Wang Wei

Wang Wei was an aristocrat, born with a silver writing brush in his mouth. Of all the privileged among the Chinese poets of all periods of her history, Wang Wei made best use of his privilege. He was a musician of surpassing skill and a landscape painter so innovative that he can be said to have changed landscape painting from his time forward. He was also a patron of poets (he probably saved Li Po from execution), and, not least, patron of the Southern School of Zen Buddhism, the school from which arose both the Rinzai and the Soto schools known to modern scholars and practitioners alike. Most importantly, he was a poet of consummate skill. There is no doubt that Wang Wei’s chueh chu, his quatrains, are somehow something other than anyone else’s. Su Shih, the great Sung poet, said that Wang Wei’s poems are paintings, and his paintings, poems. More than a thousand years of readers have agreed. But there is more. Wang Wei’s readers almost invariably find themselves inside his poems. Something is happening here, and I don’t know what it is, except that I’m in the presence of surpassing poetic genius. [source]

The best introduction to Wang Wei’s poetry is a poem of Ars Poetica by Ssu-k’ung T’u (837-908):

Bend down—and there it is:
No need to wrest it from others.
With the Way, in complete agreement—
The mere touch of a hand is spring:
The way we come upon blooming flowers,
The way we see the year renew itself.
What comes this way will stay;
What is gotten by force will drain away.
A secluded man in an empty mountain,
As rain drops, picks some blades of duckweed.
Freely to feel the flash of dawn:
Leisurely, with the celestial balance. [tooltip content= “Hiding the Universe: Poems of Wang Wei, Wai-lim Yip (Wushinsha-Grossman Press,1970)”] [source][/tooltip]