“In the Mountain Forest I Lose My Self”: The Experience of No-Self in Wang Wei's Short Landscape Poems

Abstract

Abstract This article discusses the dialectics of subject and object in Wang Wei's short landscape poems from the perspective of Buddhist metaphysics. First, the article traces Wang's Buddhist connections and surveys the Buddhist concepts, ideas, and practices of which Wang himself explicitly wrote in his essays and poems. Then it uses these ideas to analyze poems from his “Wang Stream Collection” (Wangchuan ji). The conjunctive theme of this article is the underlying emptiness of all existing phenomena, one of the main metaphysical doctrines of Mahayana philosophy and a recurrent motif in Wang's poetry. The author demonstrates that, when seen from the standpoint of emptiness, the relation of the perceiver and the perceived in Wang's short nature poems proves to be more sophisticated than usually thought. Because both the human agent and the natural objects around him are intrinsically empty, they are interrelated and interdependent in the act of perception at the deepest and the most subtle ontological level.