Wang Wei, sometimes titled the Poet Buddha, was a Tang Dynasty Chinese poet, musician, painter, and statesman. He exemplified the ideal of the Chinese scholar official, maintaining a successful career as a bureaucrat in the Tang court while remaining detached from the passions of everyday life.
Background
Not much is known about Wang Wei’s early life. Born in 699, in the district of Qi, in the modern province of Shanxi, China, he was the eldest child of a family of aristocratic, middle-level officials. Wang Wei’s father, Wang Chulian, despite his middle-official rank, belonged to the powerful Taiyuan Wang clan, while Wang Wei’s mother belonged to the prominent Boling Cui clan. The Wangs and the Cuis were among the “Seven Great Surnames” (qi xing) and wielded much political power. He began to compose poetry at the age of nine and also showed talent in painting, calligraphy, and music.
Education
Wang Wei was a prodigy and evidently had the typical Confucian literary education, which prepared him for the civil-service examinations. At the age of fifteen, he went to the capitals of Luoyang and Xi’an to prepare himself for the examinations and was warmly welcomed at the courts of the imperial princes, especially that of Prince Qi (Li Fan), the younger brother of the emperor.
Having taken first place in the provincial examination, he became qualified to take the metropolitan examination. In 721, he was among the thirty-eight successful candidates for the jinshi degree out of the several thousand who attempted it. Wang spent ten years studying with Chán master Daoguang.
Career
Known for his court poetry and ability to play pipa (Chinese guitar), Wang Wei was an immediate success at court, where he shrewdly made important social and literary contacts. As a result, he was soon appointed one of the court’s associate secretaries of music. His future looked bright.
Nevertheless, at this time, Wang Wei’s position as a literatus came to overshadow his background as an aristocrat. Soon after Wang Wei assumed his official position at the court of Prince Qi, the prince was suspected of conspiring against his brother. In 722 the emperor responded by breaking up the princely entourages. Wang Wei was charged with an indiscretion (allowing the performance of a tabooed dance). In 723 he was dismissed from court, demoted, and banished to the distant district of Jizhou (in modern Shandong Province), thus beginning the early period of his literary development.
Wang Wei served in Jizhou until 727, when he began a period of travel in the eastern provinces. These travels frequently provided inspiration for poems which are unusual in their perspectives. During his travels, Wang Wei made the acquaintance of Daoist and Buddhist masters and frequented their retreats. He also made important political friendships during his exile. His friendship with Pei Yaoqing, the prefect of Jizhou, led to his introduction to the outstanding statesman and brilliant poet Zhang Jiuling, the powerful imperial minister.
About 730 Wang Wei’s wife died. He never remarried and chose to remain celibate for the rest of his life, beginning a serious study of Ch’an Buddhism with the Ch’an master Zuoguang. At this time, he also discovered his own poetic voice. In 733 he returned to Xi’an. Now his acquaintance with Zhang Jiuling paid off, for this powerful and highly ethical man sponsored his reentry into politics. In 734 Emperor Xuan Zong appointed him “reminder on the right.” True to his Confucian ideal, Wang Wei was in public service once again, thus ending his first stage of poetic development.
As reminder on the right, Wang Wei reminded the emperor of overlooked or forgotten matters. Such a position required much tact and subtle diplomacy; apparently Wang Wei was equal to it, for he maintained his position and continued to advance. Nevertheless, he found Xuan Zong’s new ministry dangerous. Although the triumvirate included Zhang Jiuling and Pei Yaojing, the third member was the ambitious Li Linfu. Zhang Jiuling and Pei Yaojing had both risen to positions of power through the examination system; they were literati. Li Linfu, however, was an aristocrat and a member of the imperial clan that supported hereditary privilege: Conflict was inevitable.
When Zhang Jiuling was banished and Pei Yaojing demoted in 737, Wang Wei also was in danger. Nevertheless, he survived, although he temporarily became investigating censor of Hexi, a post on the northwest frontier in the province of Liangzhou (modern Gansu). Here he assisted the military governor, Ts’ui Hsi-i, from 737 until 738, when Cui’s forces were defeated by the Tibetans and the general was killed. Although not technically an exile, Wang Wei’s frontier assignment gave Li Linfu time to consolidate his power without undue interference. He became a virtual dictator when the elderly emperor, preoccupied with his consort, Yang Guifei, began to allow him a free hand in public affairs.
When Wang Wei returned to Xi’an in 738, he was promoted to palace censor. In 740 he was sent to the south to supervise the provincial examinations, returning to the capital and continuing his steady advancement. At about this time, he seems to have acquired his famous Wangchuan estate, which was located in the foothills of the Zhongnan Mountains, some thirty miles south of Xi’an; the estate was to prove important to his life and to his painting and poetry. About 750 his mother died, and he withdrew from court for the customary period of mourning, a little more than two years.
Upon his return to Xi’an in 752, Wang Wei was appointed secretary of the civil office, which obliged him to nominate, examine, and evaluate civil officials. In 754 he became grand secretary of the imperial chancellery, which represented a more prestigious rank. The following year, however, any further advance was abruptly curtailed by the onslaught of the An Lushan rebellion, which dispersed the entire court. The years from 734 to 755 may be considered Wang Wei’s middle period, his most productive and significant literary period. It includes his poem written to Zhang Jiuling after the latter’s exile to Hsing-chou in 739 and the frontier poems inspired by his military experience at Hexi.
The events of the An-Shi rebellion, which took place between 755 - 763, profoundly affected Chinese social culture in general and Wang Wei in particular, although Nicolas Tackett has recently argued that it was not as destructive of the Tang aristocracy as had previously been thought. In 756, Wang Wei was residing in the capital of Chang'an, where he was captured by the rebels when they took the city. Although the emperor Xuanzong and his court and most of the governmental officials had already evacuated to Sichuan, Wang Wei had come down with dysentery and at that time was an invalid and thus unable to travel, especially not on this notoriously mountainous and difficult passage. The rebels then took their prize captive to their capital at Luoyang, where the government of the rebellion sought his collaboration.
According to some sources, he attempted to avoid actively serving the insurgents during the capital's occupation by pretending to be deaf; other sources state that, in an attempt to destroy his voice, he drank medicine that created cankers on his mouth. In any case, at Luoyang, Wang Wei was unable to avoid becoming officially one of the rebels, with an official title. In 757, with the ascendency of Suzong, and the Tang recapture of Luoyang from the rebel forces, Wang Wei was arrested and imprisoned by the Tang government as a suspected traitor.
The charges of disloyalty were eventually dropped, partly because of the intervention of his brother, Wang Jin, who held high government rank and whose loyal efforts in the defense of Taiyuan were well known. Furthermore, the poems he had written during his captivity were produced, and accepted as evidence in favor of his loyalty. Following his pardon, Wang Wei spent much of his time in his Buddhist practice and activities. Then, with the further suppression of the rebellion, he again received a government position, in 758, at first in a lower position than prior to the rebellion, as a tàizǐ zhōngchōng, in the court of the crown prince rather than that of the emperor himself.
In 759 Wang Wei was not only restored to his former position in the emperor's court, but he was eventually promoted. Over time, he was moved to the secretarial position of jǐshìzhōng and his last position, which he held until his death in 761, was shàngshū yòuchéng, or deputy prime minister. As these positions were in the city of Chang'an, they were not too far from his private estate to prevent him from visiting and repairing it. During all this time, he continued his artistic endeavors.
Wang Wei never lived to see the empire return to peace, as the An-Shi disturbances and their aftermath continued beyond his lifetime. However, at least he could enjoy a relative return to stability compared to the initial years of the rebellion, especially when he had the opportunity to spend time in the relative seclusion of his Lantian estate, which allowed him both a poetic and a Buddhist retreat, as well as a place to spend time with his friends and with nature, painting and writing. But, finally, his writing came to an end, and in the seventh month of 759, or in 761, Wang Wei requested writing implements, wrote several letters to his brother and to his friends, and then died. He was then buried at his Lantian estate.
Achievements
Wang Wei is known for his monochrome landscape paintings, expressive of Zen Buddhist ideals and is credited with introducing the painting technique known as “broken” or “splashed” ink (pomo), though it is known to have been used earlier. Wang Wei was one of the greatest poets of the golden age of Chinese poetry, the T'ang dynasty. He was also regarded by later critics as the founder of the Southern school of landscape painting.
