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Taking the garden poetry in the Tang dynasty as the research object, this dissertation scrutinizes Tang people’s landscape experiences in gardens, i.e. investigates from the perspective of experience the meaning of Tang people’s writings about garden landscapes. This dissertation defines the landscape descriptions in poetic works as the poets’ dynamic experiences in nature. They are the product of the mutual interweavement and containing between the body subject of the poets and the natural world, and the poetic words are the embodiment of poets’ bodily existence experiences. In landscape experiences, perception plays the primary role. The differences in poets’ perception methods determine the distinctions in their landscape experiences. The “habitual body” similarly exerts an important influence on the presentation of the landscape experiences. The differences in cultures and personal life processes that different poets have acquired in the past are accumulated in the “habitual body.” They affect the differences in the poet’s bodily perceptions of the landscapes at the moments and determine the divergences among the landscapes they experience. Moreover, the places where the poets are located also affect their landscape experiences. Different places can lead to dissimilar landscape experiences in which the body and the environment are intertwined. Considering that the Tang dynasty is the era of garden culture’s prosperity, this dissertation chooses to take the garden places as the core and explore Tang people’s landscape experiences in them. The text is divided into 6 chapters:
Chapter 1 “Introduction” states the research background and purpose of this dissertation. It borrows the idea of physical phenomenology to define the connotations of “landscape experience,” further locks the place of experience onto the garden, and decides the research scope on three types of gardens: mountain-water gardens, prefecture and county governments, and urban private gardens. It also reviews the research results of related topics in the academic circles to display the investigation this dissertation conducts on the basis of the previous research results.
Chapter 2 is “An Investigation of the Connotations of ‘Landscape.’” In view of the fact that Ogawa Tamaki’s “Meaning of Landscape” enriches our understanding of the connotations of the word “landscape” in classical literature, this dissertation stands on the basis of this article, further examines the meanings of the word “landscape” from the Six Dynasties to the Tang dynasty, and pays attention to the perceptual experiences the poets present when using the word “landscape.” It points out that in the Six Dynasty period, the term “landscape” refers to the landscape and the atmosphere that the poet perceives in nature. When it turns to high Tang dynasty, Wang Chang-Ling specifies in The Principles of Poetry that the “scenic words” in poetry should not only reflect the writer’s true perceptual experience in natural places but also notice that the “landscape” in a “scenic word” merges personal landscape experiences in the past, cultural perceptual modes acquired through accumulation of poetry reading experiences, and space fields created by imagination. Since middle Tang dynasty, the literati have believed that poetry can create a world, which changes their physical perceptions in their walking into the nature and experiencing the landscape. While they perceive the surrounding landscapes with the “present body,” they also chant and conceive verses. Through chanting activities, they summon past landscape experiences as well as the perceptual experiences acquired through reading texts of poems by predecessors and accumulated in the “habitual body.” They run their imagination to combine the scene perceived at the moment with past experiences and transform them into a “poetic landscape” that can express the world of personal existence.
Chapter 3 “Landscape Experiences in Mountain-Water Gardens” takes Wang Wei as the main research object and investigates his landscape experiences in Wangchuan Villa. It explains that the reason why Wangchuan Villa can become the harbor of Wang Wei’s spiritual life. It is because the villa is located in the valley of Wangchuan and Wang’s worries in the officialdom are resolved by the place spirit consisting of mountains, waters, fields, and Buddhist temples and by simple interactions between Wang Wei and villagers and monks. Then, by clarifying the picture of Buddhism history in Wang Wei’s times, we place Wang Wei’s Zen cultivation in the context of high Tang dynasty when Northern Zen Buddhism flourishes. We point out that his life in the mountains of Wangchuan is deeply influenced by the Northern Zen Buddhist cultivation of guarding the true heart and observing the mind. Through repeatedly dissolving greed, hatred, and ignorance, he breaks the self and the attachment to the self and presents the tathata mind of “nirvana” and “silence.” The landscapes in many of his poems demonstrate that the poet uses the tathata mind to truthfully observe his activity changes in each moment when his senses and consciousness perceive the landscape. They also show how the various changes in the mountain-water world function together at every moment of cause and condition, constitute the scene that the poet has experienced, and thus prove the wisdom of “prajna-sunyata” through experience.
Chapter 4 “Landscape Experiences in Prefecture and County Governments” traces the parts that involve landscape experience in prefecture-government poem writings established by poets from the Six Dynasties to early and middle Tang dynasty. It indicates that their perception of the local customs, their feelings in touring in the gardens and appreciating the landscapes, and their “official recluse” consciousness produced by the quiet atmosphere in the garden are deepened and developed by Wei Ying-Wu, Bai Ju-Yi, and Yao He during middle Tang dynasty. In terms of perception of the customs, Xie Tiao takes the window as the framework and emphasizes grasping the landscape outside the window by focusing near or far with sight. In contrast, Wei Ying-Wu highlights perceiving scenes with the method of shifting from sight to hearing and touch, revealing that the barren hills and cold rains of local environments moisten the world the poet lives in and infiltrate the loneliness in the poet’s mind. After Wei Ying-Wu, Bai Ju-Yi presents more abundantly the differences in customs he experiences in Jiangzhou, Zhongzhou, Hangzhou, and Suzhou. Contrarily, Yao He’s presentation of the county government mainly fastens to the relationship between his lonely state of mind and the local desolate scenes. As for garden touring, all the three poets use landscaping and touring activities to make the garden atmosphere arouse their imaginations, to transform the garden space into a larger mountain world and thus experience the “official recluse” state of mind, and to reorganize their relationships with the gardens so as to gain a sense turning from “leisurely” to “comfortable.”
Chapter 5 “Landscape Experiences in Urban Private Gardens” regards Meng Jiao, Jia Dao, and Bai Ju-Yi as the representatives of urban private gardens. Due to Meng Jiao’s and Jia Dao’s low social statuses and financial resources as impoverished scholars, the landscapes they experience in the gardens are not comfortable feelings. They interlace their impoverished, sick, and frustrated physical and mental feelings with the desolateness of the garden landscapes and chant about the desolate scenes to obtain high-spirited postures that lift life. As for Bai Ju-Yi, this dissertation refers to the lane wall system of the Tang dynasty on the basis of academic and archaeological investigations in order to explore how he builds the Practicing-the-Way Garden into a quiet and deep space. It further explores how Bai realizes his pursuit of the value of “leisure” in the process of using the “leisurely” body to unfold landscape experiences, such as leisurely walking, leisurely lying, and leisurely boating, and attain a “leisurely world” that interweaves the garden landscape with physical satisfaction and mental comfort. Then it explains his affirmation of the destination of his late life from his intention to perform his own consciousness of garden touring experiences.
Chapter 6 “The Meaning of Landscape Poetics” has a comprehensive discussion on the analyses of the above three chapters from the intertwined relationship among place, physical perception, thought, and imagination, to expound the significance of the study on the landscape poetics of gardens in the Tang dynasty.
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