The Selected Poems of Yang Wan-Li

Considered one of the four great poets of the Sung Dynasty, Yang Wan-li (1127-1206 c.e.) is in many ways the quintessential Chinese landscape poet. As a traveling government official, Yang undertook many long and arduous journeys that exposed him to both breathtaking landscapes and hardships of hunger, exhaustion, bitter weather, and dangerous rapids in stark gorges. It is in this crucible of tranquil beauty and existential danger that he forged a poetry of self-realization deeply informed by Ch'an (Zen) Buddhist insight. In finding a language to capture the pure perception at the heart of human experience, Yang's poems embody the Ch'an experience of the meditative mind emptied of all conceptual structures.

A typical Yang Wan-li poem attends to immediate experience with profound clarity, and this attention usually leads to a moment of sudden awakening: a startling image or turn of thought, a surprising imaginative gesture, a twist of humor. With nothing more than a crystalline attention to the present moment, Yang's poems find enlightenment everywhere: in a fly, for instance, sunning on a windowsill. In these original translations of over two hundred of his most vital works, David Hinton gives a remarkably modern voice to Yang's journeys through the perennial mysteries of consciousness, revealing for a new generation why his poetry has captivated readers for nearly a millennium.