One of the greatest strengths of classical Chinese poetry is its temporal ambiguity: unless it's specifically mentioned, there's no way of knowing when something is occurring/has occurred/will occur. Things and events are caught in time like insects in ever-flowing amber, and thus temporal positioning is unimportant. After all, everything meaningful: whether it's a past event that continues to resonate in the present, an emotional/psychic state that has us in its clutches here and now, or the imagined form of some future happening that affects our current behavior, it can't be separated into a discrete thing or things outside of our perceptions or beyond causality. We act otherwise, of course, but just because that tendency to separate self from other, subject from object, is a feature of human consciousness, it doesn't mean we're utter slaves to some mechanistic understanding thereof.
I bring this up because I've rendered parts of Sikong Tu's poems as orders or suggestions, which they very well may be, but they could just as easily be translated in the past tense, and thus as descriptions of the poet's (or whomever he's describing) experiences. In "Unconstrained" I have everything happening in the present, which gives the reader the idea that the narrator is reflecting on an unfolding experience of possible enlightenment, and/or doubt about such a state. Did Sikong Tu experience what Rinzai Zen (which has its roots in the teachings of 臨濟義玄 Linji Yixuan, a contemporary of Sikong Tu) calls 見性 kensho, and see his true self? Or is he repeating what, even in Tang times, was established, maybe even to the point of being trite and snoozy, understanding of the nature of things and how to truly perceive it?
Neither possibility excludes the other, and neither is the only answer. Read the poem and mull it over on your own, dear reader. The great matter of life and death inhabits this poem like it does all other things, and I'd be curious to see what you think.
Dig it.
微臣
微臣
史大偉
-----
疏野
司空圖
惟性所宅
真取不羈
控物自富
與率為期
築室松下
脫帽看詩
但知旦暮
不辨何時
倘然適意
豈必有為
若其天放
如是得之
-----
"Unconstrained"
Sikong Tu
Pondering the
dwelling-place of one's true nature,
one can seize the Real,
uninhibited;
a grasp of all things
leads to inner abundance,
with candor comes hope.
An abode built beneath
the pines,
bare-headed, reading
poetry,
knowing only dawn and
dusk,
the seasons running
together.
Supposing an agreeable
state of mind,
why is action
necessary?
If one is as free and
easy as the sky,
is this not attainment?
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