The Lyrical Resonance Between Chinese Poets and Painters: The Tra ...

into fashion, in both of which landscape was attributed with the subtlety and profundity of the Tao and was given a prominent place. Portrayals of landscape and nature in pictorial language served as better signifiers of the Tao than neo-Taoist discourses in an abstract and abstruse language. As Liu Xie wrote of the poetic trend of the Zhengshi period (240-248) in his Wenxin diaolong, “The reign of Zhengshi featured the elucidation of the Tao, and poetry partook of the spirit of the immortal.”²⁸ Neo-Taoist discourses thematizing landscape engaged Taoist-minded painters as well as poets during this period; this dawning awareness of the aesthetic (and spiritual) value of landscape as the embodiment and immanence of the Tao was well expressed by the poet Zuo Si (272-305) in one of his poems, entitled “Seeking Out Fellow Recluses”: “No need for strings and pipes; / There is pure music in mountains and waters.”²⁹ The discussion by Zong Baihua (1897-1986) of the human-nature interaction during the Jin period (265-420) helps explain how landscape evolved into an independent aesthetic subject, giving rise to the landscape genre in poetry and painting: “The Jin people discovered nature from outside and their own deep emotions from inside. As a result, mountains and rivers became spiritualized as well as emotionalized.”³⁰

For all the efforts made by Six Dynasties artists to promote landscape painting as an ideal vehicle of the Tao, they were not influential enough-either in theory or in practice-to bring forth a general awareness of its significance among contemporary poets. The theory that viewing landscape painting could serve as a substitute for viewing the real landscape to gain vicarious Taoist experience was not widely embraced by the Taoist-minded scholardom. Whereas landscape poetry was much in vogue (perceived as the verbal vehicle of the Tao), landscape painting as an incipient art form was not yet generally recognized as a pictorial signifier equally capable of reifying the Tao. The hierarchical gap between poetry and painting impeded the aesthetic resonance between the two arts. Although the pictorialism in Han fu reflected the influence of Han painting, there remained a lack of interartistic awareness in Six Dynasties poetry. Among the most famous poets of this period, Xie Lingyun (385-433) did not write any poems about painting.