L82
Tao Qian and the Chinese PoeticTraditian
contemporary taste and expectations that he was essentially All Yan Yanzhi said of Tao the artist is that "in writing he aimed communicating meanings," while Shen Yue did not even about appraising Tao's writings in his biography in Song shu.Liu Xi never mentioned Tao in his monumental work;28 Yang Xiuzhi 82) thought he "does not excel in verbal refinement" (H 1.:L0); Zhong Hong placed Tao in the middle rank of his three-tier grada of poets, having to defend his "plainness and directness" (zhizhil pointing out expressions of "elegance and grace" (H 1:9). Even sympathetic Xiao Tong, who considered Tao's works "unique and superb in all genres" (TYl10), was confined by the taste of his age to, include but nine of Tao's poems inWen xuan (Selections of Literature), compared with thirty-two by Xie Lingyun. It is perhapa
doubly ironic that Tao's ability to convey the essential spirit experience was perceived early without being understood. For Zhong Hong's remark recalls Dong Zhongshu's (c. 179-<.104 B.C.) that "poetry articulates sentiments, and so is good insofar as it iE plain," which Su Yu explains thus: "Poetry expresses sentiments, which cannot be false; thus it is described as plain. " To Zh:u Ziqing'i explanation that "plainness means nafuralness ,"2e one might simply add that zhizhi implies a fidelity to original essences, an art of Na in which Nature speaks through the poet as much as he speaka through it. The Neo-Daoist aesthetic has come to fruition at an almost unnoticed spot.
Luminosity of the Unconscious: The Ineffable Truth l'erhaps the best clue to Tao's link to Neo-Daoist aesthetics lies in two of his mostmemorablelines: "Inthis thereis a truemeaning;/ Iwould lrxplain it, but have forgotten the v/ords" (Tyl 89). For "getting the
meaning and forgetting the words" is a basic principle in Neol)aoism and its chief mode of communication; it aims at transcending the limits of language (indeed all instrumental forms) to reach for ineffable essences. Already discussed in Zhuangzi-"Tfie fish trap cxists because of the fish; once you get the fish you forget the fish trap. . . . Words exist because of meaning; once you get the meaning you forget the words" (226 / 4H9)-the issue finds a more poetically rrriented articulation in the "Appended Remarks" to Yijing: "Writing cloes not fully represent language, and language does not fully (txpress meaning; , . . thus the sages set up images in order to express lneaning thoroughly."l Combining the two statements, Wang Bi nrrives at his own formulation: Nothing excels images in fully expressing meaning, and nothing excels language in fully representing images. Since words arise from images,