Mirages on the Sea of Time: The Taoist Poetry of Ts'ao T'ang

Since the early seventeenth century, Taoism---the native religion of China---has been regarded as superstition and potentially subversive. Chinese arbiters of taste systematically ignored the Taoist poetry of medieval China, and until recently most Western scholars and translators accepted this judgment uncritically. A corpus of beautiful verse, with analogues in the poetry of Christian mysticism, has thus remained virtually unknown in our time.

Edward H. Schafer here assists the efforts to recover the meaning and value of such poems. To his translated verse of nineteenth-century poet Ts'ao Tang he has added introductory remarks on the source of the poet's imagery and short essays on his treatment of figures of the Taoist pantheon. Ts'ao Tang has placed these gods, goddesses, and demiurges in a number of unstable or ambiguous settings such as celestial gardens, sparkling palaces on the summits of sacred mountains, and secret places of rendezvous on magic islands in the eastern sea. The poet creates a world of illusions, in which it is difficult to distinguish vestments from rainbows, castles from crags, birds from spirits, sea-waves from sea-mounts, even lords from ladies---contrived wonders that are metaphors for a world completely inaccessible to our mortal senses

Edward H. Schafer was Agassiz Professor of Oriental Languages at the University of California, Berkeley. His scholarship was devoted to the Tang dynasty, from the 8th to the 10th centuries, which saw the greatest cultural flowering in Chinese history