So much for narrative literature, now let's look at poetry. A specifically Buddhist poetry does exist, but "the real importance of Buddhism to poetry," says Martin, "lies elsewhere." First, "the need for accurate renderings of Sanskrit or Pali sounds in Chinese…" for the translations, "made literati"—the elite—"aware of the fact that Chinese was a tonal language." There was apparently no explicit awareness of this before this vast translation exercise. This led to a new awareness "of the rich possibilities of sound oppositions in poetry…" This is then called "tonal prosody," that is to say prosody—poetic form— which takes into account not just parallelism between the vocabulary but also between the tones of the specific words used in each line of the poetry. Second, and even more fundamental, is a new awareness of impermanence and sensory illusion. And I quote Martin who is in fact referring to an eminent Chinese scholar, a woman: "Tian Xiaofei 田晓菲, in her masterful study of Liang literature" —in the period precisely of Liang Wudi "remarks with some humor that if flowers blossomed in spring throughout all antiquity in Chinese poetry, they never fell in springtime before the Six Dynasties… It appears," says Martin, "that it needed Buddhist thought to acclimate in China the idea that decay and death could occur in the very season of life," in spring. Martin then quotes two lines from the famous landscape poet Xie Lingyun 謝靈運, whose dates are 385 to 433. Here are those two lines: "I lowered my eyes on the top of mighty trees, And raised my ears to rushing torrents" coming off the mountains. "Xie Lingyun's two verses embody the discovery that the phenomenal world is constantly illusory: 'above' may be 'under', or the contrary, or both at once." Buddhism and Daoism together produce landscape poetry and painting. Xie Lingyun himself came from a Daoist family, like Liang Wudi, but like Liang Wudi also became a Buddhist. According to another chapter by James Robson on sacred geography, that we'll be talking about next time, "In his writing it is clear that Xie Lingyun hoped to achieve illumination in the mountains, indeed it was the 'identification of natural and spiritual phenomena [that] was at the heart of [his] landscape Buddhism'." The painter Gu Kaizhi 顧愷之, whose dates are 344 to 405, is famous for his landscape depiction of the transmission of the Way by Zhang Daoling —founder of the Heavenly Masters—to his two closest disciples. His contemporary Zong Bing 宗炳"—375 to 433 [443]— "was a Buddhist lay practitioner who in 404 took part in Huiyuan's 慧遠 vow to be reborn in the western pure land." So here we have two famous initiators of landscape painting who are, the one more focused on Daoism and the other a lay Buddhist in fact. "Zong Bing," says Martin, "is well known to historians of Chinese painting for his masterful essay entitled an 'Introduction to painting landscape' 畫山水序, which has attracted the attention of modern scholars for its admixture of Buddhist and Daoist points of view along with ideas about natural scenery. Zong Bing purportedly traveled to many of the sacred mountains in his day and when he became too ill to travel he painted representations of them on his walls so that he could still enjoy them." Martin shows that the monk Sengyou did the same thing: sick and "unable to walk," he collected and commented on travel accounts and, thereby, made "the great pilgrimage to India by the act of writing." Martin also explores the possible impact on Chinese poetry of "descriptions verging on the erotic" in Buddhist sutras and, more generally, the influence on Chinese art of "the sensuousness of Indian sculpture and painting." Anyone who has ever looked into the temples, for example, of Konarak, will understand immediately what he's talking about —the sensuousness of Indian sculpture. And of course this is very much in conflict or contradiction with traditional Confucian attitudes towards the erotic. So he links this to the "palace style" <i>gongti</i> 宮體 poetry that first became popular among Southern elites of the late fifth century. Again "Tian Xiaofei has shown what the subtle art of description of these palace poets, which she characterizes as 'an extraordinary power of noticing'" and underlines what it "owes to the practice of Buddhist meditation." I quote: "Concentration enables one to seize the reality of an instant," in that very instant, "and meditation, which is nothing but the non-interrupted perception of innumerable successive instants, makes one realize the illusory character of the perpetually changing phenomenal world." "Though these [palace] poets are generally depreciated as being merely able painters of still lives, the object of their descriptions, Tian Xiaofei concludes, is more the moment than the thing" —the moment and the sense of impermanence of the sensory world. And he [Martin] summarizes his whole discussion of possible impact of Buddhist meditation practices and ideas of the impermanence of the material world and therefore of the I, of the self, with a very famous poem from the Tang dynasty by Wang Wei 王維, whose dates are 706 to 761, so outside of our period, but it shows—summarizes—very neatly some of the features of the impact of Buddhism on poetry. Wang Wei himself—the very name "Wei" means, refers to Vimalakirti, who we'll be talking about in a moment. So here is this poem: it's called "Deer Barrier" or <i>Luzhai</i> 鹿柴. Now I want to say immediately that whenever I use this verse —this poem, very short, four-line poem, just twenty characters. It's called a <i>jueju</i> 絕句, literally to cut lines; it's the shortest, the most compact form that becomes very popular in the Tang dynasty. When I use it in my classes I always ask especially students from the Mainland, is there anybody here who can reproduce this poem from memory? And there's always at least one or two people —or all of them gathering together— who can reproduce the poem, meaning this is one of the poems that every Chinese person who goes to school, at least on the Mainland, still learns by heart. "In the empty mountains nobody is to be seen; Only peoples' voices may be heard. A returning sunray enters the deep wood, And brings its light [again] to the green moss." Martin summarizes: "Tonal harmony" —which of course can't be transmitted in the English translation which is a non-tonal language, but—"Tonal harmony, brevity of form," twenty characters, "absence of the self"—absence of the self. Listen again: "In the empty mountains nobody is to be seen; only people's voices may be heard," but their presence is just a distant echo. So "absence of the self, the seizure of the fugitive instant." Just when the sun is going down and therefore its light goes through, doesn't have to come through the pine needles or the leaves, can come through into the forest and light up the green moss. So "the seizure of the fugitive instance through echoes and the play of light and shadow, all the ingredients which collaborate to make of these four lines a <i>chef d'oeuvre</i>, can be traced back to the Six Dynasties and assigned in one way or another to the influence of Buddhism. In other words, without Buddhism, they would likely never have been written."
