29. Dispatching to the Taoist in the Mountain of Quanjiao
A poem by Wei Yingwu, translated by Hyun Woo Kim
Today morning, the provincial building is cold;
Suddenly, I think of the guest in the mountain.
He ties up the thorny firewood below a stream,
Comes back, and boils the white stone.
I want to carry a bowl of drink,
To console the evening of winds and rain afar.
The falling leaves are filling the empty mountain;
Where will I find the footprints?
「 寄全椒山中道士」
今朝郡齋冷
忽念山中客
澗底束荊薪
歸來煮白石
欲持一瓢酒
遠慰風雨夕
落葉滿空山
何處尋行跡
From Hyun Woo:
Today’s poem is my favorite piece by Wei Yingwu. The poetic narrator seems to be Wei Yingwu himself, as he mentions the “provincial building” where a banquet took place in the poem we read two weeks ago. It is autumn, and the morning is cold. This leads him to think of a certain Taoist hermit in a mountain, likely a friend of his. The poet must have been thinking of his friend all day: it is morning when the poem began, but later he wants to “console the evening of winds and rain afar”. However, he will not be able to locate the hermit even if he goes to the mountain far away with “a bowl of drink” since “the falling leaves are filling the empty mountains” and there will be no “footprints” visible. I love the imagery at the end of the poem where the autumn leaves cover up signs of a human being, and it is quite fitting to read it now as we enter the new season.
You may have wondered what Wei Yingwu means when he says his friend “boils the white stone”. A Xian(仙) is an immortal being that Taoists strived to become, but many schools of Taoism differed in opinion regarding how. Some would live a life of recluse in the mountains (this is why I have usually translated 仙 as “hermit” or “recluse” so far), and others would engage in alchemy and take pills made with secret recipes, which often included adding mercury. Liu Xiang, an astronomer and alchemist from the first century B.C., recorded that a Xian took boiled white stone as food. Thus ‘white stone’ has been used as a Taoist imagery in East Asia since Liu Xiang.
Interestingly, two twentieth-century East Asian artists chose ‘White Stone(白石)’ as their artist name. They are Qi Baishi(齊白石) and Baekseok(白石). The former was a Chinese painter and the latter was a Korean poet. Their works share a certain common aura despite the difference in their crafts. I presume both of them to be artistic sons of Wei Yingwu, and Wei Yingwu an artistic son of Tao Yuanming.
There is something so touching about Baekseok and Qi Baishi’s art. Since I have already shown a poem of Baekseok in an interview with
, I will share paintings of Qi Baishi today.Sent to School
Children Play in a Willow’s Shade
Chickens’ Interest
In the last painting, Qi Baishi signed “ninety-three-year-old Baishi (White Stone)”. He would die that year. All the paintings are from here and here.
If you enjoyed my work, you can buy me a cup of tea. I am not a coffee person, by the way.
Any office worker can relate, staring out the window and dreaming of an alternate lifestyle shorn of anodyne modernity.
This just completely changed my perception of Substack. If even one out of a thousand publications here are addressing subjects of such genuine importance as T'ang poetry, it's worth continuing to dig around.