Enlightenment narrative
One
"Buddhist literature" can be divided into broad and narrow senses. The broad sense focuses on religion, and can include scriptures, Buddhist scriptures, and all texts that propagate doctrines. The narrow sense focuses on the american nature: American works that deal with themes and imagery related to Buddhism. Of course, Buddhist works can belong to Buddhist literature, but this should not be limited, first, because Buddhist works can be completely religious in nature, and many monastic poetry is social or social; second, because many non-Buddhist works are very religious. Therefore, for researchers whose foothold is in literature, "Buddhism and literature" is the best way to express it: in this vocabulary, the relationship between religion and literature can be diverse, with a variety of different forms of interaction and combination.
In general, the discussion of "Buddhism and Literature" is nothing more than an analysis of buddhist scripture translations, themes, imagery, and forms (such as chants, sound rhythms, etc.). However, the author believes that since Buddhism has entered the material, spiritual, and emotional lives of all social strata from various angles, the influence of Buddhism in literature is bound to have a universal penetrating nature, and may not necessarily only be reflected in the tangible aspects of Buddhist study, temple observation, and monks' travels. If we focus only on the tangible aspect, we may lose sight of some important texts with a strong Buddhist spirit, thus ignoring the profound spiritual and intellectual influence of Buddhism on the indigenous Chinese tradition.
In the book Beacons and Meteors: Literature and Culture of the Xiaoliang Dynasty (Zhonghua Bookstore, 2009), I proposed that a new "poetics of contemplation" emerged in the late Southern Dynasty. Liang Dynasty poetry presents a new way of viewing the phenomenal world, and this new way of viewing is deeply influenced by Buddhism: the objects presented in poetry are no longer typed and conceptual, but special and specific, fleeting—the most important innovation brought about by the classical Chinese poetic tradition in the late Southern Dynasty, especially Xiao Liang poetry, under the influence of Buddhist thought.
Therefore, the influence of Buddhism on medieval poetry is not only manifested in the themes and imagery within the work or in the writing opportunities and environments outside the writing, such as participation in the Eight Levels, visiting the temple, climbing the pagoda, and interacting with monks, but also has a general penetrating potential influence. The depth of this influence varies, of course, from author to author, but once this is realized, one will find that some of the most famous works in the history of literature can present new meanings when viewed from a different perspective.
In this article, the author interprets the famous "Qinzhou-Tonggu" group poems of the Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu (712-770), hoping to show readers through this article that a group of jixing poems that are often independently read and appreciated actually implies an enlightened and sentient narrative of enlightenment, and poets like Du Fu, who have always been embraced by Confucianism, are as diverse and complex as anyone in the Middle Ages, and should not be simplified and labeled.
Two
In the early winter of 759, Du Fu and his family left Qinzhou (present-day Gansu) for Tonggu (present-day Gansu), and after a brief discussion in Tonggu, set out for Chengdu. The journey from Qinzhou to Tonggu has twelve poems, with "Fa Qin Zhou" as the first title, with the inscription self-note: "Qian Yuan went from Qinzhou to Tonggu County in the second year of the Twelfth Year of the Chronicle. [1] This little note is important because it concatenates twelve poems that can be read separately and independently, forming a whole, and this overall reading gives all poems a large interpretive framework, so that one can see the meaning that each poem alone does not possess in itself. In other words, what Du Fu presents us with is not a single location, but a map of travel that links all the places together.
Many scholars have noted the profound influence of the Southern Dynasty poet Xie Lingyun's landscape poetry on Du Fu's poetry from Qin to Shu [2]. In 422, Xie Lingyun was sent from the then capital jiankang to Yongjia (Wenzhou, Zhejiang), and wrote poems along the way, the first poem was titled "The County's Chufa Capital on July 16, 3rd Year of Yongchu", followed by "Neighbors Sent to Fangshan", "Passing through Shi Ning Shu", "Fuchun Zhu" and "Seven Mile Se". Each poem is an independent individual with an inner integrity, but there is no necessary connection between poems other than the fact that they were written on the same journey.
In fact, there is a recurring structure in Xie Lingyun's landscape poems, that is, the poet begins with melancholy, vents his depression between the landscapes, and finally reaches a certain sense of perception and transcendence at the end of the poem. Such a single poetic structure does not encourage the reader to read the different poems written in the same itinerary together as a whole, because repeated perceptions reduce the validity of each perceptual experience itself.
In contrast to Xie Lingyun, Du Fu's self-annotation condenses twelve poems into an organic whole, creating an enlightened and sentient narrative, which, although carried out by the distance of the body, ends with a journey of shocking spirit and imagination. The twelve jixing poems from Qinzhou to Tonggu are headed by "Fa Qin Zhou" and end with "Phoenix Terrace". Before analyzing this group of poems in detail, it is necessary to point out that the group of poems ending in "Phoenix Terrace" is not a natural reading choice for the reader. First of all, the poet traveled south from Qinzhou in the north to Tonggu, but the Phoenix Terrace was located in the southeast of Tonggu County and was not on the poet's travel route [3].
Therefore, for a group of jixing poems, it is not appropriate to end with "Phoenix Terrace". Second, the poet notes himself under the title of "Phoenix Terrace": "The mountain is steep, not to the top." This small note clearly tells the reader that the poet did not ascend the Phoenix Mountain and did not see the Phoenix Terrace on the top of the mountain with his own eyes, which is obviously different from the poet's personal experience of the place marked in the poem from Qinzhou to Tonggu.
Third, the "Phoenix Terrace" and the poet's song of another place in Tonggu County, "Wanzhangtan", because they are both scenic spots in the same valley, and a mountain and a water, a phoenix and a dragon (the poem mentions that the pond has a black dragon), in fact, constitute a wonderful contrast, so that some scholars have written a special article on the "Phoenix Terrace" and "Wanzhangtan" for comparative analysis [4]. However, this also shows that "Phoenix Terrace" is actually a profound arrangement for other Ji Xing poems from Qinzhou to Tonggu, and if they are separated and separated from each other, the poet takes it as the end of the Ji Xing group poems.
Of course, we can ignore the ordering of poems that represent the author's intentions, and make various different types of creative interpretations of poetry texts, such as "Phoenix Terrace" and "Wanzhangtan" together for comparative analysis. However, if we read the Qinzhou-Tonggu poems as "group poems" as instructed by the author's self-annotations, there will be some different discoveries.
１． 《Fa Qin Zhou》
I'm more lazy and don't think about myself.
No food to ask the Promised Land, no clothes to sinan.
Hanyuan turned in October, and the weather was like cool autumn.
The grass and trees have not fallen yellow, and the scenery and water are quiet.
The chestnut pavilion is better named, and there is a good field domain under it.
There are many potatoes in the intestines, and cliff honey is also easy to find.
Dense bamboo bamboo shoots, clear pond can be ark.
Although the wounded traveled far away, Shu Sui traveled for a lifetime.
This state is prone to rushing, and it is really fearful of people's thickness.
Should be received non-nature, landing without worry.
There is no stone in the valley, and the saitian begins to harvest slightly.
It is difficult to comfort the old man for a long time.
The sun is lonely, and the cries fill the city.
Drive around in the middle of the night, drinking horses and cold pond streams.
The stars and moons are high, and the clouds and mist are floating.
Inside the Great Qiankun, my path is long and leisurely.
The geographical and spiritual journeys of the body, the path and the "tao" of the author, are completely integrated in the last verse of the poem, giving symbolic meaning to this journey [5]. If you read the whole group of poems and then turn around and look back at the poem, the poem will appear more meaningful.
Here I just want to point out one point: the poet said that he wanted to go to Tonggu because Tonggu was a paradise on earth in his mind, with a warm climate and abundant food, chestnuts, potatoes, cliff honey, winter shoots, and clear ponds. He set off in the middle of the night, and his horse was already drunk with water, although behind this poem you can faintly hear the echo of Chen Lin's "Drinking Horse Great Wall Cave" "Water Cold Hurts Horse Bones".
２． Akagaya
The weather is cold and frosty, and the wanderer has it.
But the years are twilight, and there is no time to start again.
Morning hair Akaya Pavilion, dangerous and difficult.
There is no change in the rocks, and my car is already loaded with grease.
The mountains are bitter and windy, and the sunset is childish and hungry.
Quietly the village ruins, fireworks and fires are chased.
Poverty and disease have turned to pieces, and the hometown is unthinkable.
Always afraid of the road of death, always scorned by the high.
Before reaching heaven, the poet must first experience hell: he left Qinzhou with his family to escape hunger and cold, but hunger and cold chased them all the way. The first poem mentions "no clothes", and the first sentence here points out "the weather is cold, frost and snow", and it is also "the mountains are deep and bitter and windy", making the cold of "no clothes" more unbearable. The first poem mentions "no food", but here the poet does not talk about his own hunger but writes about the hunger of the children: parents know that adults can endure the shortage of a meal, and young children lack such endurance, and their hunger makes parents in difficulty feel doubly difficult (about two years later, Du Fu described the same situation in "Prozac", "The idiot does not know the father-son ceremony, and the angry rice cries mendong"). It will be even colder after sunset, and dinner and accommodation will not be settled. When the poet was in Qinzhou, he imagined that the climate of Tonggu was warm, and the grass and trees were "not yellow", but he had just embarked on the journey to Tonggu, but the poet himself had already "turned to zero".
３． "Tietang Gorge"
The mountain wind blows the wanderer, and the ethereal ride is desperate.
Kiev-shaped Tibetan hall, wall color standing iron.
Trails of the dome, stone and thick cracks.
Repair the boundless bamboo, inlay the first snow.
Wei Chi mourned at the bottom of the valley, and the futility was displeased.
The water is cold and long, and my horse's bones are broken.
Career is in the arc, and thieves are not destroyed.
Fluttering for more than three years, looking back on liver and lung fever.
If in the previous poem the poet is "scattered" like the grass and trees of autumn and winter, then here he is blown by the mountain wind (echoing the previous poem "The mountain is deep and bitter and windy"), and in the middle of the poem, he falls to the "bottom of the mourning valley", and the end of the poem finally ends with the image of "fluttering". It is worth noting that the bamboo in the first poem appears here again, but there is no fresh winter shoot, but it is covered with "Taishi Snow", that is, the snow that has been accumulated since ancient times, and it is not even the fresh "frost and snow" in the previous poem. "Water Cold" appears again (echoing the "Cold Pond" in the first song), but it is no longer possible to drink horses because of the "long ice" frozen. And the poet's horse is finally "broken", which not only pushes chen Lin's subtext of "hurting the horse bone" in the first poem to the obvious place, but also the degree of my horse is far more expensive than Chen Lin's pen.
４． "Salt Well"
The grass and wood in the brine are white, and the green officials are salt smoke.
The official work is also a routine, boiling salt smoke in the river.
Kii is shaking for years, and the car is out of the car day after day.
From the gongdou three hundred, to the Hu six thousand.
Gentlemen are cautious and stop, and villains are bitter and noisy.
I sighed, physics is inherently natural.
The government monopolized the circulation and trade of salt, and in the late 1770s, the salt tax accounted for half of the Tang Empire's tax revenue. During the years of Tianbao (742-756) and Zhide (756-758), a bucket of salt sold for only ten dollars, but by the first year of the Qianyuan Dynasty, the year before Du Fu wrote this poem, the price had risen to one hundred and ten dollars per bucket [6].
However, although Du Shi is known as a "poetic history", we had better not make the mistake of using poetry to judge the price of salt. For literary researchers, it is more important to note how the two colors mentioned in the poem, "green" and "white", are intertwined with the recurring imagery and theme of the group poem: in the previous poem, green bamboo is covered with snow; in this poem, the grass and trees, although "not yellow", are turned white by the salt, and the only cyan color is the green smoke of boiling salt. The poet's romantic imagination of the Tonggu winter shoots at the beginning of the group poem is gradually cast into the shadows by what he sees on the way.
Although the 8th-century poet's depiction of man-made environmental pollution and destruction is almost reminiscent of dickens's depiction of 19th-century factories, salt is indeed the most basic ingredient in human food and is essential for human survival. Food and survival are exactly what the poet seeks, just as the greed of the human heart is based on natural physics, and it is natural human nature that leads to unnatural white grass and green smoke from boiling salt.
５． "Han Jiao"
The march is quiet, and the valley is full of potential.
Cloud gate turned to the shore, accumulating haze and cold weather.
Cold and undeserved, I have a solid list of clothes.
When the situation is midwinter, the traces increase the waves.
Savages look for smoke, and the line is full of water to eat.
In this life, he was spared the burden of the lotus, and did not dare to resign from the difficult road.
If the previous poem mentions a fundamental element of the human diet, the poem turns to another living condition that the poet Hitu got in the same valley: a warm climate that could help him solve his problem of being naked. The poem points out "midwinter", showing the time change of the poet's itinerary from the "October turn" of the first poem to this experience, and the "cold pond" in the first poem becomes "hanjiao", accompanied by the emphasis of "my real clothes list". The wilderness is quiet, and the pedestrians are too cold and tired to speak quietly, in contrast to the locals who come to talk to the pedestrians.
The "smoke" in the previous poem appears here in the form of picnic cooking smoke, which is still related to food, and the locals follow the smoke, which does not echo the poet's search for "fireworks" in the "quiet" wilderness in the previous second poem. At the end of the poem, because of the campfire, food, warmth and the chatter of the natives, the poet's emotions were obviously infected by enthusiasm, and he tried to see the phnom penh of the dark clouds, masturbating: "In this life, I am free of lotus, and I dare not quit the road." ”
６． 《Dharma Mirror Temple》
In a state of danger, he barely toiled.
The gods hurt the mountains deeply, and the cliffs were broken and the temple was ancient.
Chan Juan is fresh and clean, and Xiao Shu is cold and gathered.
Back to the mountain roots and water, Ran Ran pine on the rain.
The clouds are cloudy in the morning, and the first day is vomiting again.
Zhu Yong is half bright, and the household can be counted.
Forget the early stage, out of the lotus has been pavilion noon.
The rules of the underworld are called, and the micropath is not retrieved.
This poem is the middle point of the group of poems, like a break between the curtains. During the journey, the poet temporarily stopped his journey and went to visit a temple. By the time of Du Fu, "temple poetry" had a long tradition and formed a certain procedure. In many of the poems on the temple tour, the poet's journey to the temple also includes the journey of seeking the Dharma. However, Du Shi does not tell a narrative of enlightenment, but rather describes a dreamlike experience that seems to have been magically cast. The depictions of Su Yu and ChaoYun even faintly echoed the illusions of the goddess of Wushan and the King of Chu.
Zhu Yong, who flickered in the sunlight, and The bright and brilliant Hu Mu only reinforced the dizziness of the leader, reminiscent of du Fu's most admired Southern Dynasty poet Yu Xin in his two poems in "Dreaming into the Hall": "The sun is flaming, and the window shadow mirror is shaking." "Poets use the intercourse of light and shadow and the trance and confusion they create to describe a sense of unreality. In this way, the mountain temple where the vines and bamboo trees intersect form a space with a magical charm, in which the passage of time is marked by the poet's temporary forgetting of his responsibilities in the world ("forgetting the early stages"). At the same time, Buddhist temples often provide visitors with dining and refreshments, and we can believe that Du Fu enjoyed not only spiritual rest but also physical comfort during his wanderings.
"Hell Breaks the Spell." The cuckoo's cry, which originally meant "it is better to go back", only reminds the poet to return to the world and continue his journey. However, the cries of the cuckoo here are astonishing to both the poet and the reader: in the previous poem, we learn that the time sequence has reached midwinter, but the cuckoo usually cries often during the mating seasons of late spring and early summer, and Du Fu's poem "Cuckoo" written in 766 AD has the sentence "Cuckoo twilight spring solstice, mourning and crying in between".
The "meditation" is also unexpected: many cuckoo species are chirping at night, but the time of this poem is obviously the "pavilion noon" of the day in the middle of the day, and the previous verse is also full of dangling daylight! The last few sentences of this poem, from "Zhu Yong's half-light jiong" to "The Rules of meditation", are full of abnormal situations, very confused, and the sound of the poet waking up from the dream is itself as unreal as the dream.
There is a famous metaphor in the Lotus Sutra", which is one of the so-called Seven Parables of The Lotus Sutra. A group of treasure-seeking travelers experienced all kinds of "dangerous and difficult roads, no one, fearful places" and "slackening off the middle road". One of the travelers was a wise and wise teacher, and in order to encourage the crowd to continue to move forward, he used his mana to create a city. "The people went to the city of Huahua, and they were already thinking about it, and they were born with peace and contemplation. At that time, the teacher knew that this multitude had ceased to rest, and that there was no longer tiredness, that is, the city was destroyed. The people said, 'Wait for Noble to be near, to the great city of the Great, and I have become a breather.' ’”
In Du Fu's poem, we see a very similar situation: the poet who is hungry and cold, Kurama Lawton, not only is he "in danger", but also "injured", from the spirit to the body is on the verge of collapse, the Fajing Temple provides him with a resting place, it is the poet's "huacheng", is his Buddhist taoyuan, because after resting, the huacheng city is destroyed, and he can never come again like a fisherman who has left Taoyuan: "The path is never taken again." ”
We noticed that the Fajing Temple was surrounded by bamboo forests: "Chan Juan is clean and clean, and Xiao Zhen is cold and gathered." "Han Zhen is the shell of the winter shoot that falls off, and the winter shoot is exactly what the poet dreamed of looking forward to in the same valley when he was in Qinzhou. But the poet cannot stay in the city, he must continue to move forward.
７． 《Qingyang Gorge》
Saiwai is bitter about the mountains, and the southbound road is evil.
Gangluan is passing through each other, and the clouds and water are wrong.
Lin Qiaojiao came from the corner, and the sky was narrow and the wall surface was cut.
The five-mile stone in the west of the creek fell towards me in anger.
Looking up at the side of the sun car, I was afraid that the Kun shaft was weak.
There is a wind, and the frost is deserted.
Yesterday, remembering Longsaka, Gao Qiu looked at Wu Yue.
East laughing lotus Huabei, north zhi kun gong thin.
Transcendent and spectacular, it is already called Yin Silhouette.
Suddenly, it is like taking advantage of people, and sighing indifference.
Leaving the temporary refuge, the poet's journey became more difficult. The mountains of Qingyang Gorge seem to have a demonic temperament: "furious" rocks, cliffs as flat as knives, and the sound of the wind whistling like a charm. In the early Middle Ages, a cultural narrative mode that could only be achieved through hell was developed, and Du Fu's landscape depiction here is definitely modeled after the description of hell in the sword forest of the sword mountain. This is the longest poem after "Fa Qin Zhou" and before "Phoenix Terrace". It is noteworthy that it contains six orientations: South, West, East, North, Up, and Down (verses 2, 7, 15, 16, 9, and 10), which seems to imply that the poet's experience of climbing and seeing the mountain has thus reached the comprehensiveness and completeness of the cage.
Ironically, in "Fa Qin Zhou", the poet lamented that "the landing has not been sold", and also complained that the landscape of Qinzhou is not good, and "there are no different stones in the valley", but here, he seems to have completely fed up with the landing, and he has seen enough strange stones, and has reached the level of "bitterness and disgust".
８． Dragon Gate Town
The spring is light and ice, and the depressed boardwalk is wet.
I have worked tirelessly to force this short scene.
Shimen Cloud Snow Pass, ancient town peak set.
The rod is miserable, and the feng shui is white and astringent.
Huma Tun chenggao, to prevent this from happening.
Oh Er far away, weeping in the cold night of the mountains.
Chenggao was a strategic location east of Luoyang. In the year that Du Fu left for Tonggu, Shi Siming's rebels captured Luoyang. The poem is permeated with the mood of powerlessness. The snow reappeared, forming a white pass with the clouds, but could not resist Huma's attack. Even the wind and water ——— here as an alternative to weapons——— were "astringent" (blunt and rusty), and soldiers with iron hearts wept at night.
The first poem mentions the gradual darkness of the "lonely shu", with the subtext of Chen Lin's "Drinking Horse Great Wall Cave" hinting at the hardships of the border fortress. This motif was re-pointed in the third and fifth songs ("Career to arc arrow, thieves are not destroyed" "This life is free of lotus"), and now it is completely reproduced, making a detailed description of the ancient town. The poet's desire to escape the hunger and cold echoes here with the night cry of the cold jailer, which was originally an ancient theme of the Ponse Le House, and now it has become a real scene for the poet to see.
９． "Stone Niche"
The bear roared at me east, and the tiger and leopard numbered me west.
I screamed after the ghost, and I cried in front of me.
It's cold and dark, and the mountains are far away from the road fans.
Driving under the stone niches, midwinter sees rainbow neon.
Bamboo cutters who son, lamentations on the ladder of clouds.
For the official to collect beautiful arrows, five years old for Liang Qi.
The bitter cloud is straight to the end, and there is no way to carry it.
Yu Yang rode, and Sassy was shocked.
The further forward he went, the more the poet seemed to fall into confusion. In the seventh poem" "Qingyang Gorge", the poet complains that "the Tao is evil", and here he is completely "a road fan". The previous song includes a six-fold view, and this one is left, right, front, and back surrounded by bears, tigers and leopards, long-screaming ghosts, and mourning marmosets, and only sounds can be heard, but images cannot be seen. The poet's increasing loss of control over reality is also reflected in the fact that the poem is the most illusory and unreal of the entire group of poems. This is not to say that the poet had a dreamlike experience, but rather that the poem provides a Chuci-style allegorical landscape (sentences 1-6) in which a lefu character is presented (sentences 9-14).
If the seventh poem is written about the east, west, south, and north, and the ninth poem is also written about the east, west, south, north, or back, at least the mountains in the seventh poem have a majestic beauty and realism, which is completely absent in this ninth poem. On the contrary, the ninth poem has a sense of delirium, like the whispers of a patient with a high fever.
This is mainly manifested in the lack of visual imagery in the whole poem, but mainly on sound: the poet hears the roaring cry before and after the left and right, the lament of the bamboo cutter seems to come from the clouds, and the poem ends with the sound of the iron horse of the rebels in Yuyang in the far northwest. The only sight the poet "sees" is the "rainbow" in verse 8. But because the rainbow should be hidden in the first month of winter, the rainbow seen in midwinter seems to be a visual illusion of the poet, a peculiar, abnormal phenomenon, and an ominous omen.[7]
The song of the bamboo cutter laments that the beautiful bamboo has been harvested because of the continuous war, which directly threatens the poet's imagination of the winter bamboo shoots in the same valley. In the next poem, he is very close to his destination and begins to try to make more realistic plans for life in the same valley.
10． "Grass Ridge"
The peaks accumulate long and yin, and the day is hidden.
The fluttering forest symphony, tragic stone-like change.
The mountains are divided into grass ridges, and the road is different from Mingshui County.
I am poor and tired of my old age.
Bu Ju Shang Bai Li, Hugh Driving to Zhu Yan.
Yi has a good host, as if they have met.
The words of the book are wonderful, and the distant visitors are deeply surprised.
The fern was reluctant to be left behind, and Mautz saw it in his eyes.
In the previous poem, the poet realized that the local bamboo forest resources had been exhausted and the people lived in poverty, and in this poem he expressed a desire for tonggu life to be far more realistic and humble than the original romantic ideal. He no longer talked about chestnuts, potatoes, cliff honey, and winter shoots, saying that as long as "ferns are not willing to stay", it is very good. The meaning and interest of this poem depends almost entirely on the context of the group poems.
In this poem, the poet suddenly mentions the "good master" of Tonggu County—this "good master" appears neither in the first poem nor in the last poem—which is quite surprising. This is not only because the closer he is to his destination, the more attentive the poet is to the reception he receives there, but it is also the implicit way in which the poet tells the reader that the "master" has finally disappointed him. The last poem says nothing about the master, and this silence is made louder by "Grass Ridge".
11． 《Nigong Mountain》
In the morning glory blue mud, in the living blue mud.
The mud is not a moment, and the version is laborious.
Do not be afraid of the way forever, but will be overwhelmed.
The white horse is an iron horse, and the child becomes an old man.
The mourning ape fell through, and the dead deer was exhausted.
Send a message to the people from the north, and then Mo hurried.
The closer to the destination, the more anxious the poet becomes, but before he can reach it, he still has to overcome a series of difficulties. In "The Southern Fu of the Sorrowful River", Yu Xin describes the arduous journey experienced by the southerners who were captured to the north: "Hunger follows the sting swallows, and the dark streams of fireflies." The water in Qinzhong is black, and the mud is closed. Although Du Fu and his family were traveling south, they also had to face endless green mud. In the black realm, the poet shows his humor, and the third couplet, "Not afraid of the road forever, but will be the same" responds to the sentence in Xie Lingyun's "Looking at the South Mountain to the North Mountain through the Lake": "I do not hesitate to go far away, but I hate Mo and the same." Xie Lingyun intended to say that he did not care about living in isolation, but regretted that no one shared the beauty of the landscape with him.
Du Fu used the same sentence pattern, even the same rhyme, to show that he did not care about the long road, only worried that he would be trapped by the poor mountains and rivers with his whole family and children, and fall into the green mud together. We realize that although the first two sentences of Du's poem, "Toward the green mud, twilight in the green mud", although they use the ballad of "Chaofa Yellow Bull", they actually echo the beginning of Xie Lingyun's poem", "Chaodan Fa Yang Cliff, JingLuo Yin Peak", which constitutes a parody of Xie Lingyun.
Another humorous point of Du Fu's poem lies in the contrast between "mud gong" and "human gong". For the Creator, the mud of this mountain is "not temporary", out of long-term accumulation, and cannot be achieved overnight; in the same way, for man, if they want to build a passage on this mountain, they must also pay long-term labor. Even for pedestrians trying to cross, it takes a long time. Even apes and deer, which are a hundred times more agile than humans, cannot rely on their agility to quickly escape the trap of green mud. Thus, when the poet admonishes the people of the north at the end to "do not hurry", this admonition has a layer of black humor, because the mountain is "in a hurry".
The name of a mountain is reminiscent of the poet in the first poem who also imagined the name of "Chestnut Pavilion", but now the poet is no longer so naïve.
12． Phoenix Terrace
Pavilion Phoenix Terrace, north to West Connecticut.
Siber is lonely now, and the sound of the phoenix is also leisurely.
The mountain road is gone, and the stone forest is high and floating.
Ande is on the ladder, and the king is on the top.
Fear of no mother chicks, hunger and cold chirping.
I can cut my heart out and drink to soothe the loneliness.
The heart is a bamboo solid, and the heart is forgetting the outside world.
Blood is a fountain of liquor, and it is better than a clear stream.
The king Rui, who is heavy, dares to resign his life.
Sit and watch the color of the long, lift the eight pole week.
From the sky to Ritu, fly down to the twelfth floor.
The picture is to worship the supreme, and the phoenix is to bow down.
Then the light is rejuvenated, and the worries are washed away.
It is for this reason that the group of thieves is drowned.
For the readers who accompanied Du Fu all the way through all kinds of difficulties and dangers to come to Tonggu, this last poem is really a shocking, confusing, and tongue-in-cheek counter-climax! Only by putting it in the context of the group poem can we truly appreciate its power. There is not a single mention of the fairyland on earth that the poet had fantasized about, not even a single word of Tonggu. As we said earlier, Fenghuangtai is not at all the place where the poet passed from Qinzhou to Tonggu, but has already passed through Tonggu.
At the end of the journey, the poet focuses on a mountain that is so high that he has not climbed to the top at all, as if to tell the reader that the paradise that once inspired him to travel long distances does not exist, and that the poet, who is now exhausted, can only continue his journey spiritually.
In "Fa Qin Zhou", the poet talks about his desire to go to the same valley because of hunger and cold; in the second song "Red Valley", he talks about not himself but the hunger and cold of his children. Whether ancient or modern, Chinese or foreign, we can imagine this most universal situation of human nature.
During the journey, the child constantly asks the parents: "Have we arrived?" When will it arrive? "We can also imagine the disappointment of adults and children after finally arriving in the same valley that everything does not match. However, in the last poem, the poet does not mention his disappointment, but sublimates his disappointment into the greatest sympathy and compassion: from his starving young son to the phoenix chick on the top of the mountain or the motherless chick waiting to be fed. The poet thus expresses a startling desire to cut out his heart and give his blood for the hungry and thirsty chicks.
The imagery of bamboo in the whole group of poems is carried out throughout, and in this poem it appears again unexpectedly: Du Fu no longer desires "winter shoots" and "clear ponds" for himself, on the contrary, although he wishes to climb the ladder like the bamboo cutters in the ninth "Stone Niche", he does not want to cut down bamboo, but to use his body as a substitute for bamboo, and the hungry phoenix chicks peck at his heart as bamboo and suck his blood as a sweet spring.
This blood-soaked Baroque imagination, this extreme feeding, has no "gentleness and thickness" to speak of, which makes many theorists who have seen mediocrity and stereotypes in the Ming and Qing dynasties feel uneasy, do not think so, and all regard it as "extreme change" (He Zhuo). Wang Shilu's comment was short and rather critical: "Like Mengjiao." Zhang Called it a "transposition" and said: "If you look at it from a song, you can delete it." Qiao Yi's praise implied: "The meaning is correct, not a word." Guo Zengzhong said bluntly: "This poem is not good after all." ”【8】
However, the poet did indeed achieve "the words are not amazing and endless", and its astonishment lies not in the carving of the dialogue, but in the great transformation that the poet has undergone through this journey: at the beginning of the poem, he only thought of seeking food for himself, lamenting the "danger" and "divine wounds", but now he wants to turn his body and heart into food, as a sacrifice, to rescue the trapped sacred bird on the mountain, so that it can soar the sky again, call Ritu, "re-prosper in the light, wash away the worries of the world".
Such a drastic change—from worrying about oneself, to worrying about one's family members, to sympathizing with others, to thinking of the whole world—can also be seen in other Du poems, such as the modern reader's familiar "The Cottage Is Broken by the Autumn Wind". However, Phoenix Terrace is different: the object of its sympathy is not a person but a bird (although it is a divine bird), and the solution it proposes is to use its own flesh as food and sacrifice. In Fa Qin Zhou, the poet quotes Confucius twice, but we all know the famous story in the Analects: the stables are on fire, and Confucius asks "hurt people" and "do not ask horses"; we also know that Confucius is a disciple of the people and does not join the flock of birds and beasts.
One of the most basic teachings of Confucianism is that the skin of the body cannot be damaged by the parents, but here the poet has to dig up his heart and blood to give to the young chicks of birds. This kind of compassion is not just a gentleman's far away kitchen, but the great compassion of the bodhisattva in the Buddhist teachings of saving all sentient beings and willingly giving up one's body.
Ancient and modern commentators often think of Confucian feelings as soon as they see "longing for ZTE", and completely reduce The Salvation of Cangsheng to Confucian consciousness, but on the one hand, the poetic text is not a philosophical text, and must be handled in the way of literary research, rather than in the way of ideological research; on the other hand, this poem completely subverts the Confucian poetic teachings of gentleness and generosity, mourning and not hurting, and its extreme fantasies open up the style of Tang mengjiao, but since the Song Dynasty, the acceptance of Du Fu has mainly emphasized loyalty to the king. In particular, the influence of Taoism not only suppressed any elements in the traditional Confucian tradition that did not conform to neo-Confucian concepts, but also simplified Du Fu in many ways.
The Buddhist tradition has many stories about self-mutilation of limbs and giving away the flesh of the Buddha, such as rulai severed head to give people, pick eyes to give people, cut meat and feed eagles, especially the story of sacrificing himself to feed the tiger is the most famous, telling the Buddha's predecessor Prince Mahasattva when he traveled to see the hungry tigress about to devour his cubs, decided to sacrifice himself to save the young tiger, because the hungry tiger was no longer able to eat people, he stabbed himself with bamboo branches to feed the tiger, until the tiger recovered its strength and then devoured his flesh.
This story appears in many Buddhist texts translated and circulated in the Middle Ages, such as the Kang Monks' Society (?) during the Three Kingdoms period. -280) Translated six sutras, Hui Jue (c. 445) translated the Xianyu Sutra, and Tan Wuchen (385-433) and Yijing (635-712) translated the Golden Guangming Sutra; the medieval Buddhist books "Sutras of Different Phases" and "Dharma Garden Zhulin" are also included; others include the "Bodhisattva Devoting Himself to Feeding the Hungry Tiger and Rising Pagoda Karma Sutra".
Medieval art such as Dunhuang Grottoes murals, Yungang Grottoes, Longmen Grottoes carvings, etc., this story is richly expressed. In particular, it is worth mentioning that in Gansu Province, where Du Fu has been in Qinzhou and Tonggu for a long time, there are still many Northern Dynasty Buddhist murals, sculptures and statue monuments that show the story of sacrificing oneself to feed the tiger, such as the murals of the Tianshui Maijishan Grottoes and the Qin'an Statue Monument, which can be seen by Du Fu in the era in which he lived [9].
The Lotus Sutra uses the term "huacheng" as a metaphor for the nirvana fruit of the Hinayana sutra. In contrast to the Mahayana emphasis on universal beings, the Hinayana teachings preach self-liberation. If the "Fajing Temple" in the middle of the group of poems provides the poet with a temporary rest in the City of Huacheng, then we must remember that the "great treasure" that travelers who rest in the Lotus Sutra are looking for is the salvation of all sentient beings. The end of the group poem should provide an ending and a solution to the problem, and Du Fu did indeed do this.
It is very important to emphasize the self-annotation of the "twelve poems" of the Jixing group poems under the title of the poem: the structure of the group poems can only be truly established when the reader reads the final part, and this structure is the narrative structure of the poet who goes through all kinds of tribulations and eventually cultivates to enlightenment and sentientity.
Three
Fa Qin Zhou begins and ends with a response to Confucius, but the poems are structured through a Buddhist narrative structure of pursuit-enlightenment/self-liberation-self-sacrifice. This kind of mixed discourse itself is the most representative, it shows the complex spiritual world of a medieval person, and it also shows the changes that occur along with the changes that the poet has experienced along the way.
The poet does not narrate directly, but uses the repeated and multiple changes of several images and themes to suggest this tortuous and complex process of change, so that not only the stylistic characteristics of poetry are fully exerted, but also outside the framework of the group poem, each single poem has a rich connotation and can be independently appreciated from different angles. This is the most significant difference between an excellent literary text and a purely religious text.
When discussing the relationship between religion and literature, although multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary discussions can be carried out, the starting point is whether literary studies or religious studies will bring different perspectives to the text. It is worth noting that if the starting point is religious studies, one may only pay attention to the poem "Fajing Temple", because it directly involves the temple; however, if a literary interpretation is made, focusing on the meaning of the poet's display and hint in poetry (rather than direct expression of speech), the religious spirit of the group of poems will be seen.
[1] This article uses Du Shi's edition of Wang Su's Collected Works of Song Ben Du Gongbu (Shanghai Press, 1957) and Xiao Difei's Annotations to du Fu's Complete Works (IV) volume VII (People's Literature Publishing House, 2014), pp. 1699-1770. Subsequent citations will not be indicated.
[2] For the nearest text, see Su Yiru, "The Inheritance and Escape of Du Fu's Poetry from Qin into Shu to da xie landscape poems", Wen and Zhe, No. 16, 2010, pp. 203-236.
[3] See Yan Gengwang, "Tang Dynasty Traffic Map Examination" (Taipei Academia Sinica, 1986 edition), p. 836, Li Jizu, "Schematic Map of Geographical Names in Du Fulong's Right Poems", Du Fu Research Journal, No. 76, pp. 44-51.
[4] Huang Yizhen, "On the Symbolic Significance of the Phoenix Terrace and the Wanzhangtan", "Phoenix" and "Dragon"," in Huang's Commentary on the Poetry of Du Fu from Qin to Shu (Liren Bookstore, 2005), pp. 83-128. Wen Hulin has a small note under the title of "Wanzhangtan" "Tonggu County", but in the early editions of Du Ji, this poem is always arranged before the poem "Fa Qin Zhou", which violates the normal order of poetry according to the time of writing under the poem style, and is in stark contrast with the later Qing Dynasty Duji version (the Qing Dynasty version generally always places "Wan zhangtan" after "Phoenix Terrace" and "Qianyuan Zhongyu Ju Tonggu County Song Seven Songs"). According to this, Taiwanese scholar Huang Yizhen speculated that the order of the early version of the poems probably reflected the design of the poet himself, because "Wanzhangtan" did not conform to the form of Ji Xingshi, so he placed it before "Fa Qin Zhou" to ensure that it was not confused with the "Qinzhou - Tonggu" Ji Xing poem, but he was worried that readers would mistakenly think that Wan Zhangtan was a place name of Qinzhou, so he specially added that the poem was written in Tonggu. This statement is for reference. See Commentary on Du Fu's Poetry from Qin to Shu, p. 83.
[5] Huang Yizhen's "Analysis of Du Fu's Poetry from Qin to Shu" discusses this in detail. Lucas R. Bender's 2016 Harvard doctoral dissertation, Du Fu: The History of Poetry and the Sage of Poetry, made a particularly delicate interpretation of the poem, pointing out in particular the opening and closing responses to Confucius: "Even if I am weak, and the reverse use of "my way is poor" (p. 328).
[6] The New Book of Tang (Zhonghua Bookstore, 1975 edition), vol. 54, 1378 pp.
[7] According to "Rainbow Hidden", it was once the topic of the Tang Dynasty Jinshi Examination. Li Churen once wrote a fu on this topic, and Xu Chang, a jinshi in the Jianzhong period (780-783), wrote a poem on this topic.
[8] Annotations to du Fu's Complete Works (IV), pp. 1765-1768.
[9] Many art history and cultural relics scholars have written about this, see Wei Wenbin and Gao Haiyan: "Gansu Museum Collection of Statue Monuments and Pagoda Sacrifices to Feed Tiger Bunsen Image Examination", Central Plains Cultural Relics, No. 3, 2015, pp. 63-73; Gao Haiyan: "A Review of the Study of Sacrificing The Sacrifice and Feeding the Tiger in Chinese Han Buddhist Art", Dunhuang Academic Journal, No. 1, 2014, pp. 170-180.
【10】This article was read at the International Symposium on "Religious Practice and Literary Creation" jointly organized by the School of Letters of Wuhan University and the Research Center for Religious Literature and Religious Literature of Wuhan University in December 2016, and I would like to thank the organizers and the audience who asked questions.
Journal of Shanghai Normal University, No. 1, 2018.