Tang China’s painter-poet signed himself as Vimalakirti
Wang Wei (699–761), courtesy name Mojie, was a middle Tang musician, painter, poet, and official. Famous for fusing landscape painting with spare nature verse, he signed works Wang Weimojie—invoking the Buddhist lay sage Vimalakirti—and his brother Wang Jin later compiled the poems by imperial order.
About 400 of his poems survive, 29 of them in the 18th-century anthology Three Hundred Tang Poems, and many draw on the landscape around him. Nothing else is left intact: no authenticated painting exists, known only through influence and descriptions, and none of his admired music was written down. The eldest of five brothers, raised in Puzhou after his father moved east of the Yellow River, he went to Chang'an at nineteen, charmed the court with his poetry and pipa playing, and took first place in the palace examination of 721.
His career zigzagged. Appointed deputy master of music, he was demoted to a granary post in Jizhou for breaching etiquette by performing a lion dance, then rose again under the patronage of the minister-poet Zhang Jiuling and fell back as Li Linfu gained power. In 728 he befriended the poet Meng Haoran. After his wife died in 731 he never remarried. He served on the Liangzhou frontier until about 738, then roamed the Zhongnan Mountains with Pei Di and bought the Wang Chuan estate at Lantian with his earnings as an artist. Mourning his mother around 747, he wasted almost to a skeleton.
When rebels took Chang'an in 756, dysentery kept him from fleeing with the court. Taken to Luoyang, he reportedly feigned deafness or damaged his voice with medicine, yet accepted a rebel title. After the Tang recaptured the city he was jailed for treason, then freed thanks to his brother Wang Jin and to poems written in captivity that proved his loyalty. He rose again to become deputy prime minister, the post he held at his death in 761.
In his later years he gave up meat and committed himself to Chan practice, having spent a decade learning from the master Daoguang. His signature invokes the lay sage of the Vimalakirti sutra, which ends in a teaching delivered through silence.
Source: Wang Wei
