Wang Ji(王绩): The Drunken Sage Who Wrote His Own Epitaph
Paul Peng
He was the brother of a great Confucian master. He was offered a post in the imperial library. He was summoned to the capital by the Tang emperor himself.
He quit his job. He went home. He built a cottage on a river islet. And he spent the rest of his life drinking, playing the zither, walking in the mountains, and writing some of the most joyful Taoist prose ever composed in classical Chinese—including his own epitaph, which he wrote while he was still alive.
His name was Wang Ji (王绩, 585–644 CE). He called himself Donggaozi (东皋子), the Master of the Eastern Bank. His friends called him the “Bushel of Wine Scholar” because he once accepted a government post solely because the office’s wine supply was reputed to be excellent. He was not a tragic figure. He was the man who looked at the grand machinery of the Tang dynasty and said: no, thank you. I would rather be drunk.
The Confucian’s Younger Brother
Wang Ji was born in Longmen, Jiangzhou—present-day Wanrong County in Shanxi—in 585 CE. His older brother, Wang Tong (王通), would become one of the most famous Confucian teachers of the late Sui period. Wang Tong’s disciples included some of the men who would later found the Tang dynasty. Wang Ji grew up in the shadow of that greatness. He knew the classics. He could have followed his brother into the world of serious scholarship and moral instruction. He chose differently.
During the Sui, he was appointed as a junior editor in the imperial library, then transferred to Liuhe County as an assistant magistrate. The Old Book of Tang records his departure in a single, devastating sentence: “Since this was not to his liking, he abandoned his official post and returned to his hometown.” He had seen the bureaucracy from the inside—the paperwork, the hierarchy, the daily performance of deference, the slow suffocation of every spontaneous impulse. He went home to Longmen, built a cottage on an island in the river, planted a garden, and began to drink seriously.
The Parable of the Two Horses
Wang Ji’s most important philosophical statement is a story. Two horses. Two fates. One lesson. It appears in his Biography of Wuxinzi, a fictional autobiography describing the philosophy of “the Master of No-Mind”—a transparent stand-in for himself.
“One horse was never relieved of its heavy load. It could not be unrestrained. It died from exhaustion. The other horse lived freely all day long. It remained plump and strong.”
“Thus, the phoenix does not disdain dwelling in the mountains. The dragon does not feel ashamed to coil in the mud. The gentleman does not stubbornly pursue purity to invite trouble. The sage does not shun filth to nourish life.”
This last line is Wang Ji’s most original contribution to Taoist philosophy. Traditional Taoism, from Zhuangzi onward, had emphasised purity—the sage withdraws from the dusty world, preserves his clarity by refusing to engage. But Wang Ji noticed a paradox: the pursuit of purity can itself be exhausting. The effort to remain untainted generates its own kind of weariness. The task is not to escape the mud but to learn how to coil in it without being soiled by it.
The Drunkard’s Utopia
Wang Ji’s most extraordinary literary creation is the Record of Drunkland (《醉乡记》), a prose description of an ideal state that exists nowhere on any map:
“Drunkland is far from China. Its land is flat and vast. Its atmosphere is peaceful and uniform. There is no alternation of darkness and light, no cold and heat. There are no cities or villages. Its people have no love or hatred, no joy or anger. They do not eat grain. They inhale the wind and drink the dew. Their sleep is peaceful. Their steps are leisurely. They live mixed together with birds, beasts, fish, and turtles.”
Drunkland is Wang Ji’s synthesis of three distinct traditions: Zhuangzi’s “uncarved block” of primordial simplicity, Taoist descriptions of the immortals’ paradise (where inhabitants “do not eat the five grains but suck the wind and drink the dew”), and the very real, very earthly condition of being pleasantly drunk. The genius of the Record of Drunkland lies in its refusal to separate these levels. Is Drunkland a metaphor for spiritual liberation? Yes. Is it a description of the Taoist immortal realm? Yes. Is it what happens when you drink enough wine on a warm afternoon? Also yes. Wang Ji is not choosing between transcendence and enjoyment. He is saying they are the same thing.
The Epitaph Written in Advance
Sometime in his later years, Wang Ji composed his own epitaph—the Self-Written Epitaph (《自撰墓志馓》):
“He was ignorant of honour and disgrace. He disregarded gain and loss. He regarded life as an unnecessary appendage. He regarded death as the bursting of a boil.”
“Life as an unnecessary appendage, death as the bursting of a boil” is a direct quotation from the Zhuangzi. The body is a temporary swelling on the body of the Tao. Death is the moment the swelling subsides. There is nothing to mourn. There is nothing to fear. The epitaph is the ultimate act of Taoist self-possession: a man who defines himself, writes his own conclusion, and leaves no debt of interpretation for posterity to collect.
Why This Matters for the Living Tradition
From a Zhengyi perspective, Wang Ji’s “Drunkland” is more than a literary fantasy. The inhabitants “do not eat the five grains but inhale the wind and drink the dew”—this is bigu (辟谷), the Taoist practice of grain-avoidance, which later adepts developed into elaborate fasting and breath-cultivation techniques. Wang Ji was not an alchemist. But his poetic imagination mapped terrain that later Taoist practitioners would explore with systematic rigour. The Zhengyi tradition, with its integration of ritual technology and inner cultivation, is the institutional inheritor of both the philosophical freedom Wang Ji embodied and the subtle-body practices his Drunkland prefigures.
What the Drunkard Left Behind
Wang Ji died in 644 CE, at the age of fifty-nine, in the cottage he had built for himself on the river islet. He left behind poems, essays, and an epitaph written with his own brush. He was not important. He did not want to be. And that was the whole point.
“Chanting loudly and whistling, carrying a wine flask and a pot, I associate only with like-minded people, unaware that old age is approaching.”
He was not useless in the sense of having no value. He was useless in the sense of having removed himself from the system that assigns value—and in that removal, finding a richer, quieter, more intoxicating form of life.
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