Dwarf Potted Trees in Poetry and in Other Essays: China, to 960

The Artist:     Tao Chien [T'ao Ch'ien] (original name Tou Yuen-ming or Tao Yuanming, tzu Yuan-ling, 365-427 A.D.) is generally considered one of the two or three greatest pre-Tang dynasty poets. Although his great-grandfather had been an illustrious statesman and general, the fortunes of the house of Tao declined rapidly, and by Chien's birth it turned into a poor family in Jiangxi province. His father's name is unrecorded.
Even during his life, though, Tao was a noted poet and essayist. Many of his one hundred and twenty extant pieces could be considered philosophical, yet were written in simple language and straightforwardness that speak from his heart directly to the reader. He scorned the more ornate language and the obliqueness favored by many of his contemporaries. This was a time when the Daoist reaction against rigidly traditional Confucianist art and literature produced inspired imaginative works, the likes of which had not been seen in seven centuries. Tao was the first writer to make a poetry of his natural voice and immediate experience. This led to the personal lyricism which all major Chinese poets inherited and made their own. He maintained relations with Hui-yuan's Lu-shan monastery and became the first in a tradition of Chan figures who stood outside the monastic community and thereby challenged the students to free themselves from the unenlightened striving of that life by seeing that they are always already enlightened.
Tao is also noted for having established a type of landscape poetry known as t'ien-yüan (fields and gardens), a pastoral foil to the wilder scenes of the shan-shui (mountains and rivers) tradition. Farming, symbolic of his ideal life of simplicity, self-sufficiency, and self-reliance is a favorite topic. Drinking, which releases the true self from all worldly worries and social inhibitions, is another. His series of twenty verses on "Yin chiu" (Drinking Wine) contain some of his best-known lines and works (see below). His popularity has remained high throughout the centuries, and his influence on such literary giants as Du Fu and Su Shi (q.v.) was often noted.
Tao was also an official, holding numerous but never long-lived posts. At one point he was even adjutant to a general who later became an emperor. A year and two positions later, Tao was advised to receive with accepted protocol an official sent by the provincial government to his district. "How could I bend my waist to this village buffoon for five doou (pecks) of rice!"   This was about 50 kilograms, his monthly pay. He resigned from the magistrate's office which he had held for less than three months. Two different explanations are given for his resignation. He later wrote that he had held office merely for economic reasons, which he considered enslaving himself to his mouth and stomach. He was ashamed to have compromised his principle of being himself. More likely, though, he resigned because of his sister's death, since he did go immediately to her funeral after turning in his official seal. His awareness of the brevity of life was heightened by her death and it impressed upon him the folly of enslaving himself with an official career.
Tao had always maintained that he was ill-fitted to the common world and did not want to be involved in human affairs, preferring to keep mostly to himself, enjoying the simple life, freely roaming the hills and mountains, and chatting leisurely with others of like mind. And yet he also had a fierce, unbounded ambition from a Confucian upbringing and pressure to live up to his illustrious family name, feeling it almost an obligation to accomplish great things lest he [continue to] be a failure. Resolved at last, he retired to his native village to enjoy a quiet farm for the last twenty-two years of his life. Unsuccessful at supporting himself and his family by farming, turning down several opportunities to re-enter officialdom, he died poor but apparently content. Nowhere in the works that describe his decision to retire and his life in reclusion is there either the bitterness at being unjustifiably neglected or the resentment at having lived in inopportune times that can be found in the works of many Chinese recluses. Instead, Tao's works express the joy of one who has found himself and followed the true dictate of his heart.
   Tao personally cultivated chrysanthemums in pots, and his were well-known at that time. (Were they a source of some meager income?) Some say that his mums may have marked the beginning of dwarf potted plants and that the first use of the term "penzai" comes from his writings. His chrysanthemum garden has been a popular motif both in poetry and in painting for over a thousand years, and his description of a return to this garden after several years of absence is accounted one of the classical works of Chinese literature.
Originally cultivated here at least 1,000 B.C., chrysanthemums were believed to be full of magical essences and thus were first grown for their medicinal properties. They were a valued ingredient of the Daoist elixir. One story told how the people of Nanyang in Central China drew their drinking water from a stream where the flowers grew. Essences from these plants seeped into the water, and the Nanyang residents all lived to be a hundred. Tonic wine was brewed from an infusion of the petals and fragrant chrysanthemum tea was good for the health.
Now, there is a technique often used in small city gardens to give an illusion of greater space. This concept of "borrowed scenery" (jie jing) makes use wherever possible of buildings, trees, or natural scenes which are physically outside of but visually within either a garden or a courtyard within a garden. The scenery beyond is both a background for and an integral part of one's garden. Even the distant horizon could thus become part of one's own miniature recreation of a natural landscape. (To the Japanese, it would be known as shakkei)
The concept of borrowed scenery can be found at least as early as Tao's writings, specifically, from the 3rd in a series of 8 groups of verses which comprise his "Drinking Wine":

I live in town without all that racket
horses and carts stir up, and you wonder

Picking chrysanthemums at my east fence,
far off, I see South Mountain...

Now, the Chinese saw in the flowers something more than simply decorative and useful objects. They sought a meaning and expressiveness in these silent beings, and if the meaning was in many cases rather freely constructed, it was nevertheless calculated to strengthen and deepen the appreciation of the living symbols of the vegetable kingdom. And it helped, of course, to establish their importance in the gardens. This view of natural objects was thoroughly symbolic, and thus opened up quite other possibilities of artistic interpretation and use of such objects than a more objective or "scientific" way of looking at them would have done. The connection between the cultivation of flowers and their representation in art has therefore been intimate in China. What was valued most in the flowers was the same as that which the artists sought to capture and express. 1

The Artist: LATER ATTRIBUTION: Du Fu [Tu Fu] (712-770) was the second greatest of all ancient Chinese poets, is considered as the more profound observer of the two, and was one of the geniuses of world literature. He was a synthesist who violated accepted boundaries of the various poetic styles and subjects. He brought a fresh realism and curiosity to the field and, like the great artistic masters of all cultures, his later years' productions are filled with freedom and a certain degree of surrealism.
Tradition holds that Du Fu's forbearers had been scholars for eleven generations serving the southern courts, first from Hubei province and then Henan. At age twenty-four he went to the capital to enter upon the career of an official. This first time he did not pass the examinations and went home dejected. He spent nearly half of the next two decades travelling through the countryside.
At long last after becoming a minor official at age forty-four, Du Fu was in the capital city of Chang-An when it was seized by An Lu-Shan's forces. Although he was held in captivity for six months, Du Fu was unknown and relatively unimportant at the time and so his services weren't commandeered. After his release, he held the office of Imperial Censor/Reminder, a type of master of ceremonies for state rituals and sacrifices during which the emperor was the celebrant and central figure.
Du Fu, however, gave offence to the emperor, was degraded in rank and sent elsewhere as a minor official. Drought and famine came -- one of his children had starved to death previously -- and Du Fu resigned from office and moved with his family to Chengdu by the spring of 760. This had been the provincial capital and military center through the centuries, the so-called Embroidered City on the northwest edge of the green plain in Sichuan. The Chengdu Plain is the bed of a prehistoric lake, some 70 by 30 miles in size, with a gentle incline from north to south, surrounded by mountains. The red sandstone region is covered by a network of clear streams which allows the plain to be incredibly fertile and thus able to be densely populated. Here Du Fu built what has become known as his Grass Hut. He grew pines, bamboo, peach trees, and had a medicinal herbal garden.
Within a year Du Fu had become revitalized there, but was growing weary of life among the rustics. Not promising that he would accept an office, Du Fu and family accompanied the Governor to safer regions. News came of the army's success against the rebellious bands near Chang-An. Du Fu, believing that their victory inaugurated a permanent peace, indulged in his perpetual but ever unconsummated hope of return to civilization. In spite of poverty he did quite successfully, honored at feasts by the local officials.
He and his family returned to Chengdu for a short time and, by the spring of 766, had gone on to Gui [Kuei] Prefecture. Here everything interested Du Fu and some four hundred poems were written during this period.
Two years later he and his family travelled down the Great River to Dongting [Tung Ting] Lake. In recent years he had had problems with asthma, diabetes, consumption and other illnesses, and near the end of the year 770, he died.
The history of the State can be read in Du Fu's poems. He particularly detailed military movements, showing an appreciative eye for strategy, and his opus also provided a listing of the flora and fauna of his country. He observed that "old trees form round tops," and his poems contain several references to Green Maples, with at least one mention of "scarlet leaves of maple forest." His earliest poem dates from around the year equivalent to 735, but the earliest anthology reference to him is about 900. He was not established as preeminent until the eleventh century. He claimed to have composed over a thousand poems, but barely fifteen percent survived the warlordism and foreign encroachments following the An Lu-Shan Rebellion.
There is a wooden statue of Du Fu to be seen in the shrine at the temple which now stands on the site where Du Fu -- with the help of various local officials and a geomancer (the Daoist equivalent of a surveyor) built his Grass Hut in open country on the banks of Washed Flowers Stream. The place is still today a favorite place of pilgrimage for his compatriots.
Du Fu has one poem describing a rock landscape shrunk into the space of one cubic foot:
"A container of a square [sic] foot, with three peaks merging. A glance puts one in the wilds, and clouds seem to cling to the peaks. The perfume of lush bamboo accents fragrant wine as incense burners smolder brightly. Facing south to offer a toast, a delightful aroma fills the air."

This is also stated as:
"To be able, in the space of one square foot, to evoke a landscape of ten thousand leagues!"
[Per Wikipedia, "On land, the league is most commonly defined as three miles (4.83km), though the length of a mile could vary from place to place and depending on the era." Thus, 10K leagues could be 30,000 miles or 48,300 km, poetically referring to a landscape of 30K miles sq or 77,700 km sq or about 19.2MM acres, the approximate equivalent of the land area of the modern day country of United Arab Emigrates, the U.S. state of Maine, or the Chinese Zhidoi County within Yushu Prefecture in Qinghai Province.]

This can also be rendered as: "In a space no bigger than a square foot, whole landscapes-mountains and rivers-are contained." or "A square-foot vessel holds the vastness of mountains stretching for ten thousand miles."
Now, apparently this quote or thought was never directly in any of the 1400 surviving poems we know of from Du Fu. An early clear textual parallel (painting theory) is a well-documented formulation appearing in Chinese art theory: "Within an inch, one can behold distances of ten thousand miles; within a small space, discern towering heights." This is recorded in Yao Zui's [536-602] Xuhua pin which describes painting. From the same tradition comes the famous aesthetic principle: "Within a small space, there is the momentum of ten thousand miles." This became a standard idiom in Chinese painting and poetry criticism, not tied to a single author. Poets like Du Fu used expansive landscape imagery -- "thousand years," "ten thousand miles" -- but not in the miniature-container sense.
Later penjing/bonsai texts (during second-half of the 20th century, such as by Wu and Liang) apparently combined the painting theory phrases with the literary prestige of Tang poets and produced a hybrid attribution to Du Fu. (emphasis added) (For all we know they might have been raised with the belief that Du Fu had stated this...) 2

The Artist: Two other Tang poets to mention in this regard were include Pee Yat-yau (Fei Yat-yau ?), who described a miniature artificial rock-hill , and Bai Zu Yi [Bai Juyi or Po Chü-i, courtesy name Pai Lo-tien] (772-846). The latter was one of China's most revered and read poets. Born in a small Henan town just sixteen years after the disastrous An Lu-Shan rebellion, Bai was descended from a long line of petty bureaucrats, and grew up in an age of great political disorder, raised amid poverty and insecurity. He was first in his family to pass the examinations for Advanced Scholar, a gateway to official promotion and high rank. Various posts were given to him, from offices in the Palace Library at Chang-An (in the years equivalent to 803-807 and 827), demoted to a minor administrative post along the Yang-tze at the instigation of political enemies between 815 and 819, and then became Governor of Hangzhou (822) and Suzhou (825). In 842 he officially retired on a half-salary pension.
During his life his writings aroused enormous popular interest. He also addressed himself to political problems, comparing the current regime unfavorably to the days of the founding emperor. His collected works (with the exception of those from his last few years) have come down to us virtually intact -- unlike those of his literary equals/colleagues Li Po and Du Fu. (He admired and studied the writings of Tao Yuan-ming and Du Fu). In 839 Bai deposited copies of his works in five separate temples, idealistically inclined good bureaucrat that he was.
Upon his retirement from a long and distinguished career in service of the Tang dynasty, Bai Zu Yi chose a naturally scenic spot at Lu Shan on which to construct his residence. He celebrated a religious service there after making a terrace with a basketful of earth and by assembling stones as big as a thumb into a miniature mountain. He surrounded this creation with a lake poured from a drinking vessel.
Bai extolled penjing in his verse:

Mist brings out the beauty of autumn.
Large waves have existed since the dawn of time.
I cut slices of green jade, carve verdant cloud roots (rocks).
Air travels freely through hollows.
Neat patches of moss guard cavern entrances.
Although small in stature, the three peaks deserve to be the grandsons
of Mount Hua (a famous site in Shaanxi province).