Liu Zongyuan evokes nirvana
He imagines perfect assimilation into the environment
An Old Fisherman Liu Zongyuan Where the River Xiang winds through bamboo wilds, A fisherman moors by West Bluff for the night. He dips that crystal southern water And makes his fire with bamboo at first light. By the time the sun burns off the dawn haze He has vanished. the creak of his oars Greening the mountains and waterways. At the horizon, in midstream, I look back to see The clouds that wheel above the hills unconsciously.
The Xiang River and the bamboo kindling place our fisherman in the south, in southern Hunan.
In this poem, Liu Zongyuan (773-819) plays uneasily with the perspective: he may be the fisherman, or a disembodied observer, or positioned somewhere near the mooring point.
The metaphor of the clouds culminates the poem: their unconscious procession represents a naturalistic state that the fisherman also approaches. In Buddhism, this state is simply being in the moment, free from any intention; in the Daoist tradition, this state is acceptance of the identity of all things and recognition that we are one with nature.
柳宗元 渔翁
渔翁夜傍西岩宿，晓汲清湘燃楚竹。
烟销日出不见人，欸乃一声山水绿。
回看天际下中流，岩上无心云相逐。