Daoist Poems of Solitude
Composed by Ji Zhizhen, a Taoist priest of The Quanzhen Dao in the early Yuan Dynasty.
It consists of eight scrolls and is included in the Taiping Section of The Daozang.
This work is a collection of poems and prose by Ji Zhizhen, containing two fu poems, fourteen stone inscriptions, postscripts and notes, and more than four hundred poems and ci-poems. Most of his poems and ci-poems advocate secluding oneself from the world to pursue immortality, and cultivating the mind and refining one’s nature, expounding the principle that the mind and nature are inherently tranquil and quiescent from the perspectives of essence and function, motion and stillness. It states: "Do not seek immortals outside yourself; immortality is nothing but the original pure mind from the beginning."
Daoist Poems of Solitude
To recognize the mind and perceive the nature is to transcend life and death, attain the Dharma body, for the physical form and the four great elements are all sources of suffering and bondage. The stone inscriptions mainly recount the deeds of the founding patriarchs of Quanzhen Dao such as Wang Chongyang and Qiu Chuji, and record the construction of Taoist palaces and temples on famous mountains in places like the Zhongnan Mountains, Luoyang, Panshan, Xianning and Kaizhou by Quanzhen Taoist priests in the early Yuan Dynasty, as well as the practice of holding vegetarian rituals to release the deceased souls. These records possess certain historical value.
Living during the transition from the Jin to the Yuan Dynasty, Ji Zhizhen often depicted the tragic scene of a land laid waste for a thousand li with scarcely a soul surviving in his poems, prose and stone inscriptions, and his grief over the fall of the state and the loss of his family overflows in his writing. His literary style is also elegant and readable.
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