106. Passing by the Xiangji Temple | Wang Wei

写访寺诗，常见的开头是交代时间和地点，比如「清晨入古寺」。王维却从「不知」起笔：不知道寺在哪里，只管往山里走。这样就产生了悬念——读者跟着诗人一起找，而「深山何处钟」把悬念推高：听见钟声，却不知寺在何方。直到最后，寺也不一定出现了，出现的是「空潭」和「安禅」。访寺诗的重点从「找到寺」变成了「找到心境」，这是王维的高明处。

Poems on visiting temples usually open by giving time and place, as in at dawn I enter the old temple. Wang Wei opens on not knowing: no idea where the temple is, only walking into the hills. Suspense follows — the reader searches along with the poet — and deep in the hills, from where the bell raises it: the bell is heard, the temple's whereabouts unknown. To the end the temple need not appear at all; what appears is the empty pool and sitting in meditation. The weight of a visit poem shifts from finding the temple to finding a state of mind, and that is Wang Wei's finesse.

「泉声咽危石」的「咽」字，把泉水被石头挡住、声音变得幽咽的状态写出来了。水本来是畅流的，遇到高石才有阻塞之感，一个「咽」字里有水和石的关系。「日色冷青松」的「冷」字同理：日光是暖的，但照在密密的松林里，显出来的是冷色。两个字都是景物作用于感官的结果，不是景物本身。王维写景，常在这种细微的感官转换上下功夫。

The word chokes in the spring chokes among high rocks writes the water stopped by stone and turned plaintive. Water flows freely by nature; only meeting high stone does it feel obstructed, and the one word holds the relation of water and rock. Cold in the sunlight is cold on the green pines works the same way: sunlight is warm, yet among dense pines what shows is cold. Both words are the effect of scenery on the senses rather than the scenery itself. Wang Wei's landscape writing often works at these fine sensory shifts.

「毒龙」出自《涅槃经》等佛典，比喻人心中难以降伏的欲望与妄念。用这个词，说明王维此行的目的不只是游览，而是修行。末联把前面的寻寺、听钟、看泉、感冷，都收束到「安禅」这一个动作上。山中的一切景物，最后都成了修行的场景。理解这层宗教意味，才能读出这首诗不只是山水诗，也是一首修行诗。

The poison dragon comes from Buddhist texts such as the Nirvana Sutra and figures the desires and delusions in the mind that are hard to subdue. Its use shows that Wang Wei's purpose here was not sightseeing but practice. The last couplet gathers the searching, the bell, the spring, and the cold into a single act: sitting in meditation. Every feature of the hills becomes, in the end, the setting of practice. Only with this religious sense does the poem read as a poem of practice and not merely of landscape.