Xie Lingyun and the Beginning of Landscape Poetry

A Poet Between Two Traditions

Xie Lingyun (385–433 CE) was a prominent poet and aristocrat of the Six Dynasties period, living through the transition from the Eastern Jin to the Liu Song dynasty. Born into a powerful political and military family, he inherited the title Duke of Kangle and received a strong Confucian education, while his early upbringing also immersed him in religious tradition: after his father’s early death, he was sent away to be raised by the Buddhist monk Du Ming and spent his childhood in temples. This combination of Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist influences shaped both his political life as an official and his poetry.

He used Daoist and Buddhist spiritual concepts to find peace in nature, but constantly battled a Confucian urge to return to politics. Lingyun is often regarded as the founder of Chinese landscape, or shanshui, poetry, a form that brought detailed attention to mountains, rivers, and the natural world. In his poetry he explores the competing commitments of Confucian political responsibility and Daoist reclusion. His poems reflect both his physical engagement with the landscape and his desire to find spiritual and personal meaning within it.

Reading Nature Through Ecocriticism

Ecocriticism is the study of literature and culture from an environmental point of view. It explores how writers show the connection between humans and the natural world, and asks how books and poems shape our views on nature and address the global ecological crisis. Reading Xie Lingyun through this lens means asking not just what his poems say about mountains and rivers, but what they assume about the relationship between human action and the natural world, an assumption two of his poems answer very differently.

Planting Mulberry Trees

The poem is fundamentally Confucian in its emphasis on human action, cultivation, inherited wisdom, and improving the lives of others, but its understanding of cultivation contains a common Daoist tension: that human beings can guide nature, yet they cannot dictate its rhythms. These techniques, which Lingyun inherited from his ancestors, are similarly a model for his political policies and his wider environmental politics. He was deeply entangled in the turbulent military power struggles of the Eastern Jin and Liu Song dynasties, largely through political-military staff appointments, diplomatic missions, and pseudo-military mountain expeditions.

Meanwhile, in his writing, the technique of tree pruning becomes a metaphor for how his political plans will be periodically adjusted, stemming from his Confucian ideas. The lines about pruning, and about having everyone plant mulberries in their spare time, show human agency facilitating the growth of trees, altering the course of nature to meet human needs. The pruning of mulberry trees in the poem’s opening lines may represent the poet adjusting his own political policies to improve people’s living conditions. Lingyun may have instituted policies to clear land and cultivate mulberry trees so the domestic silk industry could thrive, though this remains speculation. The poem emphasizes the importance of time, both for the trees’ natural growth and for the techniques of planting and maintaining them, techniques inherited from ancestors and comparable to the evolution of wise rule itself. It links tree horticulture directly to Lingyun’s own political career, closing on his labors beyond the seas, and embodies the Confucian idea of undertaking practical, attentive human action to perfect nature, whether that nature is the land itself or human suffering.

The cultivation techniques in the poem mirror the political policies Lingyun inherited from the sages of the past, again reflecting his Confucian mindset. Forefathers planted trees, the old saying goes, and later generations enjoyed the cool. Later generations benefit from the achievements of their ancestors. In pre-modern China, the true sage functioned not only as a politician but as an environmental steward, and classical Confucian works praise sages highly for improving people’s lives. Lingyun promoted this kind of sagehood during his political service, and the maxim he invokes about teaching righteous behavior refers to the moral example the sages themselves set. Lingyun adheres closely to a Confucian treatment of the environment here, using nature not as an independent force but as a medium through which humans create and derive meaning.

Yet Lingyun’s emphasis on taking action sits in tension with his otherwise Daoist upbringing, and that tension between action and inaction runs throughout ancient China’s religious and cultural history. For Lingyun, Confucianism governs his environmental politics, while Daoism functions more as a private regimen for living longer. One scholar has described Xie Lingyun’s utopia as a community that unifies heaven and humanity through mountain reclusion, a fundamentally Daoist belief and cultural structure (Han). Lingyun sought reclusion, in part, to preserve his own life. By treating nature as useless, rather than utilizing it for agriculture or industry, he explored another way of seeing the natural world entirely, one that follows nature’s own process rather than redirecting it. This uselessness creates space for reclusion, and demonstrates how following nature, rather than commanding it, can be its own harmonious and sustainable way of living.

The Chin-chu Torrent

This poem was written when Lingyun was first exiled from the center of the court and became a procurator in the district of Yongjia. His experience of dramatic political upheaval leads him to avoid his political duty and seek to fulfill his political dreams and morals in nature instead, weaving together physical sense, philosophical ideal, and the natural ecosystem in a single motion. While the enlightenment he describes can be associated with a Daoist appreciation of nature, his underlying ideals still reflect a Confucian moral and political perspective. The poem moves through the ecosystem’s reality, his own senses, his interpretation of what he sees, and finally the enlightenment and awakening he draws from the natural world.

His contrasts, sun and cloud, far and high, crossing and climbing, floating and stillness, form comparative pairs that progressively zoom in on nature. These interconnected natural systems indicate a Daoist idea of self-transformation: according to the Dao, nothing can be worthy or worthless, greater or lesser, since there is no fixed hierarchy in the universe. The poem’s natural images undergo constant transformation, suggesting a belief in the arche, or beginning, as itself something always being changed, the constant change of the world being the only stable thing in the universe. The glistening dew presents an image of impermanence, existing like a spark for a single moment, as if it could fall at any instant.

This same Daoist concept of self-transformation extends to humans as well. The first line intertwines the cognition of animals and humans within a single ecosystem: the monkey knows dawn has arrived and howls, and when Lingyun hears that howl, he understands dawn is coming too. Human perception and animal perception are treated as part of the same continuous system, not two separate ways of knowing the world.

Cultivating, and Being Cultivated

Taken together, “Planting Mulberry Trees” and “I Follow the Chin-chu Torrent” reveal that Xie Lingyun’s relationship with nature cannot be reduced to either Confucian action or Daoist reclusion alone. In “Planting Mulberry Trees,” nature becomes a space for Confucian cultivation: humans plant, prune, organize, inherit knowledge, and use the environment to improve collective life. In “I Follow the Chin-chu Torrent,” however, the natural world operates according to rhythms beyond human control. The monkeys recognize dawn, dew appears and disappears, water moves through the landscape, and the speaker gradually recognizes himself as part of this changing ecosystem rather than its master. His movement through the landscape becomes a form of self-transformation, and yet even in reclusion his political and moral concerns remain present, showing that he can never fully escape his Confucian sense of responsibility.

Xie’s landscape poetry ultimately occupies the tension between these two traditions: nature is both something humans cultivate and something that cultivates humans in turn. His poetry presents the environment not as a passive backdrop to human life, but as an active space through which political responsibility, spiritual transformation, and human dependence on natural process can all be understood at once, a tension not so far from the one Wendell Berry spent his own life writing into, some fifteen centuries later and half a world away.

About the author

Avery Harris

Student writer & critic

Avery Harris is a student writer and critic from Ohio with interests in poetry, literary criticism, religion, and cultural identity. She writes in the Close Reading and Editorial sections of The Poetry Library.