Playlist: Wang Can (177-217 Ce): Poetry Of Retreat at The Fall of The Han

Transcript

Robert Oxnam: The fall of the Han dynasty, to which Wang Can alludes, influences the lives of the Chinese literati and the poetry they write over the next several centuries.

Paul Rouzer: Following the collapse of the Han dynasty, Chinese intellectuals, Chinese philosophers, were basically forced to abandon their service of the state to some extent.

Even though various Chinese dynasties continued to operate between the third century AD and the sixth century AD, the government was basically very unsteady, and many educated Chinese males hesitated to serve the state.

Robert Oxnam: As the educated elite withdrew temporarily from state service, they wrote poems to express their philosophical musings.

In these poems, now known as the "poetry of retreat," we find Confucian ideas and sensitivities combined with those of another of China's great philosophical traditions: Daoism. The word dao, meaning "the Way," refers to the way inherent in nature's rhythms and forms.

Transcript

Stephen Owen: Retreat can be understood as a purely Confucian thing. It can be understood as a Daoist move. It can be understood simply as a very pragmatic decision.

And when society was breaking down as it was, say towards the late second century AD, that was quite reasonable to want to retreat; that is, to get basically away from large cities and court politics, where you would be killed.

And one finds in the poetry of the third century a fascination with rejection, getting away, with negating Confucian, negating standard Confucian values, to go off into the hills. And it is probably the moment when one begins to discover nature in a certain sense, as one begins to understand nature as opposed to society, and, only when you have rejected society, can you actually see nature.

Paul Rouzer: In this particular type of reclusion, Daoist ideas of the cultivation of the self, of the union of the self with nature, of the practice of hygiene, and other particularly Daoist ideas, are combined in rather interesting ways with continuing ideas of Confucian service.

Perhaps the most important poet from this time period was the poet Tao Qian.*

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* Tao Qian (365-427) lived during a time when China was divided into what are known as the Northern and Southern dynasties.