Goodbye to all that

Wang Wei walks to where the water ends

My Estate at Far South Hill
Wang Wei

I started, in my middle age,
  To love the Way, so finally
My home is at the edge
  Of Far South Hill, and when I feel
The need, drop everything and go
  To splendours only I
Can truly know.

I walk to where the water ends,
  Then sit and watch the clouds around
Me rise; if I should meet a friend,
  He is a woodsman of that ground,
And we shall talk and laugh without
  A thought of turning home.

王维  终南别业
中岁颇好道，晚家南山陲。
兴来每独往，胜事空自知。
行到水穷处，坐看云起时。
偶然值林叟，谈笑无还期。

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This poem seems to form a natural pair with another poem, written considerably earlier in Wang’s life:

The estate mentioned here is the same one that Wang Wei celebrates in his Wang River poems.

For Wang Wei, the Way is Buddhism.

The most famous line is at the beginning of the second stanza: I walk to where the water ends. It is marvellous, evocative, and fabulously vague. For modern me, it brings to mind the beginning of Moby Dick, where people line the shore - the place where the water ends - because they are drawn there. In Wang’s case, he may be standing on the edge of a lake. But he might also mean that he follows a mountain stream up to its source in the hills; or to where a stream empties into the lake; or to where he can no longer see the lake… this kind of ambiguity leaves us suspended with Wang in midair. We want to be enjoying the scenery with him, but somehow it all seems illusory and out-of-this-world. This is exactly what he wants to convey.

Here is a video of how this poem might have sounded in the Chinese of the day:

Bonus video:

On the topic of Buddhism, I ran across this segment in a portmanteau Korean movie the other day, and I find it rather wonderful. It’s about a robot that finds Buddhist enlightenment because enlightenment is all about extinguishing desire, and robots don’t have desires in the first place.