at the right moment, reminding us to slow down, live gently with awareness, and return to what truly matters.

The season of retreat

Falling leaves, a chill in the early morning, and shorter daylight. It’s the appearance and rhythm of autumn.

Nature does not speak. Yet through its silent transitions, it guides us toward reflection and repose.

It is a time of retreat, introspection, and quiet renewal.

In the hours of stillness, I revisited one of Wang Wei’s lesser-known poems.

Drinking ale with Pei Di

When I drink ale with you, you are naturally relaxed;
Human nature is changeable, like rolling waves.
Old acquaintances, white-haired, may yet put hands on swords;
Gentry who first achieved eminence laugh at those first taking up office.
Plants in their colors have all passed through a soaking from light rain;
Flowered branches will soon tremble in the chill of the spring breeze.
What use is it to inquire about the floating clouds of worldly affairs?
It is better to recline in reclusion and be sure to eat well. 

Wang Wei, The Poetry and Prose of Wang Wei, vol. 1, trans. Paul Rouzer (Boston/Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), 378.

Pei Di (approximately 716-?), himself a poet, was a close friend of Wang Wei. In this poem, Wang Wei advises his younger friend not to be consumed by worldly entanglements but to cherish simple joys instead.

Both poets served as officials in the capital Chang’an.

Politics, in both traditional societies and modern states, is the arena for the ambitious. Seeking power, titles, and status has always been a human impulse.

I don’t know whether human nature is pliable to change or not, but I do know that circumstances often confuse us, and the “rolling waves” can be formidable, leading to regrettable choices.

After wading through the muddy waters of the world, how many can preserve the purity of their spirit?

If light, dark, and shadows coexist in the natural world, then so do they in human life.

The floating clouds know that worldly affairs are just transitory and fortuitous. Seeing their impermanence and the shortness of our own lives, perhaps we can learn to ask: what truly matters?

Life at Wangchuan

In his early forties, Wang Wei acquired an estate at Wangchuan 輞川, near Lantian 藍田, south of Chang’an.

There, he divided his time between quiet retirement and court duties. For more than a decade, Wang Wei and Pei Di wandered through its valleys, rivers, and small forests, writing some of the best pastoral poems in Chinese literature.

Known as the poet-Buddha (shifo 詩佛), Wang Wei could seamlessly weave Buddhist thought, painting, and poetry into a unified art.

Su Shi’s 蘇軾(1037–1101), the great poet from the Song dynasty (960-1279), once remarked:

“When you carefully read a poem by Wang Wei, you see a painting within; and when you examine a painting by Wang Wei, you see a poem within.”

As a poet, painter, and musician, Wang Wei’s landscape poems are generally simple and straightforward, like silent meditation expressed in words. His mastery of this genre was unparalleled in the classical Chinese poetic tradition.

When reading his poems, one is often drawn into the scene, experiencing the natural surroundings through sight, sound, and sensation.

Dwelling in the Mountains: An Autumn Evening

Empty mountains after a recent rain:
The air, since evening, turns autumnal.
The bright moon, amid the pines, shines. 
The clear stream, over rocks, flows.
...

Pauline Yu, The Poetry of Wang Wei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 196–97.


Magnolia Enclosure

Autumn mountains embrace the lingering light.
Flying birds follow companions ahead.
Brilliant blue-green — at times distinct and clear;
Evening mists without a place to be. 


Pauline Yu, The Poetry of Wang Wei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 202. 

The white moon, the clear stream, and the distant mountains depict a serene atmosphere of early autumn, while the “lingering” sunlight and mists are decorated with blue and green, the varying colors of nature.

With a few impressionistic strokes, we are led to see the painting with the poet’s sensitivity or read the poem with the painter’s eyes.

Apart from nature and contemplative Buddhist themes, Wang Wei also wrote poems in correspondence with various social circles, including court officials, Taoists, and Buddhist practitioners.

In this sense, the social aspect of his poems serves both communication purposes and as a way to commemorate friendships. Poems that addressed Pei Di are examples of this.

On the surface, Wang Wei appears as a half-hermit and half-official, between his Wangchuan estate and the court. But his life was not free of turbulence, both personally and professionally.

Yet in his poetry, emotion is often transformed into stillness. What is left unspoken does not indicate absence, but a profound awareness and acceptance. Sometimes, silence speaks deeply than words.

And words can dissolve, life drifting clouds, leaving us only the light of understanding.

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