All a practitioner of Chan Buddhism needs is a place to sit. Even innocuous morning exercises in the park may be forms of Daoist taiji or the internal energetic work of qigong. Still, religious life continues in China under many guises. Any activity that can be claimed to fall under the rubric of “extremism” is suppressed, at great human cost. In western China, where forms of Islam and Tibetan Buddhism are concentrated, religious activity is viewed with suspicion and is harshly constrained.

Though the historical temples and monasteries located on the famous Daoist and Buddhist mountains are kept under strict government control, and now serve mainly tourists rather than genuine believers, there are many other smaller temples and local teachers and monks who serve as religious guides and who keep their particular faiths alive. Although official churches come under constant scrutiny, surveillance, and sometimes outright destruction, house churches and bible study groups abound. Yet according to China-watcher Ian Johnson, there are somewhere around sixty million practicing Christians in China today, along with several hundred million members of Buddhist and Daoist religious organizations. Not only Chan Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, and Daoism, but also Protestant Christianity, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Mongolian shamanism, Sufi-related mysticism, and countless local spiritual traditions have survived despite every attempt to suppress them at some point throughout history, including the period from the Communist revolution up to the present day.

This small sample size gives a limited and misleading picture of religion in China, which is in fact highly varied and complex.

But this is also because there have been lamentably few Chinese poets throughout history translated into Western languages, a problem that we still face today. This is in part because the poetry is often wonderful, and there is much to appreciate in it. Other poets who sometimes write in this vein, like Li Bai and Wang Wei, have come to make up the bulk of the limited number of Chinese poets to be known in the West. Silent knowledge-the spirit is enlightened of itselfĬontemplate the void: this world exceeds stillness. Their sound is familiar to us from the Beat Generation of poets, who gave them a particular cadence, which we now associate with the totality of “Chinese poetry”:

In the present day, much of what we receive is filtered either through news stories about the officially atheist state or through (usually older) translations of Tang Dynasty poets such as Han Shan, who have come to be known as free-thinking Chan masters wandering through the mountains. Religious life in China has been the subject of much speculation, misunderstanding, and projection by the West.

The poetry of wang wei