The Taoist Elegies of Ku K’uang

Tang Studies 7 (1989) T h e T ao ist E leg ies o f K u K 'u an g TERENCE RUSSELL UNIVERSITY OF MANITOBA Sometime in A.D. 794 or 795, shortly after Ku K'uang a{£ , then aged seventy sui, had moved himself and his family into retirement at Mao Shan ~ ill ,hisyoung son died of an unspecified cause. The Yu-yang tsa-tsu ]I m _ tJl, which contains an early version of the legend surrounding this event, recounts the story in this way:1 Ku K'uang lost one of his sons who was seventeen sui. The son's soul roamed about in a formless state as if in a dream and did not depart from its home. Ku could not overcome his profound sorrow and so wrote a poem, which he intoned and then fell to weeping. The poem reads: An old man has lost his son At sunset his tears turn to blood But the old man is already seventy And the separation will not be long? His son heard this and was moved, so he vowed to himself that if he could immediately be reincarnated as a human being he should again be a son in Ku's household. After a few days he seemed to be taken by someone to a place where there was a person resembling a county magistrate who ordered that he be born again into the Ku household. Then he could not tell what was happening until he suddenly felt that he had regained consciousness. He opened his eyes and recognized that he was in his own room again. His brothers and relations were 1 Tang ts'ai-tzu chuan m;;t T 14, compo Hsin Wen-fang (Chih hai ed.), ch. 3, and T'ai-p'ing kuang-chi :;t:.>f m1lC (Peking: Chung-hua, 1981), 388.3091, also contain versions of this legend. 2 A longer and somewhat different version of this poem is contained in Ku K'uang's collected works. See CTS (Peking: Chung-hua, 1979),264.2931. I shall use the Peking, 1981 edition as the standard for texts of all poems except where otherwise indicated. 169 Russell: The Taoist Elegies of Ku K'uang crowded around at his side. It was only that he could not speak. This had been his birth ... 3 The story goes on to explain that the reborn son was Ku Feihsiung Ji'ti ~~ 1m, the most notorious of Ku K'uang's offspring, who followed in his father's footsteps in eventually retiring to live at Mao Shan after a career in public service.4 It is a charming story and very poignant. It would be worthy of our attention as a piece of fiction even if it existed in isolation from other literary and historical sources. But like much fiction, this account is based on fact. There is notice of this death given in more conventional historical sources. Ku K'uang also wrote three poems in memory of his son, including a piece from which the poem quoted in the Yu-yang tsa-tsu is clearly derived. In these poems Ku shows just how deeply troubled he was by the untimely passing of his son. He also articulates his ideas regarding his son's death and post-mortem existence. These ideas are at variance with the scenario created in the story quoted above on a number of points. It is clear from the longest of these poems that Ku K'uang did not believe that his son would be reborn into his own household. He imagined that he would achieve quite a different fate, a fate related to a well-defined set of religious beliefs to which Ku K'uang himself prescribed. This might not immediately strike us as a noteworthy state of affairs. We should find nothing remarkable in an elegy that invokes religious doctrine as a basis for a description of the supposed afterlife of the deceased. The fact is, however, that it is rare to find reference to posthumous destiny in the elegiac verse of the T'ang dYnasty,and rarer still to be provided with a vision so extensive as we...