ఒక సాయంవేళ ... చియా తావో, చీనీ కవి

చేతికర్రమీద ఆనుకుని చూస్తున్నా. మంచు స్పష్టంగా పేరుకుంటోంది.

మేఘాల, సెలయేళ్ల దొంతరలు మేటువేస్తున్నట్టున్నాయి.

కట్టెలుకొట్టి జీవించే వారు ఇంటిదారి పడుతున్నారు.

కొద్దిసేపట్లో వాలైన కొండకొమ్ములలో చలిపట్టిన సూరీడు అస్తమించబోతున్నాడు.

కొండల అంచున ఎండుగడ్డిమీదనుండి దావానలం వ్యాపిస్తున్నట్టు ఉంది.

రాళ్ళ మీదనుండీ, చెట్లమీదనుండీ తెరలు తెరలుగా పొగమంచు పైకి లేస్తోంది

కొండమీది ఆరామానికి మలుపుతిరుగుతున్న దారిలో

సూర్యాస్తమయ సూచకంగా మ్రోగుతున్న ఘంట నినదిస్తోంది.

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చియా తావో

(779–843),

చీనీ కవి

Evening landscape, Clearing Snow

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Walking-stick in hand, I watch snow clear

Ten Thousand clouds and streams banked up,

Woodcutters return to their simple homes,

and soon a cold son sets among risky peaks.

A wildfire runs among ridgeline grasses.

Scraps of mist rise, born of rock and pine.

On the road back to mountain monastery,

I hear it struck: the bell of evening skies.

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Chia Tao ( Jia Dao / Langxian ) 

(779–843),

Chinese Poet

(From :

Mountain Home ,

The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China ,

Selected and Translated by David Hinton,

Counter Point, Washington DC

Copyright 2002 by David Hinton)

In his introduction to the book, Mr. Hinton says:

Originating in the early 5th Century CE and stretching across two millennia, Chinese tradition of  Rivers and Mountains  (Shan-shui) poetry represents the earliest and the most extensive engagement with wilderness in human history. Fundamentally different from writing that employs the "natural world" as the stage or materials for human concerns, this poetry articulates a profound and spiritual sense of belonging to a wilderness of truly awesome dimensions.  This is not the wilderness in the superficial sense of  "nature" or "landscape,"  terms the western cultural lens has generally applied to this most fundamental aspect of Chinese poetry. Nature calls up a false dichotomy between human and nature, and "landscape" suggests a picturesque realm seen from a spectator's distance- -- but the Chinese wilderness is nothing less than a dynamic cosmology in which humans participate in the most fundamental way.

The poetry of this wilderness cosmology feels utterly contemporary, and in an age of global ecological disruption and mass extinction, this engagement with wilderness makes it more urgently and universally important by the day. But however contemporary this poetry feels, the cosmology that shapes it is not immediately apparent, as this poem by Chia Tao, fairly representative of the rivers-and -mountains tradition makes it clear.

The only tangible indication in this poem that suggests the existence of such a cosmology is the monastery. Given the cultural context, it would probably point a western reader vaguely towards a Ch'an (Zen) Buddhist realm of silence and emptiness. The landscape of the poem does indeed seem infused with that silence and and emptiness, a hallmark of  Chia Tao's genius, but the poem offers little more than this.  That is, of course, as it should be, for the poem naturally operates in the context of its natural cosmology and has no reason to explicate its terms. But for us, those terms should be understood before we begin to read such a poem at depth.

The poem's native cosmology has its source in the originary Taoist masters; Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, who lived in the fourth and sixth centuries BCE. The central concept in their cosmology is Tao, or way.   Tao originally meant "way", as in "pathway", or "roadway" a meaning it has kept.  But Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu redefined it as a spiritual concept bu using it to describe the process (hence, a "Way") through which all things arise and pass away. We might approach their Way by speaking of it at its deep ontological level, where the distinction between the being (yu) and nonbeing (wu)  arises. Being can be understood fairly in a straightforward way as the empirical universe, the ten thousand living and nonliving things in constant transformation; and nonbeing as the generative void from which this ever-changing realm of being perpetually arises.  Within this framework, Way can be understood as a kind of generative ontological process through which all things arise and pass away as nonbeing burgeons forth into the great transformation of being. This is simply an ontological description of natural process, and it is perhaps most immediately manifest in the seasonal cycle: the emptiness of nonbeing in winter, being's burgeoning forth in spring, the fullness of its flourishing in summer, and its dying back into nonbeing in autumn. In their poems, the ancient Chinese poets inevitably locate themselves in the cosmology by referring to the seasonal cycle--- ....(  ...... ) deep wisdom in ancient China meant dwelling as an organic part of this ontological process.

The mechanism by which being burgeons forth from nonbeing is tzu-jan, The literal meaning of tzu-jan is "self-ablaze.".....(......)... the ten thousand things emerging spontaneously from the generative source, each according to its own nature, independent and self-sufficient, each dying and returning into the process of change, only to reappear in another self-generating form.

The poetic significance of this cosmology is apparent in this poem.