Tao Te Ching (Translated by Sam Hamill) - Lao Tzu [19]
The poems attributed to Wang Fan-chih have a history that is different from those of the two mountain masters. These poems were popular among urban folk of the late T’ang, a period when the dynasty was gasping itself away in paroxysms of famine, pestilence, and war. Fewer than a dozen of his poems survive, having been cited by mainstream poets in their own collections of favorites. Like Han Shan and Shih Te, the men themselves, the majority of Wang Fan-chih’s poems were sealed away in a cave, in this case in the caverns of the great Buddhist-Taoist monastic library at Tun-huang, on the eastern end of the Silk Road, around the year 1000, when Chinese forces were clearly losing control of the region. The cavern was only reopened in the early years of the twentieth century, and Wang Fan-chih’s poems weren’t looked at closely by Westerners until after 1950.
The complete translation of the more than three scrolls attributed to Wang Fan-chih, into clear and unpretentious scholarly French by the great Sinologist Paul Demiéville, reveals that everything from radical political statements to Buddhist elementary school copybook morality verses had been stuck together under the Wang Fan-chih label. No more than ten poems by Wang Fan-chih have ever previously been translated into English. When I first looked at the originals of these poems, I was surprised. This poet is, like Han Shan and Shih Te, one who has been constructed from a group of anonymous poets, in Wang Fan-chih’s case clearly mainly poets of the late T’ang. There is a lot of trash in the Wang Fan-chih collection, but there are maybe fifty or sixty poems that were really exciting to discover. Digging through the collection for the good ones made me appreciate Han Shan’s editors for the first time. Wang Fan-chih’s themes include the familiar Buddhist-Taoist eclectic mix, and I don’t doubt that Han Shan and Shih Te would have understood and appreciated the poet’s motives, or his poems. Some few are brilliant, even though the poets whom this pseudonym gathers together were certainly poorly educated. Some of the best poems, indeed, appear to be almost what we’d call graffiti, and I can see guerilla artists splashing these short and combative poems on walls in the dead of night.
While Han Shan and Shih Te sometimes tell tales of poverty and suffering as well, Wang Fan-chih’s life was lived in a time of true cultural fugue, and many of his poems reflect terrible human suffering, felt or observed, that goes far beyond anything we see in the work of the earlier poets. They had chosen something like voluntary poverty in the most beautiful of surroundings. Wang Fan-chih dwells with rats in the midst of pestilence and starvation.
Wang Fan-chih’s name means simply, “Mr. Wang, a Buddhist layman.” While he may seem cynical, and he can certainly be cruelly witty, his motive is always a Buddhist’s, namely to save sentient beings from suffering. His poems concentrate on proving the first of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, that “life is suffering,” and so the poetry is often morbid, even macabre. He’s always ready to puncture hypocritical public displays of piety, and he’s always ready to point at the absolute material truth of death and the pointlessness of pride or of the accumulation of material possessions. He seems an angry man, even a political rebel, and it is harder to see his displays of anger as rhetorical—made to make a moral point—than it is for similar outbursts in the poetry of Han Shan or Shih Te. Acceptance of the first of the Four Noble Truths is the absolutely necessary first step in the Buddha’s Way, a way providing eight steps that are chosen solely for the purpose of releasing humankind from that suffering. Mr. Wang is happy to rub his readers’ faces in the mud, and not afraid to add in a measure of shit and piss to the recipe in his effort to get