Juan Chi

Juan Chi was born in Chienliu to a prominent family but grew up in straightened circumstances after his father, the poet Juan Yu, died when he was four years old. Juan Chi never played a part in political life but in his youth successfully combined a wild hedonism with hard study and rose to high military office under the Emperor Wei Wen Di. It is said that he then exchanged it for another post when he heard that it came with a better cook.

Another example of his lack of conformity: he remained drunk for sixty days to avoid what he considered to be a dangerous political marriage.



Eventually, he retired from such responsibilities to devote himself to a life of pleasure, philosophy and poetry.



During this period Daoism was undergoing a great revival. It was a time of wars, droughts and floods, conditions from which neither a corrupt state nor the dry scholasticism into which Confucianism had decayed seemed to offer much hope of reprieve. Alongside the Metaphysical (or Hsuan-hsueh) school of Daoism, there developed the Pure Conversation (or Ch'ing-t'an) group, of which Juan Chi was a leading member. The Pure Conversation group approached Taoism in a playful and poetic way.



Juan Chi met with several others in the bamboo groves near the home of Hsi K'ang, another member, outside the capital Lo-yang where they discussed philosophy and, in states of considerable intoxication, wrote poetry and sought to attain union with the Dao. The members of this group, the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, were noted for their sensitivity to beauty, their spontaneity and their unconventional habits. Juan Chi and his nephew and fellow-poet Juan Hsien, another member of the Bamboo Grove, were famous for drinking from a large bowl which they would sometimes share with a neighbour's pigs.



This lifestyle was in contrast to the Confucian stress on conformity and public service but, though the group withdrew from direct participation in government, their iconoclasm had considerable political implications, and Hsi K'ang was executed after offending an official. Juan Chi expressed his political concerns in such poems as Singing of Thought and, despite his hedonistic lifestyle, his poetry is often notable for its pessimism and frustration.



He did much to develop the pentasyllabic line and and left eighty-two poems in the form, collectively entitled Yonghuai shi (Poems from my Heart), as well as six fu, several essays and a lengthy prose work entitled Daren xiansheng zhuan (Biography of Master Great Man).



[unfinished]