Deer Grove (Wang Wei)

Mysterious and beautiful

Deer Grove

I only caught the echoes of men's voices,

The hills were empty; no one to be seen.

The setting sunlight enters through the branches,

In mossy woods it shines on mossy green.

Notes:

Pei Di's poem at the same site (prose translation):

As the sun sets, I see the cold mountain, and then one single figure walking.

I cannot know what happens in the deep woods, but there are tracks from a wild stag.

This very famous poem by Wang Wei again illustrates the difficulty of ancient words. I've given the title as Deer Grove, but no-one really knows what this place name means. The character 寨 originally meant fence, so it could be a fence to keep deer out; or a corral to keep deer in. 寨 later came to mean stockade, or fortified village, so it could be "deer village." But Deer Park was also the site of the Buddha's first public lessons, and deer were a common metaphor for Buddhist concepts (they're elusive and beautiful). So this site may not have had any deer at all! Pei Di's poem gives some support for this latter reading: he suggests reasoning from worldly evidence about things we cannot see, which is very much a Buddhist mode of thinking.