詩人としての郭璞

Abstract

Kuo P'u (276-324) is known as a poet of the Eastern Chin period and a scholar who wrote commentaries on the Erh ya, Shan hai ching, and other works. In his own day, however, he was more famous as a prophet and diviner, as the strange stories surrounding his name and recorded in his biography in the Chin shu indicate. Though these stories cannot be accepted as factual, they are important in indicating the magic and wonder-ridden background from which his literary works sprang. Kuo P'u's most important work in the fu genre is the Chiang fu or "Fu on the Yangtze", which describes a variety of strange and wonderful plants and animals living in and around the river. It had been typical of the fu from Han times to describe exotic creatures and landscapes, but Kuo P'u's approach to such wonders is somewhat different from that of his predecessors. He believed that such creatures and landscapes were wonders only because men in their subjective judgment recognized them as such; in fact they actually exist somewhere in this world, no stranger than those parts of the world already known to men. Kuo P'u's fourteen poems entitled "Roaming with the Immortals" have customarily been regarded as his highest literary achievement. Here again, though earlier writers had visualized an ideal world of the immortals that existed only in imagination, Kuo P'u believed that such a world was an actuality and could be attained by proper religious and ascetic practices. In the first poem of the series, he describes the mountain setting proper for such attainment, arid it was no doubt the hope of his lifetime to be able to retire and devote himself to the search for immortality. But his services as a prophet and diviner were too highly prized by the rulers of the time, and he was never given the opportunity to pursue his ambition. His anger and frustration at this fact are revealed in the second and fourth poems of the series, while the fifth laments the fact that the men of the time refuse to recognize the validity of the search for immortality. The poems are thus not only descriptions of the beauties of the land of the immortals, but a revelation of the poet's own hopes and frustrations in his attemptto attain that land.