ABSTRACT
Wang Wei's turn to the Nine Songs and its Confucian commentaries then seems more like allusion to a forgotten alternative poetics long ago assimilated by Confucian scholars than a simple evocation of China's distant past. Ironically, Wang Wei's confrontation with the poetry of Qu Yuan also reminds us of the later unfavourable comparisons made between the righteousness of the latter and the ambiguities of his own actions during the An Lushan Rebellion of 755. Wang Wei's relationship to both Buddhism and traditional Confucian Chinese poetics is more complex than has generally been perceived, and certainly cannot be reduced to his simply being a Buddhist poet or a paradigmatic practitioner of Chinese poetry. Wang Wei avoids the tedium of citing each of the ten stages individually; instead, in the middle couplets he emphasizes the actual landscape of this monastery, which on Mount Lu, in Chiang-chou, from which there was a magnificent vast view.
