Like the laws of physics, a person’s life, however unpredictable, often reveals its own patterns.
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.
Previous posts on Xie Lingyun:
Shen Yue, Book of Song 宋書, vol. 6, “Biography of Xie Lingyun 謝靈運傳” (Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company, 2018), 1942.
Wenyue Lin, Xie Lingyun, 106.
Book of Song 宋書, 1943.
The title of this poem is “Setting out from Shishou city 初發石首城.”
Shaobo Gu, ed. and annot., Xie Lingyun ji jiaozhu 謝靈運集校注 (Zhengzhou: Zhongzhou guji chubanshe, 1987), 186.
Book of Song 宋書, 1943.
The title of this poem is “Being captured in Linchuan 臨川被收.” The Chinese lines are: 韓亡子房奮，秦帝魯連恥。本自江海人，忠義感君子。
Xie Lingyun ji jiaozhu, 201.
Zifang was Zhangliang’s courtesy name. When Zhang Liang’s home country, the state of Han 韓, was destroyed by the Qin 秦, he initially attempted to assassinate the emperor of Qin. After the failed attempt, he spent years studying strategy, military affairs, and Taoism. Eventually, he assisted the founder of the Han dynasty, Liu Bang 劉邦, in successfully bringing down the mighty Qin, and retreated from the political scene after his work was done.
In his legendary political career, Zhang Liang also fused the teachings of the school of diplomatic strategists (zongheng jia 縱橫家) into his political actions.
In general, Zhang Liang belonged to the spiritual lineage of Taoism, the statesman-thinker tradition, or the Huang-Lao Taoism (huanglao daojia 黃老道家), a branch that overlaps with but is distinct from the schools of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu.
Lu Zhonglian 魯仲連 was another accomplished strategist and recluse during the Warring States period. When the forces of Qin besieged the Zhao’s capital, political panic spread among the allied states. Zhao was under pressure to acknowledge the Qin ruler as the supreme emperor, a critical move to buy temporary peace at the cost of sovereignty.
Zhonglian was visiting the state of Zhao at this time and persuaded the policymakers not to accept the proposal. His timely action helped preserve Zhao’s dignity at its darkest hour, defending a tradition of political wisdom that valued principle over coercive power.
Both Zhang Liang and Lu Zhonglian embodied the Taoist principle of leaving the scene when the work is done (gongcheng buju 功成不居). Lu Zhonglian was the hero of the poet Li Bai, who wrote many poems attributed to him.
Lin Wenyueh 林文月, Xie Lingyun (Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2014), 129.
The Chinese lines are 恨我君子志，不得巖上泯。送心正覺前，斯痛久已忍。唯願乘來生，怨親同心朕。
David Hinton, trans., The Mountain Poems of Hsieh Ling-yun (New York: New Directions Books, 2001), 67.
Huang Jie, Xie Lingyun Yanjiu Lunji 謝靈運研究論集 A Collection of Studies on Xie Lingyun (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2001), 14.
Fu 賦 was a classical Chinese literary genre that stands between poetry and prose, known for its elaborative description and rhetorical exposition.
Liu Hsieh, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, trans. by Vincent Yu-chung Shih (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 37.
茫茫終何之 is a wonderfully, nuanced sentiment. It rhymes with 迷茫, 忙忙 and so, to what end? If we care to pierce into this predicament closely, then there's a kind of release and opening towards the vast and boundless as you noted in that poem. I really like that painting by 巨然 too!
A lovely tribute to Xie Lingyun.