Mr. Five Dippers of Drunkenville: The Representation of Enlightenment in Wang Ji's Drinking Poems

This essay proposes that the drinking poems by Wang Ji (590-644) do not simply chronicle the personal, heavy-drinking habits of this late Sui and early Tang poet, nor do they imitate in a conventional manner the drinking poems of Wang Ji's Wei-Jin models, most notably Ruan Ji and Tao Qian. Rather, in Wang Ji's imagination, drunkenness was a metaphor for the enlightened man's perception of fundamental philosophical ideas in the texts of Laozi and Zhuangzi-that is, the ever-changing course of the Way and the illusory nature of knowledge. Indeed, using Wang Ji's drinking poems, the "Biography of Mr. Five Dippers" and "The Story of Drunkenville," as guides, we discover that he consistently posits an analogous relationship between, on the one hand, the contrasting experiences of drunkenness and sobriety, and on the other hand the enlightened man's perception of the unknowable Way.