There have always been Western writers who have turned to the East in their search for antidotes to the modernisation and material acquisitiveness of their own cultures. A sense of deep spiritual deprivation following upon the scientifically sanctioned rationalistic interpretation of nature over the past couple of centuries has probably been foremost, and the most potent of these deprivations has been the severance of the sacred correspondence between the human spirit and the created universe. Modern secular scepticism, alienated from the sources of Western civilisation’s moral touchstones, has been party to an increase in moral ambiguity, cosmic loneliness, and spiritual despair: clichés all, but as true as most clichés turn out to be in the end. That’s how they become clichés in the first place.

It isn’t surprising, then, in a society like Australia that is experiencing profound social and political change, to find writers from a tradition of romantic individualism discovering something lacking in such a tradition, something that perpetuates what is juvenile, solipsistic, and emotionally arid. It isn’t surprising to find some trying to strike a more modest balance between action and contemplation, trying to push beyond the narrow boundaries of self-assertion, of national identity, towards the development of a more universal consciousness. Nor is it surprising to find them turning to classical spiritual disciplines of prayer and meditation for renewal of creative powers, determined not to interpose a flamboyant self between readers and their world in the face of practical, passionless, and unproductive intellectualism. Honesty, clarity, illumination are the desiderata. The grand gesture, the Wordsworthian Sublime, begins to look faintly comical, if not downright absurd, in the face of the twentieth century’s great unmasking of its playpen heroes. It takes a culture a long time to discover human limits in the illusory perspectives of limitless space. Just because the voice gets raised, it doesn’t follow that it will be heard.

We’re still in the process of making these human adjustments but the vexed question of national identity and displacement from cultural origins is certainly not unique to Australians. It is, however, interesting to find in this century a continuing attraction to Chinese philosophy and poetry on the part of several significant Australian poets, responding to historical situations as real and immediate to them as they were to poets of the Period of Division and the T’ang Dynasty (7th, 8^th, and 9th centuries). It is not simply that East is meeting West and West is meeting East. It is also that, in the meeting of East and West, the West is learning to face the West, as it were, from the East.

My own first contact with Chinese poetry came from Arthur Waley’s translations of Li Po and Wang Wei, and later from Ezra Pound’s versions of Li Po made in 1915 from the notes of Ernest Fenollosa under the title of Cathay. Li Po’s world was so effortlessly brought to life that it seemed as if the intervening centuries had never existed.

For example, there is Pound’s ‘Letter from the River Merchant’s Wife’ – the young wife’s devotion as she grows from a stubborn impetuous child into a loving mate, equal of her older husband, and eventually into an old woman painfully aware of life’s fragility. The poem cuts across time and nationality and goes straight to the heart:

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?

At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-yen, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
                                               As Jar as Cho-Ju-Sa.

The understated emotion, the constraint, the modesty of speech, the poignant undertones of loss without self-pity, seemed very familiar.

Her stoical reserve reminded me, in fact, of my own Australian world where men and women of my grandparents’ generation repressed suffering, refused to make a fuss or feel sorry for themselves, and who accepted time’s passing ceremonies with dignity, serenity, and dry humour.

Another poem by Li Po called ‘Exiles’ Letter’ touched on other similarities and also brought to light certain differences. The poet’s fondness for the bottle, for example, would have found him many friends among the poets of Australia. Unlike the European mystical ascetic tradition, Li Po clearly didn’t abandon the world of the senses in his renunciation of worldly power; his disdain for ‘kings and princes’ didn’t stop him enjoying himself. Friendship was paramount and candid speech was the bond that cemented his meetings with his friends. He says:

Intelligent men came drifting in from the sea and from the west border,
And with them, and with you especially
There was nothing at cross purpose,
And they made nothing of sea-crossing or of mountain-crossing,
If only they could be of that fellowship,
And we all spoke out our hearts and minds without regret.

No posturing, no self-dramatisation, no false heroics. When the poet is sent off into exile to a faraway region and his friend is posted elsewhere, he feels very isolated and, during that separation, tells us that all they have left now are ‘thoughts and memories in common’.

When the poet tells us that he has to go to court for an examination for a government position, we are reminded of the long connection in China’s literary tradition between literature and political life. This close link between literature and politics, inseparable for most of China’s history, sets the Chinese tradition somewhat apart from other world literatures and certainly from the Western romantic individualist tradition. It tells the Westerner something of the greater degree of responsibility to the collective expected of the writer, the seriousness with which his words were regarded. In present-day Western society, the poet’s importance to the community is marginal.

The personal link between Li Po and his friend is obviously of much more importance to him than passing an examination in order to gain promotion as a state functionary. This reminds the Western reader that, despite the absence of a sharp distinction between public and private spheres, there were poets who, valued the private satisfactions of friendship more than success as defined by the state.

Unlike the European tradition of epic and dramatic literature, the Chinese tradition is chiefly meditative and philosophic, pitched somewhere between the traditional ethical precepts of Confucius and the nihilism of Chuang-tzu. This movement between energetic optimistic belief in man’s betterment and sceptical inactive pessimism is a position understood quite well by Australian writers who, on the one hand, aspire to recognition by the public world but who, at the same time, are only half-persuaded that such acclaim matters. They are aware of the populist disdain for and suspicion of those who rise to privileged positions in the cultural hierarchy since they themselves share this doubt about worldly success. The understated ironic humour which we call specifically Australian, often hard to understand if one wasn’t brought up with it, is directed at those who get ‘too big for their boots’, and intimates a fundamental cynicism about human achievement. The personality that sticks out above the rest is likely to be brought low sooner or later. What are the little disturbances of human beings compared with the havoc wrought by fire, flood, drought, and the tyranny of distance?

It’s interesting, too, that Australian poetry does not concern itself much with romantic love. Perhaps because in the European tradition of love poetry the personality of the writer is foremost, the poet tends to exhibit himself in a romantic light, to boast of himself as a lover or complain if he’s found to be unsatisfactory in the role. In Australian poetry the personality of the writer used to be played down in relationships with others if it was a male – it’s usually landscape that brought man out of himself, not a woman. Of late, women have become more assertive in taking up the lover’s plaint if we look at Jenny Strauss’s recent anthology, The Oxford Book of Australian Love Poems. But it seems to have become more of a power struggle than a society concerned with adoration or the placing of the love object on a pedestal.

In Chinese poetry there is a similar playing-down of personality. The poet speaks of himself in the role of friend rather than lover. He presents himself as having infinite leisure to spend on friendship, and free from mercenary ambition that usually constitutes the greatest barrier to a good friendship. The poet lets us see him as a reliable companion, a good drinker of wine, and a good mate who won’t spoil a social gathering by leaving it sober.

To the European poet, the relationship between man and woman used to be a matter of stirring significance, surrounded by an aura of mystery and glamour. To the Chinese poet, it is something matter-of-fact, obvious, the satisfaction of a bodily need, unrelated to the satisfaction of the emotions. Like the Australian male poet, he reserves his feelings for friendship, usually with his drinking mates.

Rather than presenting himself unbelted and unbuttoned, full of Byronic abandon, the Chinese poet comes across as a rather timid, reclusive figure, neat and tranquil, almost apologetic for his existence. His gift is for candid reflection and self-analysis, not grandiose speculations about what might be. What is comes first.

There are three Australian poets born between 1920 and 1950 who have been influenced by Taoist and Buddhist thought as reflected in poems from the third to ninth centuries in China as well as by the balanced refinement of its expression.

Rosemary Dobson, the oldest of the three, has carried on Ezra Pound’s admiration for the poetry of Li Po, Wang Wei, and Du Fu. Her own meditative cast of mind touches the same hidden springs. She shares with them the sensitivity and finely-poised classical intelligence that respects the demands of friendship, the home, and the family. Surrendering to the delicate nuances of undramatic moods, her poems reflect the disciplined quietism of an orderly but never rigid mind. A calm eye, an appreciation of visual beauty, and the power of passive physical understanding enables her to celebrate the sensuous world, its decay and loss with a decorum that never draws attention to itself, effortlessly blending life and art.

While the Buddhist regards the senses as windows looking out upon unreality, mirage, and illusion, to the Taoist they are doors through which the soul flies to mingle with the colours and contours of the universe. The Buddhist senses the haunting sorrow behind desire’s fulfilment; the Taoist, more of an Epicurean, hears the rhythm of infinite joy in a world of beauty that is both within and beyond our mortal reach. Rosemary Dobson’s later poems seem to contain both strains.

I have chosen two, written to commemorate the death of her friend, the poet David Campbell. These come from a sequence entitled ‘The Continuance of Poetry’, the title indicating the value she attaches to the notion of poetry’s durability in the face of neglect, contempt, and even tyranny. Poetry is one of the few tested triumphs of the human spirit, and these poems tell of the poet’s hope for the continuity of the imaginative life and the role of memory in its survival. If, as Nietzsche has said, nihilism consists in the loss of memory, recovery of memory is a potent weapon against that annihilation of value:

Two poets walking together
May pause suddenly and say,
Will this be your poem, or mine?

May offer courteously,
Please take it. No, you first.
Wang Wei and P’ei Ti

Made twenty poems each of the Wang River:
Apricot Wood House, South Hill, the Pepper Garden.
Later Wang Wei wrote to his friend,

Could you join me once more?
Out walking now I see blond grass,
Wild orchids, black cattle, the daylight moon.
                              (‘Poems of the River Wang’)

With the lightest touch, the poet defines the essence of friendship in images of great simplicity. The ideal of friendship between two poets, courteously sharing what their senses perceive admits no self-seeking. Stirred by colour, shapes, light, their poems tell of the taking and giving of pleasure. Attuned to the finest gradations of happiness ‘lightly called physical’, immune to fanaticism, unspoiled by the Western puritan conscience, megalomania, social grievance, sinister ambitions, or score-settling class animus, the poem reveals Rosemary Dobson’s capacity for protective self-scrutiny in perfect balance with the capacity to be carried out of the self.

The second poem is called ‘After Receiving the Book of Poems by Li Po

We walk along the dry bed of the river.
In the sand the fallen needles of she-oaks,
In the air the smell of dry resin,
A few white clouds curling in the sky.

Rounded stones in the blue thread of the river:
White, scoured, turning in their roundness
With the slight movement of poems
Settling deeper in the mind.

Not being able to find the hermit he wanted to visit
Li Po looked deeper into the landscape.
Like Li Po we lean against a pine-tree;
And looking into the landscape find your poems.

Again, a simple poem which, by its economy of means, achieves great power of suggestion very close to the poetry of Li Po himself. Like the ‘River Wang’ poem, there is the same response to the landscape sketched in with a few deft touches, and the same concern with the harmony of friendship which worldly concerns may disrupt but never destroy. In this, as in so many of her poems, she catches the still timelessness of the interaction between the inner self and the outer world, finding equilibrium in the same pure and self-deprecating diction of her ancient Chinese teachers.

Rosemary Dobson has herself expressed the hope that she may leave behind some tenable poetry in a disordered world. In much the same way, Li Po and Wang Wei were witnesses to the upheavals and decline of a once-stable civilisation in a period of transition; their work proved a sustaining force in such troubled times.

A poet doesn’t have to have endured literal exile to know the pain of isolation or the indifference of an audience. Exile can take different forms. It can be the personal exile from a native land, the historical condition of an entire society or nation, or the modem philosophical predicament. A country doesn’t have to be in a state of open revolution or under enemy siege for a poet with patrician manners and a taste for foreign literature to feel alienated. Sometimes the pressures to conform are more insidious for being unexpressed. When many articulate people seem possessed of high social purpose, convinced of a national promise, and full of fervour, such times are often hard for writers who have an uneasy apprehension that the centre is not holding, that current national optimism is based on illusory premises, and that the quiet dissenting voice will not be heard. Poets of this kind need unusual spiritual stamina to survive.

The Australian writer Randolph Stow was born in 1935, and has chosen to live as an expatriate for most of his adult life. In his early poetry, there is already apparent an ambiguity in his adaptation to his environment. Sensitive to the utilitarian exploitation of the land, opposed to the mindless authority of officialdom, unimpressed by rank and privilege, he saw physical isolation as both a gift and a burden. He describes his homeland as ‘my sad-coloured country, bitterly admired’, and, in 1961, described his feelings about living far from the cities:

There are two sensations above all that the land offers me – the sense of size and the sense of the past. When one is alone with it one feels in one way very small, in another gigantic. One expects something. One is a little like Adam perhaps. In the cities, personality is fenced in by the personalities of others. But alone in the bush, with maybe a single crow (and that sound on a still day enlarges the world by half), a phrase like ‘liberation of the spirit’ may begin to sound meaningful. (‘Raw Material’, Westerly 2, 1961)

In poems such as ‘Ishmael’ and ‘The Land’s Meaning’, the wanderer and outcast is received into his homeland with a mixture of defiance and resignation. Given this movement towards a more passive acceptance, a genuinely submissive stance in a harsh environment, it is not surprising that the Taoist ideal should have appealed to him.

In XLIV of the Tao Teh Ching, for example, we find:

Know contentment
And you will suffer no disgrace;
Know where to stop
And you will meet with no danger.
You can then endure.

The point is made more forcefully in XLVI:

There is no crime greater than having too many desires;
There is no disaster greater than not being content;
There is no misfortune greater than being covetous.

The ‘virtue of non-contention’ is found in Stow’s long meditation written in 1966, ‘From the testament of Tourmaline’, subtitled ‘Variations on Themes of the Tao Teh Ching’. Here, in a rhapsodic affirmation of the Taoist principle, he draws attention to man reduced to an element of nature. But, like those later Ming scrolls which depict the human presence dwarfed by overhanging rocks and towering peaks, man isn’t overwhelmed. He may be small but there is no tension set up between him and the landscape, no contention is offered. He accepts his place among the timeless, limitless mysteries of nature.

Stow suggests that modern secular civilisation’s efforts are in vain, and he appeals to a more primordial state of being that renders the human serene and passive, at one with the indifference of his environment. Like the Taoist parable of the piece of uncarved wood, man must let himself be blank, ‘yet receptive as a hollow in the hills’. In ‘Ishmael’ the poet invited nature to make him over on the amoral mould of her indifference:

These blinding images

I call to mind to mould the mind, inviting
desert and sky to take me, wind to shape me,

strip me likewise of softness, strip me of love,
leaving a calm regard, a remembering care.

In the ‘Tourmaline Testament’ he describes the artist in terms of a smith working with iron:

A smith at work
does not consult the iron.
          Passionless, silent,
he forms it to his pattern.
          Forge-flames leap
in fragile multiplicity,
          changed, renewed
by the breath of the empty bellows.

What can be empty
yet ever and all replenishing?
          Under the bellows
blazes the world’s forge-fire.

He speaks further of the ideal state that will come once the selfishness of desire has been extinguished, the passion for conquest vanquished:

The loved land will not pass away.
          World has no life but transformation.
          Nothing made selfless can decay.
The loved land will not pass away.

The grown man will not pass away.
          Body is land in permutation.
          Tireless within the fountains play.
The grown man will not pass away.

This brings to mind the anecdote told of the Taoist sage, Chuang-Tzu (300BC) who was found, after the death of his wife, sitting on the ground banging on a bowl on his knees and singing away cheerfully. When accused of lacking feeling, he replied:

When she died, I was in despair, as any man well might be. But soon, pondering on what had happened, I told myself that in death no strange new fate befalls us. In the beginning we lack not life only, but form; not form only, but spirit. We are blent into one great featureless indistinguishable mass. Then a time came when the mass evolved spirit, spirit evolved form, form evolved life. And now life in its turn has evolved death. For not nature only but man’s being has its seasons, its sequence of spring and autumn, summer and winter.

This attitude to death which comes up again and again in Chuang-Tzu is part of the general attitude to the universal laws of nature. Not merely resignation or even acquiescence, but a lyrical, almost ecstatic acceptance of a process beyond our control. That the human should even attempt to question nature’s right to make and unmake is damaging to the tranquillity of spirit which is the essence of Taoism. In view of humanity’s total helplessness, to try and intervene in nature’s plan makes us puny humans look fatuously inept.

To illustrate the impotence of action and speech, Stow invokes the harsh inhuman landscape of his own country:

          There is no going but returning.
Do not resist; for Tao is a flooded river
                  and your arms are frail.

          The red land risen from the ocean
erodes, returns; the river runs earth-red,
                  staining the open sea.

Before earth was molten rock, was silence.
Before existence, absence. Absence is tao.

Unlike Rosemary Dobson’s work, Stow’s poem rejects roots in an identifiable culture with its style, tradition, historical memories, and language. His roots are struck at a more primitive level, in the landscape itself without a recognisable human being in it. He shares with the Taoist monks and poets who took to the woods and mountains the ascetic renunciation of the babble of language. As it says in the opening chapter of Lao-Tzu, ‘The way that can be spoken of/ Is not the constant way.’ In other words, we are instructed that language itself is inadequate to describe the intangibility of the Tao – a spirit that existed before the universe came into being. This distrust of language to express the inexpressible, coupled with a deep yearning for disengagement from the torments of desire and ambition have been a marked characteristic of the Australian temperament in isolation. In this sense, the Taoist doctrine is not as alien as might be thought; to ‘go bush’ looks pretty closely akin to monkish withdrawal from the world’s chattering classes.

The third and youngest poet, Dane Thwaites, born in the 1950s, transposes the material of his model, the Buddhist monk, Han-Shan, into present-day terms to express his existential predicament. In a sequence entitled ‘Imitations of Han-Shan’, published in 1987, Thwaites reveals his youthful disaffection and unease speaking of withdrawal from the world of everyday affairs. Like his reclusive model, Han-Shan, he doesn’t fit in. Unlike Stow, who justifies his stance through the abstractions of Taoist mysticism, Thwaites’s exile is more troubled because he would like to take part in human affairs but can’t make sense of them. His poems confirm yet again the fact that a poet may find a supportive voice across the centuries. It also confirms that retreat from the world in times of division and discord is not exclusively the province of Buddhist monks of the 8th and 9th centuries in China. The idea acquires a distinctive Australian flavour with the infusion of local detail, an attitude that might be called stoic primitivism.

Han-Shan’s life spanned the late 8th and early 9th centuries. Leaving his farm, his wife and family, he wandered from place to place looking for a patron. Unsuccessful in his search, he eventually settled as a recluse on the Cold Mountain (Han-Shan), a retreat not far from T’ien-t’ai, famous for its many Buddhist and Taoist monasteries. Because Han-Shan visited the Cold Mountain so often, he has always been known by its name and by no other.

In his poems, the Cold Mountain is often the name of a state of mind rather than a locality. It is on this concept that the mysticism of the poems is based. His work offers sustenance to the young poet for whom the times are out of joint, for whom the ‘Cold Mountain’ is a survivable reality.

It’s interesting, too, that just as Ezra Pound introduced many Western readers to the formal poise of the classical poets of the T’ang Dynasty, his compatriot Gary Snyder, the American Beat poet, much influenced by Zen Buddhism in the 1960s, translated Han-Shan several decades later into lively, colloquial English, apparently very close to the spontaneous and immediate style which set Han-Shan apart from other poets of his age. Dane Thwaites has clearly found a soul-mate in the monkish misfit. Zen Buddhism has, I believe, a specific appeal to the young because it rejects the harsh, puritanical scriptural and literary traditions of more mainstream Buddhism. It lacks the intrinsic ethical thrust of older Buddhist lore, and thus can be adapted to fit any orientation, either peaceable or more aggressive.

Here, for example, is Han-Shan in Snyder’s lively translation:

Most T’ien-t’ai men
Don’t know Han-Shan
Don’t know his real thought
& call it silly talk.
And again:
When men see Han-Shan
They all say he’s crazy
And not much to look at --
Dressed in rags and hides.
They don’t get what I say
and I don’t talk their language.
All I can say to those I meet:
‘Try and make it to Cold Mountain.’

And here is one of Dane Thwaites’s jaunty, defiant imitations:

I should cry but I laugh –
locked up three weeks with a moody man.
The log in the grate breaks open and flares,
my features flare in the fire-door glass;
no one’s paid to count my hours.
Listening, on the wind’s beach
to the windy breakers, I recall
ancient conversations, very faintly:
everything else is here and now.
A purposeless existence! When I’m down
it seems sad. I look through a Book of Nudes
trying to keep in touch with Life & Purpose.
If I’d played my cards right
by now I’d be a scientist or bank official.

All this talk. Three weeks
Waiting for my thoughts to lift
like this mountain winter weather
that seems unable to let up.

Like Han-Shan, Thwaites knows he must resist, trick by word or by silence, fight passively for survival, go underground if necessary. To account for social evils, the primitivist has to blame institutions that corrupt our native disposition. Like most primitivists, he assumes that human nature is essentially disposed to benevolent conduct. If he were logical (which would be asking too much of a Cold Mountain dweller), he’d try to show how benevolent dispositions give rise to evil institutions. But this problem is one the primitivist doesn’t like to tackle: he prefers to treat technology, urbanisation, mass production as modern aberrations which people can be taught to abandon – a basic romantic fallacy.

In Thwaites’s economical, laconic speech, a life of physical austerity is evoked, bringing back memories of community-minded rural life, the traditional rural ingenuity in coping with physical hardship, and the freedom from attachment to material possessions. All these aspects tune in with a certain strain in the older Australian character inherited from an earlier, simpler way of life. The dry sceptical humour and melancholy of the early bush tales is still present in some of our writers even if people don’t live in the bush any more. As Nicholas Jose has said in his essay on Australian cultural identity in the Daedalus Symposium, ‘the bush still stands for a quality of innocent, doubting resistance to urbanity, internationalism, and the European mind.’

In some ways, all writers are exiles. Being in exile is both a metaphor and a reality. In Australia, it’s a metaphor for our uncertain relation to our past, our home, and to our roots. It’s also a reality for many people made homeless and stateless by war, revolution, and political oppression. The condition isn’t unique to the Australian consciousness. For a writer, the isolation of exile has always been as much a state of mind as a fact of geographical or historical circumstance, and it is not always negative. Distance may allow the writer to see his country in a clearer, less enchanted light. Exile of mind, body, or both may help a writer to identify the crises induced by a culture, the aspirations of those who live within it, and maybe help restore to his people the capacity to reclaim their creative energies by investigating the origins of his own problems of identity. In this sense, it would seem as if some Australian and Chinese poets have more in common than a superficial glance at our respective cultural circumstances might suggest.

This paper was first presented as the opening speech of Salamanca Writers Festival in Hobart, and was sponsored by the National Library of Australia.