Why Is Wang Wei Called the Poet Buddha? The Tang Painter Whose Poems Hold Pictures

Wang Wei is called the "Poet Buddha" because, in his later years, he devoted himself to Chan (Zen) Buddhism, and that practice shaped his poems so deeply that he was given the title after his death. He lived from 699 to 761 and was a musician, painter, poet and government official of the Tang dynasty, regarded as one of the most distinguished artists of his era. About 400 of his poems survive, 29 of them in the famous anthology Three Hundred Tang Poems. If Li Bai is the poet of wine and freedom and Du Fu the poet of conscience, Wang Wei is the poet of stillness.

A Buddhist name from the start

Buddhism was in Wang Wei's name long before it was in his poems. He took the courtesy name Mojie and often signed his works "Wang Weimojie", a reference to Vimalakirti, the lay hero of a Buddhist sutra. In that text, Vimalakirti explains the doctrine of emptiness to an assembly of holy beings and ends with a teaching given through silence. For a poet whose best lines are almost silent themselves, it is a fitting choice.

Later in life he became a devout Chan Buddhist and a vegetarian, and he spent ten years studying with the Chan master Daoguang.

A brilliant start, and a lion dance

Wang Wei came from an aristocratic family and was the eldest of five brothers. Known for his early talent, he went to the capital, Chang'an, at nineteen to prepare for the civil service examination, and he won favour at court with his poetry and his music, especially his playing of the pipa, a lute-like instrument. He passed the palace examination in 721 in first place.

His first post was as a court music official. Then he was demoted to run a granary far from the capital, for a strange reason: he had broken etiquette by staging a lion dance. The setback was minor, and it gave him the chance to travel. Later promotions came with the support of the minister and poet Zhang Jiuling, and in 728 Wang hosted the poet Meng Haoran in Chang'an, beginning a close friendship. After his wife died in 731, he never remarried.

The estate on the Wang River

In his middle years, Wang Wei explored the countryside of the Zhongnan Mountains south of the capital and became friends with the poet Pei Di. His income as an artist, on top of his official salary, let him buy a large country estate at Lantian, known as Wang Chuan, the Wang River.

That estate became the setting of his most famous work, the Wang River Collection: twenty short quatrains by Wang Wei, each answered by a poem of Pei Di's with the same title. It includes the poem usually translated as "Deer Park". These poems look simple, but on closer reading they have great depth and complexity. When his mother died around 747, he built a shrine to her on the estate and mourned so deeply that he was reduced almost to a skeleton.

Captured in the An Lushan Rebellion

The great rebellion of 755 to 763 changed his life. In 756, when the rebels took Chang'an, the emperor and most officials had already fled, but Wang Wei was sick with dysentery and could not travel. He was captured. The rebels took him to Luoyang and wanted him to serve them. Some sources say he pretended to be deaf, others that he took medicine to damage his voice, but in the end he was given an official title in the rebel government.

When the Tang retook Luoyang in 757, Wang Wei was arrested for treason. He was saved partly by his brother Wang Jin, a high official, and partly by his own poems: the verses he had written in captivity were accepted as proof of his loyalty. He returned to government, rose again, and held the post of deputy prime minister until his death in 761. Before he died, he asked for writing materials and wrote letters to his brother and friends. He was buried at his Lantian estate.

"A painting within a poem"

The most famous judgement on Wang Wei comes from the Song-dynasty poet Su Shi: in Wang Wei's poems there is a painting, and in his paintings there is a poem. No authenticated paintings by Wang Wei survive, but his influence on later painters and written descriptions show what his art was like. He has long been regarded as the founder of the Southern School of Chinese landscape painting, known for strong brushstrokes against light washes of ink.

As a poet, he belonged to the "mountains and streams" school of landscape poetry, and he and Meng Haoran were so closely linked that people called them "Wang Meng". He was a great master of the jueju, the four-line Chinese quatrain, and many of his quatrains show quiet scenes of water and mist with few details and almost no people. One scholarly guide describes his work as affirming the world's beauty while questioning whether it is ultimately real, and compares its deceptive simplicity to the Chan path to enlightenment. That is the "Buddha" in "Poet Buddha".

From Chinese music to Mahler

Wang Wei's influence travelled far. His "Song of the City of Wei" became the basis of a famous melody, "Three Refrains on the Yang Pass", whose best-known version for the zither-like guqin was published in 1864. The Japanese haiku master Yosa Buson echoed him in his death poem.

In the West, a loose German translation of his poem "Farewell", addressed to his friend Meng Haoran, became the text of "Der Abschied", the final movement of Gustav Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. His poems, through the work of Ernest Fenollosa, also inspired the American poet Ezra Pound. A man who wrote about empty mountains ended up filling concert halls.

Learn with Wang Wei: English phrases

Phrase	Meaning	Example
less is more	simple things can be more powerful	Wang Wei's poems prove that less is more.
peace and quiet	a calm place without noise	He moved to the mountains for peace and quiet.
to paint a picture	to describe something vividly	The poem paints a picture of an empty hill.
to keep a low profile	to avoid attention	After the war, he kept a low profile.
a breath of fresh air	something new and refreshing	His style was a breath of fresh air.

Try this: Write three English sentences describing a quiet place you love, using "peace and quiet" and "to paint a picture".