Tao Yuanming's Utopianism

Peach Blossom Spring (桃花源记) is a short prose fable written by China's best known poet during the six dynasties period, Tao Yuanming (陶渊明). Joining us today is Dr. Wendy Swartz, professor of Chinese literature at Rutgers to share her knowledge with us on the subject. Prof. Swartz is the author of Reading Tao Yuanming: Shifting Paradigms of Historical Reception, and  another book Reading Philosophy, Writing Poetry: Intertextual Modes of Making Meaning in Early Medieval China.

Recommended Reading:
Earl Trotter, Tao Yuanming: Selected Poetry & Prose  (primary text)
Wendy Swartz, Reading Tao Yuanming: Shifting Paradigms of Historical Reception (secondary text)

For aficionados of classic Chinese: 《陶渊明集》

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Transcript

During the reign‑period of T’ai yuan of the Chin dynasty from 326‑97 AD there lived in Wu‑ling a certain fisherman. One day, as he followed the course of a stream, he became unconscious of the distance he had travelled. All at once he came upon a grove of blossoming peach trees which lined either bank for hundreds of paces. No tree of any other kind stood amongst them, but there were fragrant flowers, delicate and lovely to the eye, and the air was filled with drifting peachbloom.

The fisherman, marvelling, passed on to discover where the grove would end. It ended at a spring; and then there came a hill. In the side of the hill was a small opening which seemed to promise a gleam of light. The fisherman left his boat and entered the opening.

 It was almost too cramped at first to afford him passage; but when he had taken a few dozen steps he emerged into the open light of day. He faced a spread of level land. Imposing buildings stood among rich fields and pleasant ponds all set with mulberry and willow. Linking paths led everywhere, and the fowls and dogs of one farm could be heard from the next. People were coming and going and working in the fields. Both the men and the women dressed in exactly the same manner as people outside; white‑haired elders and tufted children alike were cheerful and contented.

Some, noticing the fisherman, started in great surprise and asked him where he had come from. He told them his story. They then invited him to their home, where they set out wine and killed chickens for a feast. 

When news of his coming spread through the village everyone came in to question him. For their part they told how their forefathers, fleeing from the troubles of the age of Ch’in, had come with their wives and neighbours to this isolated place, never to leave it. 

From that time on they had been cut off from the outside world. They asked what age was this because they had never even heard of the Han, let alone its successors the Wei and the Jin. The fisherman answered each of their questions in full, and they sighed and wondered at what he had to tell. The rest all invited him to their homes in turn, and in each house food and wine were set before him. It was only after a stay of several days that he took his leave.

“Do not speak of us to the people outside,” they said. But when he had regained his boat and was retracing his original route, he marked it at point after point; on reaching the prefecture he sought audience of the prefect and told him of all these things. The prefect immediately despatched officers to go back with the fisherman. He hunted for the marks he had made, but grew confused and never found the way again.

The learned and virtuous hermit Liu Tzu‑chi heard the story and went off elated to find the place. But he had no success, and died at length of a sickness. Since that time there have been no further “seekers of the ford.”

C: Thanks for tuning in to the Global Novel. I’m Claire Hennessy. What you’ve just heard is a short prose fable called Peach Blossom Spring written by China's best known poet during the six dynasties period, Tao Yuanming. Joining us today is Dr. Wendy Swartz, professor of Chinese literature at Rutgers to share her knowledge with us on the subject. Prof. Swartz is the author of Reading Tao Yuanming: Shifting Paradigms of Historical Reception, and  another book Reading Philosophy, Writing Poetry: Intertextual Modes of Making Meaning in Early Medieval China. Welcome Wendy. Thank you so much for joining the show. 

W: thank you Claire! I was always fun to talk about Tao Yuanming.

C: first of all, Could you tell us who Tao Yuanming was?

W: mostly likely he was born in 365, and died in 427. He served in government office, the main career for all educated elite men in premodern China, for about 13 years. He withdrew from office when he was about 40, and lived out his life in what was considered reclusion as a gentleman farmer. He wrote mostly about his life in retirement, including his daily activities, as well as about his philosophy of reclusion. During his lifetime, he was not considered a major poet. In the centuries after his death, he came to represent for the Chinese literati class three exemplars: eccentric recluse (he supposedly quit office because he refused to don the formal proper attire to meet an inspector sent to his district, saying, “I refuse to bend at the waist for five pecks of rice.”), ethical hero (because he quit office before the change in dynasty and cryptically wrote about that dynastic change, later readers saw in this an act of loyalty for not serving two rulers), and lofty transcendent (some believed that he transcended the mundane, including politics, altogether; the logical conclusion to this attitude can in seen in the early 20th century when one prominent scholar claimed that although Tao Yuanming experienced extreme poverty and hunger after he withdrew from office, such deprivation surely did not bother such a lofty man). As the stature of Tao Yuanming’s person grew, so did appreciation for his poetry. For the last millennium, he has been considered a poet with few parallels in China. Today there is a subfield in Chinese literature devoted to studying Tao Yuanming and his works, much like Shakespeare Studies in English Literature. 

C: How is a recluse defined? What did a recluse look like in Tao Yuanming’s time? And how do the ways of a recluse help us understand the cultural climate of the poet?

W:Broadly speaking, a recluse in premodern China referred to someone who qualified for government service, by virtue of their education, class, and abilities, but chose instead to withdraw from or shun that kind of active public life. In Tao Yuanming’s era, the early medieval period (roughly from the 3rd century to the 6th), reclusion had especially interesting and peculiar features. Reclusion was not necessarily defined against government service then. Medieval writers introduced the crafty concept of “recluse at court,” which meant reclusion was defined by one’s state of mind or one’s intent. If a court official was lofty-minded, detached, and transcendent, then he could lay claim to practicing a reclusion of sorts at court. (As a side note: this, of course, had the advantage of maintaining the respectability of being a government official and collecting a steaedy salary.) In short, to be considered a recluse in medieval China, one did not need to hide in the mountains as a hermit and lead an ascetic life. This is one of the most important distinctions between the concept/practice of reclusion in China and in the West. In medieval China, reclusion was less about place (where you are physically) than state of mind or intent (where you are spiritually or mentally).  

Another interesting feature of medieval reclusion was the social aspect of it. Contrary to a popular perception of a recluse as a hermit living an obscure, ascetic life, recluses were often famous and sought after in medieval China. Tao Yuanming, in particular, was well known in his locale as an eccentric, lofty-minded recluse. There are anecdotes about how gentrymen and officials sought his company, and would lure him with food and wine, for they knew how much he loved wine, above all. 

C: The fact that Tao Yuanming being a drunkard is both an interesting and baffling fact: He was reportedly to be drunk while tending his farm; he seldom accepted visits except acquaintances who truly desired to befriend him and especially those who brought him wine. When he gets drunk faster than his guests, he would simply tell them to leave so he could sleep. And he would spend all the money he received from a friend as pre-paid credits on a bar, rather than on food. While nowadays we designate such behaviors as alcoholism, I wonder how drinking was viewed at his time? And how should we understand Tao’s alcoholism in relation to his status as a recluse and a poet?

W: The ancient Chinese rarely viewed habitual wine-drinking pejoratively as alcoholism. To the contrary, in early medieval China, drinking had become a defining part of elite culture. Social outings and gatherings would include intellectual discussion, poetry composition, and drinking wine. In certain cases, a man’s drinking might be construed as a tempered form of political protest or a muted gesture to mark unspeakable distress. This was the dominant reading of the famous scholar-official, Ruan Ji, who lived about 150 years before Tao Yuanming. Ruan Ji was said to have taken to winebibbing and to have played the role of the drunkard during a turbulent era, when one powerful and ruthless family was poised to replace the ruling dynasty. In the same vein, Tao Yuanming’s liberal alcohol consumption was seen by many later readers as protest and distress over the rise of a military man then poised to oust the ruling family and supplant the dynasty under which Tao Yuanming was born and presumably loyal to.

Perhaps Tao Yuanming was such a loyalist, who drank and drank in order to leave his mark of noble protest and indicate in a culturally-accepted sign his disapproval of current politics. Many of his readers would like to believe that was the case. There is no good reason to debunk that reading. But, Tao Yuanming himself would tell you in his poetry that he saw wine as what he called the “care-dispelling thing.” What cares? Maybe the troubled political times. But surely, his decision to renounce his worldly ambition, his decision to withdraw from government service and live a life of poverty. That was no easy decision in his time. In one poem praising the dignity and honor of impoverished gentlemen, Tao obliquely references the resentful words he gets at home, presumably from his wife and sons who were made to live his choice of poverty.

C: What are the major conventional modes of reading Tao Yuanming (for example, “自然” as one of the motifs), and what’s the new way of reading him as you proposed in your monograph? 

W: Since the 11th century, through the promotion of several influential poet-critics, Tao Yuanming’s poetry has come to embody the supreme ideals of spontaneity and naturalness. Spontaneous and natural has remained one of the major conventional ways of interpreting Tao Yuanming’s poetry. For illustration, I will discuss as an example one of his most famous poems, “Drinking Wine” #5. 

I built my hut in the midst of men, 結廬在人境

Yet hear no clamor of horse and carriage. 而無車馬喧

You ask how it can be done? 問君何能爾

With the mind detached, place becomes remote. 心遠地自偏

Plucking chrysanthemums by the eastern hedge, 採菊東籬下

At a distance I catch sight of the southern mountain. 悠然見南山

The mountain air becomes lovely at sunset, 山氣日夕佳

As flying birds return together in flocks. 飛鳥相與還

In these things there is true meaning, 此中有真意

I wish to explain, but have forgotten the words. 欲辨已忘言

The most famous couplet comes in the middle of the poem: “Plucking chrysanthemums (ingredient for long life) by the eastern hedge, At a distance I catch sight of the southern mountain (symbol of long life).” For Chinese readers, this exemplifies spontaneity. To just happen to catch sight of something indicates a lack of intentionality. You’re not actively, trying to see something. This attribute was so much part of the Tao Yuanming brand that a competing version of the text, with a variant “to gaze at” (wang 望) instead of “catch sight of” (jian 見), was summarily dismissed by later editors, critics and readers. According to their line of reasoning, “to gaze at” would suggest intentionality, which a spontaneous and natural poet of such as Tao Yuanming surely could not have meant. They would say Tao Yuanming simply poured out what was within him, without any thought of using language to craft literary works. 

This interpretation of Tao Yuanming and his poetry as being utterly and absolutely spontaneous, natural, and uncrafted had created blinders to reading and appreciating the full range of his poetic art. For centuries, critics by and larger ignored earlier textual sources for Tao Yuanming’s poetry and saw his works as utterly and absolutely original in their spontaneous creation. My recent book on early medieval Chinese poetry and philosophy, and their intersection, demonstrates that Tao Yuanming did not create from within a vacuum of spontaneous genius; he himself was an intertext, a lacework of many texts. He read earlier texts, such as the Zhuangzi and the Analects, and was familiar with the philosophical and literary traditions; and he used them in his own literary production. I argue in my book that instead of searching for Tao Yuanming’s originality in imputedly unique inventions, we ought to inquire into how he deliberately selected from and creatively used cultural forms available to him to produce texts that are of his own distinct design and composition. 

C: What were the literary canons in six dynasties, ones that dismissed Tao Yuanming’s works as mediocre? And how did he get recognized by Tang-Song poets? And…What are the social and literary conditions that witnessed a major shift in Tao’s reception? 

W: It might be interesting for our viewers to know that Tao Yuanming was not always considered to be a great poet, a “natural,” “spontaneous” poet. In fact, critics and readers in his time saw him primarily as an eccentric or lofty recluse, who happened to write poetry that was often confused with words of a farmer. “Natural” was only articulated as a defining attribute of Tao Yuanming works about five hundred years into his reception history, during the Song dynasty.

This was not because “naturalness” did not exist as an aesthetic term during his time, since, for example, it was applied by early medieval China writers to the poetry of Tao’s contemporary, Xie Lingyun 謝靈運 (385-433), who has since come to epitomize the exquisite craft and artfulness celebrated in that period.

Modern scholars have duly noted that both Xie Lingyun and Tao Yuanming have been described as natural by critics of different periods, and many explain this as a progression from error to truth. That is to say, the early medieval perception of Xie Lingyun’s poetry as natural was simply inaccurate. According to this line of thinking, it is the Song critics who finally got it right 500 years later: Tao Yuanming is truly the one who was natural, while Xie Lingyun becomes his antithesis. The simplicity, directness and lyrical nature of Tao Yuanmin’s farmstead poetry should render this quality self-evident.

However, I have argued for the critical importance of historicizing interpretive concepts and terms. If we historicize the concept of “naturalness,” a very different, and more convincing explanation emerges. “Ziran” did, in fact, mean different things in the early medieval period and the Song dynasty 500 years later. One might think it odd that a concept like “natural” is not absolutely, automatically self-evident. The Song dynasty understanding of “natural” is closer to our modern understanding of it: spontaneous, effortless, artless. The early medieval writers had a different understanding and they were not wrong to perceive Xie Lingyun’s poetry as natural, since it bore the hallmarks of natural craft in early medieval China: Xie Lingyun’s poetry directly pursued a scene without leaving obvious, excessive marks of crafting and it captured the appearance of things with verisimilitude without the heavy mediation of allusions. 

Song dynasty critics would concur that naturalness is inimical to prominent traces of crafting and indissociable from direct expression. Yet most would not characterize Xie’s poetry as natural because their conception of naturalness was also different in significant ways. The Song dynasty notion of naturalness now required an absence not only of obvious artifice, but also of effort and intentionality. For Song critics, Tao Yuanming’s poetry exemplified these qualities and thus naturalness.

C: How did Tao eventually become a cultural icon or moral hero for the Chinese literati? And how should we understand this collective process of cultural making of an icon?

W: The case of Tao Yuanming illuminates brilliantly some of the most enduring collective desires and concerns of the Chinese literati class. He grappled with a core dilemma for the Chinese literati: to serve or not to serve the government (reasons for serving might be ambition, bettering society, financial considerations, respectability; reasons for not serving might be to uphold one’s lofty standards and ideals, to maintain one’s integrity (because, of course, politics can be messy and dirty), the constraints and lack of freedom in government bureaucracy. Like many before and after him, Tao Yuanming faced this major life dilemma. However, Tao made a brave choice—to withdraw from government service and live as a farmer-recluse—that many others simply couldn’t. And, he lived that choice with mostly joy and tranquility, if we are to believe his portrayals of his farmstead life. He represented the freedom and daring that most could only dream about. 

As well, as I mentioned earlier today, for many critics and readers in the Song dynasty and afterwards, Tao Yuanming’s withdrawal from government in a precarious and unstable era and thus did not serve two ruling dynasties made him a moral hero who stood for loyalty and integrity. His supposed loyalty was celebrated especially in the Song dynasty and thereafter. In part, this is because loyalty to one dynasty was integral to the Song definition of morality. Different eras emphasized different aspects of Tao Yuanming and his works because these different eras are guided by different cultural demands, and changing aesthetic and moral concerns. In this way, the construction of Tao Yuanming as one of China’s greatest cultural icons was a collective and cumulative process.

C:What cultural legacy did Tao Yuanming leave us? do you think? 

W:Tao Yuanming has been an enduring cultural icon because he appealed to a wide-range of people for a variety of reasons. In premodern China, for the Confucian moralists, he stood for unswerving loyalty and unbending integrity. For sympathizers of Daoist or Buddhist thought, he was untrammeled and represented transcendence. For scholar-officials, his work gave them a literary space to fantasize about leaving the toilsome or tainting world of officialdom. For playwrights and painters, Tao Yuanming provided many colorful anecdotes for their works, such as stories about his love of wine, his pursuit of freedom, and his flouting of etiquette and conventions (his refusal to show the prescribed decorum to a visiting inspector for five peck of rice, meaning an official salary). For the modern audience, we still appreciate Tao Yuanming for his courageous choice of pursuing a life of freedom and independence, against the pressures of society, culture and family, and doing as he pleased and living his ideal life. 

The picture of utopia that Tao Yuanming depicted in his famous work, “Peach Blossom Spring,” is remarkably similar to how Tao represented his own farmstead life. “Peach Blossom Spring” is about a fisherman stumbling upon a hidden enclave and discovering a small agrarian community with inhabitants living an idyllic, peaceful, and harmonious existence far away from politics and social upheavals. I think Tao Yuanming continues to appeal to readers today because we believe that he lived as he pleased and that he lived his ideal life. We can aspire to that.

Another big part of Tao Yuanming’s cultural legacy is the vision of utopia depicted in his famous work, “Peach Blossom Spring.” This story is about a fisherman who stumbles upon a hidden enclave and discovers a small agrarian community with inhabitants living an idyllic, peaceful, and harmonious existence far away from politics and social upheavals. This is what the fisherman sees upon discovering the hidden enclave: 

“The houses were orderly aligned, with rich fields and beautiful ponds. Mulberry and bamboo trees and the like grew there; criss-crossed paths lined the fields. The sounds of cocks and dogs could be heard from one courtyard to the next. Men and women were coming and going about their farm work in the fields…. The old and young were carefree and happy.” 

The Peach Blossom Spring inhabitants enjoy material self-sufficiency: they have fields, ponds, trees, and plants that fulfill their basic needs. The able-bodied men and women work the fields, while the old (who have worked) and the young (who will one day work) live a happy, carefree existence. The passage about the sounds of cocks and dogs being heard from one courtyard to the next alludes to a chapter in Laozi Daodejing (The Classic of the Way and Virtue), which describes an ideal state or realm: the peaceful co-existence of neighboring communities in which the dogs and cocks in one can be heard in the other, yet these communities have no contact or conflict with one another. The use of this Laozi allusion here signifies rustic harmony and tranquility. 

The poem that follows the prose introduction elaborates beautifully on this idyllic picture. I will now recite some relevant lines:

By agreement they set about farming the land 相命肆農耕

When the sun went down each rested from his toil. 日入從所憩

Bamboo and mulberry provided shade enough, 桑竹垂餘蔭

They planted beans and millet, each in season. 菽稷隨時藝

From spring silkworms came the long silk thread 春蠶收長絲

On the fall harvest no king’s tax was paid. 秋熟靡王稅

[…]

Children wandered about singing songs, 童孺縱行歌

Greybeards went paying one another calls. 斑白歡遊詣

[…]

Although they had no calendar to tell, 雖無紀曆誌

The four seasons still filled out a year. 四時自成歲

Joyous in their ample happiness 怡然有餘樂

What need is there for clever contrivance? 於何勞智慧

This pared down living yields abundant joy: their food and clothing are sufficient, yet their happiness is ample. They are free from constraints of governed society (no taxes to pay, no calendar to determine their lives). The old enjoy leisure by making social calls, the young express their innocence by singing songs. This is a picture of rustic simplicity, in which clever contrivance and the troubles it brings have no place. Clever contrivance here would mean ambition and getting ahead in the world. 

The vision of utopia sketched in “Peach Blossom Spring” is, in fact, remarkably similar to how Tao represented his own farmstead life: being in nature, working the land, making an honest living, making social calls to neighbors, and drinking wine in leisure. To be able to find extraordinary pleasure in such ordinary things, as Tao Yuanming has shown in many of his other works, constitutes life in its ideality. I think Tao Yuanming continues to appeal to readers today because we believe that he lived as he pleased and that he lived his ideal life. We can aspire to that.

C: Thank you Prof. Swartz for helping us understand Tao Yuanming and his time through such an interesting and enlightening talk.