Page 107 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

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Four more dynasties—the Liu Sung, Southern Ch'i, Liang, and
Ch'cn—ruled from Nanking before the split between north and
south was healed. The Confucian order was undermined, and the
southern Buddhist temples and monasteries now grew to such
vast proportions — particularly under Liang Wu Ti (502-550)
that they constituted a serious threat to the political and economic
stability of the realm. With the eclipse of the Confucian bureau-
cracy, it was often the great landed families who exerted the
most influence on politics and the arts, outliving the dynasties
themselves.
Many intellectuals in the south sought escape from the chaos of TAOISM
the times in Taoism, music, calligraphy, and the delights of pure
talk (ch'ing-t'an). Taoism came into its own in the third and fourth
centuries, for it seemed to answer the yearnings of men of feeling
and imagination for a vision of the eternal in which they could for-
get the chaos of the present. This conglomeration of folklore, na-
ture worship, and metaphysics was rooted in the native soil of
China. It had first become a cult in the Later Han when Chang
Tao-ling, a mystic and magician from Szechwan who called him-
self the T'ien-shih ("heavenly master"), gathered round him a
group of followers with whom he roamed the countryside in
search of the elixir of life. Sometimes he would take them to the
top of the Cloud Terrace Mountain (Yiin-t'ai-shan) and there in-
vent ordeals to test their magic powers. By the Chin Dynasty, the
movement that had originated as a private revolt against the estab-
lished order had grown into a full-fledged church, with a canon of
scriptures, a hierarchy, temples, and all the trappings of a formal
religion copied from the Buddhists.
On a higher level, however, the Taoists were the intellectual
avant-garde. The reaction against Confucianism had produced a
thaw in the rigidly traditional view of art and literature, and now
the imagination took flight once more in poetry more inspired
than any since the elegies of Ch'u. Typical of the age is the poet
T'ao Yiian-ming (365-427) who, though forced several times to
take office to support his family, retired whenever he could to his
country cottage where he grew his own vegetables, drank exces-
sively, and read books, though he said he did not mind if he failed
to understand them completely. This was not merely escape from
political and social chaos; it was escape also into the world of the
imagination.
It was in these turbulent years that the Chinese painter and poet AESTHETICS
first discovered himself. Lu Chi's Wen fit (Rhymeprosc on Litera-
ture), written in a.d. 300, is a penetrating, even passionate, rhap-
sody on that ordeal which T. S. Eliot called the "intolerable wres-
tle with words and meanings" and on the mysterious sources of
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poetic inspiration. In the traditional Confucian view, art had
served a primarily moral and didactic purpose in society. Now
that position was abandoned, and new critical standards were
evolved, culminating in Hsiao T'ung's preface of a.d. 530 to his
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