Medieval Buddhist of the Day

(I’m restarting my habit of posting research-related stuff over here, even as I continue to nerd out over historical Chinese dramas over on Bluesky – the drama posts will not be making their appearance here)

I am not primarily a poetry person, nor even really a literature person. I enjoy poetry, but that’s not the same thing. But poetry is unavoidable in the study of premodern China, no matter how hard you try to make an end run around the literati and their death-grip on cultural capital. And I was struck today by the way poetry is often invoked as the measure of other, apparently incommensurable, art forms. There’s the bit on yuefu poetry 樂府 of the 文心雕龍：故知詩為樂心，聲為樂體 “Thus we know that poetry is the heart of music, while sound is its body.” (body may be “form” here but still)

Then there’s Guo Xi writing about painting in the 林泉高致, some time during the eleventh century: 更如前人言詩是無形畫，畫是有形詩 “It is just as people have said, that poetry is painting without form, and painting is poetry with form.” (n.b. not the same word for “form” but still) Sorry, the first source is from the Southern Liang, early sixth century. Anyway. What makes poetry the measure of all other art? Someone must have written about this. It’s enough to make a person believe in the existence of “the poetic” as a phenomenon distinct from poetry itself.