The Road to East Slope: The Development of Su Shi’s Poetic Voice 9781503623200

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The Road to East Slope The Development of Su Shi's Poetic Voice

The Road to East Slope The Development of Su Shi's Poetic Voice

Michael A. Fuller

Stanford University Press Stanford, California 1990

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 1990 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Printed in the United States of America CIP data are at the end of the book

Dedicated to Hans H. Frankel, scholar and teacher of Chinese poetry

Acknowledgments

B o o K s oFTEN have tangled, almost untraceable roots, for our intellectual life is nourished in complex ways. In presenting this study of Su Shi's poetry, therefore, I must first acknowledge two early debts. My earliest and greatest debt is to my parents, who were willing to support my interest in Chinese literature. I must also thank Messrs. James C. Gleason and William Mahoney for teaching me the simple yet difficult faith that art does matter. This book is a revised version of the dissertation I wrote at Yale University with the support of an East Asian Prize Fellowship granted by the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale. I am grateful to the Council for that support and for its assistance in all the technical and logistical aspects of getting a dissertation written, revised, bound, and approved. (I should also thank the director and teachers of the Inter-University Program in Taipei for bending the rules to allow me to design courses around Su Shi when I needed to write a chapter to qualify for the Prize Fellowship.) I was fortunate enough to have in effect two thesis advisors. Professor Stephen Owen, already in his new position at Harvard, did his best to keep me from going too far off the track, and Professor Hans Frankel helped me with many of the day-to-day problems of reading and understanding. Yet the dissertation remained a rather rough, introverted creature. Through long conversations with Peter Bol, my colleague at Harvard, I have had the opportunity to clarify and refine the intellectual underpinnings of my analysis. I also must thank Stanford University Press for aiding in the transformation of my initial study

V111

Acknowledgments

into a smoother, more coherent book. Helen Tartar has patiently guided this book through two revisions. The two readers for the Press have given me many practical suggestions and much food for thought. John Ziemer, the production editor, has tried diligently to bring some order to both my scholarly and stylistic idiosyncrasies. Any errors and oddities that remain are my fault. And finally I must thank my wife, Kathryn Ragsdale. Throughout the entire process-from the beginning of the research for the dissertation to the reading of the page proofs-she has been my constant aide and counselor. Without her help, this book would not have been possible.

M.A.F.

Contents

Abbreviations Song Dynasty Reign Periods, 1023-1125

XI X111

Introduction 0 NE TWO

Prelude: Voices of Mid-Northern Song Poetry The Young Scholar from Shu

THREE Fengxiang and the Poetry of Immanent Pattern F 0 U R Hangzhou: The Widening Circle

9 43 78 I I9

FIVE The Magistrate Reflects on Life: Su Shi in

Mizhou, Xuzhou, and Huzhou SIX The Layman of East Slope

Appendix: The Texts Notes Bibliography Title Index Subject Index

198 25I 3II 3I7 357 369 375

Abbreviations

o L L o w 1 N G abbreviations are used in the text and the notes. For full citations, see the Bibliography, pp. 357-68.

TH E F

DPTB DPW]SL DPYF] HCLS HZ JY JYJ LCJ LMDWJ LTBJ LTBS MDYSJ NPHZ OYWZG] QTS SBCK SDPJ SGZ ShiBY SKQS SMGWJ SSSJ STB

Su Shi, Dongpo tiba Lang Ye,Jingjin Dongpo wenji shi lUe Long Muxun, ed., Dongpo yuefujian Han Yu, Han Changli shi xi nian ji shi Feng Yingliu, comp., Su Wenzhong Gong shi he zhu Ji Yun, ed., Su Wenzhong Gong shi ji Su Xun, Jiayou ji Su Che, Luan cheng ji Liu Yuxi, Liu Mengde wen ji Li Bo, Li T aibo ji Li Bo, Fen lei bu zhu Li Taibo shi Meng Jiao, Meng Dongye shi ji Wang Baozhen, Zeng bu Su Dongpo nianpu huizheng Ouyang Xiu, Ouyang Wenzhong Gong wen ji Quan Tang shi Sibu congkan Su Shi, Su Dongpo ji Shi Yuanzhi et al., Zeng bu zuben Shi Gu zhu Sushi Shi Yuanzhi et al., Shi zhu Sushi, bu yi Siku quanshu Sima Guang, Wen guo Wenzheng Sima Gong wen ji Wang Wen'gao, Su Shi shi ji Ogawa Tamaki and Yamamoto Kazuyoshi, So Toba shishu

xu SXSJ TDSH TYMJ WJZJ WLXSJ WWG YKLS

ZA ZB Zha

Abbreviations Su Shunqin, Su Xueshi ji Hiraoka Takeo et al., Todai no shihen Tao Qian,Jian zhu Tao Yuanmingji Wei Yingwu, Wei Jiangzhou ji Mei Yaochen, Wan ling xiansheng ji Wang Wen' gao, Su Wenzhong Gong shi bian zhu ji cheng Fang Hui, Ying kui Iii sui zongan commentary to WWG Siku quanshu zhenben Zha Shenxing, Su shi bu zhu

Song Dynasty Reign Periods,

1023-1125

Renzong t* (Zhao Zhen ifi!!;}1{, IOI0-63), reigned I022-63 Tiansheng :=K~ I023-32 Mingdao @JI31[ I032-33 Jingyou ~ffifi I034-38 Baoyuan I038-40 Kangding I 040-4 I Qingli ~)g I 04 I-48 Huangyou ~;fit I049-54 Zhihe ~f!J I054-56 Jiayou ~ffifi I056-63 Yingzong ~* (Zhao Shu ifi!!lli, I032-67), reigned I063-67 Zhiping r&Zf I064-67 Shenzong ijlljl* (Zhao Xu ifi!!ffl:, I048-85), reigned I067-85 Xining ~"' I068-77 Yuanfeng 5C~ I078-85 Zhezong §"*(Zhao Xu ifi!!.~, I076-11oo), reigned I085-1100 Yuanyou 5Cifit I086-94 Shaosheng *B~ I094 -98 Yuanfu 5[:~ I098-I IOO Huizong ~*(Zhao Ji ifi!!t5, I082-1135), reigned I IOO-I I25 Jianzhongjingguo ~rep~~ I IOI Chongning *~ I I02-6 Daguan :kill. 1107-Io Zhenghe i&f!l I I I I-I8 Chonghe mf!J III8-I9 Xuanhe ]Lf!J I II9-25

•x'*IE

The Road to East Slope The Development of Su Shi's Poetic Voice

Introduction

w oR D s speak with many voices. Words adapt themselves to transactions at myriad levels of thought and experience from philosophy to barroom fiytings. These inflections of use leave echoes that linger. Both poets and readers of poetry must confront this unruly cacophony of implications as they construct or reconstruct poems from words. When a reader approaches an ancient poet from an alien culture, the task of hearing the meanings embodied in the text grows in some ways simpler, in some ways more difficult. On the one hand, sheer ignorance reduces the babble of echoes the words ought to have to a mere whisper. On the other hand, this silence can be deafening. The peculiar task of literary scholarship is to restore the sense of voice, to, in some systematic way, rebuild the language of the poem from the bare text. SuShi ~!JiJ:t (1037-1 101), one of the great Chinese poets and the premier poet of the Song dynasty, demands a complex reconstruction, for his is a particularly varied language. He was not only the best poet of his time but also a major prose stylist, calligrapher, and politician. He was an important advocate of a new style of painting, an avid herbalist, a dabbler in alchemy, and an amateur scholar. Su Shi was accused of slandering one emperor and was the teacher of another. His poetry embodies this multiplicity. Su Shi the politician, for example, spoke out through his poems: indeed, most of the evidence used by the censors to condemn SuShi for u~se majeste was culled from his poems. The sensibility of Su Shi the painter and calligrapher also informed his approach to poetic composition. Even EvEN s 1M P L E

2

Introduction

within purely poetic issues, the ramifying quality of language remains. As a self-conscious inheritor of the vast wealth of Tang poetry, Su Shi spoke through the words of the earlier poets, sometimes turning their language against them, sometimes stealing it for his own purposes. The present study is a largely chronological account of the development of SuShi's shi ~'!f poetry from his youth to the end of his exile in Huangzhou that touches on these various inflections of voice in his writings. The organizing perspective that has grown out of this historical approach is, however, somewhat abstract. From his earliest writings, Su Shi reveals himself to be an intensely thoughtful poet. The constantly active intelligence that shapes both the particular details and the larger organization of the poems is a distinctive aspect of his poetic style. The attempt to account for the quality of this informing pressure of thought and for its transformation as Su Shi matures forces us to confront a nexus of issues that initially seem rather distant from substantive questions of poetic practice. At the center of these abstract issues is the concept of li fi, "inherent pattern." Li is a difficult term. It has a long history in Chinese thought, and its evolving function in the cultural life of the Northern Song dynasty is complex. 1 Establishing the larger context of the role of li in the intellectual shifts from the Tang to the Song is, however, beyond the range of the present study. Instead, I turn to thenarrower question of the way in which these historical shifts in thought in the Northern Song manifest themselves in poetic practice. The specific issue is one of coherence: How does one structure a poem as a coherent whole, and what sort of meaning can one attribute to this aesthetic unity? The answers to these questions change over time. Solutions that are viable in one cultural milieu cease to work as that culture evolves. Such was the situation of Tang poetry and Tang society in the wake of the An Lushan rebellion that brought to an end the glorious reign of the emperor Xuanzong (r. 712-56). The confidence that marked High Tang poetry's reading of the world-its faith in the correspondence of the imperial order with the cosmic order and in the ability of the poet to discern and represent his place in that order-wavered and finally collapsed. 2 Through the last

Introduction

3

half of the Tang dynasty, a growing awareness of subjectivitylong a theme in Buddhist thought-interposed itself between the poet and his experience of the world. Poems became explorations of the subjective logic of experience. But as fragments of subjective ordering, they lost their connection with larger structures of significance. The function of li in Song aesthetics is precisely to assimilate subjectivity into the larger underlying patterns of experience. Yet li is an odd, ambivalent, unstable term; as we shall see in Chapter 3, it is suspended halfway between the mind and the world. The poetics of li that Su Shi developed to resolve the various problems of subjectivity, meaning, and their embodiment represents the zenith of a short arc in Northern Song culture. His particular solutions to the problems of writing significant poetry were based on suppleness, learning, and a certain confident yet skeptical thoughtfulness. These solutions were no longer viable soon after his death, just as the Northern Song understanding of li soon grew into the reified category that we translate "principle." 3 In the evolution of Su Shi's use of the term li, "inherent pattern" is important in resolving problems of meaning and relation in his poetry from the very beginning. In one of his earliest compositions, for example, Su Shi used the idea of lias a norm to conjoin seeming opposites: "The most trustworthy of all things under heaven is water. Now the size of rivers and the depth of the sea can, if you will, be estimated. It is only that [the water] itself has no form [of its own] and follows the objects [it encounters] in taking shape. Therefore, through ten thousand transformations it has a necessary inherent pattern." 4 Although water changes shape every moment, it remains eternally the same: it is infinitely responsive, yet always itself in its inherent nature. Flux and continuity, response and identity, the meeting of world and self all come together in the idea of the li of water. Later in Su Shi's life, the image of water became his way of describing the manner in which his prose transformed moments of private experience into public texts: My writing is like a spring of ten thousand gallons; it does not choose its path as it goes out. On levelland it flows smoothly and quickly, and a thousand miles a day is not difficult. When it comes to turns and breaks over mountains and stones, it follows the object to describe the form, and

Introduction

4

it cannot be known. That which can be known is that it always travels where it ought to travel, and it always stops where it ought to stop. It is like this, and as for all else, I too cannot know. 5

Despite this passage's optimism, Su Shi approached the transformation of private experience into public language with ambivalence throughout most of his life. In the very act of embodying individual experience, the shared language of inherited literary conventions constantly threatens to overwhelm the particularity of the moment. The loss of identity is-only by assertion-offset by the permanence offered by the printed word. As SuShi's conception of the inherent patterns of human life broadened with age and experience, however, it increasingly helped attenuate the distinction between private experience and public meaning. Moreover, as Su Shi affirmed the possibility of commemorating earlier poets and bringing their texts to life through sympathetic, imaginative reading, the issue of the quality of the identity embedded in texts shifted from the potentially reified poems themselves to the existence of later generations of readers who will, in turn, commemorate his poetry. 6 In both aspects-in composition and in reading-SuShi's ambivalence about the adequacy of poetic language per se lessened as faith in the constancy of the patterns of human experience grew. Doubt never seemed to disappear, however, until Su Shi's final exile to Danzhou on Hainan Island. This act of vengeance by the reform clique placed Su Shi in an exalted realm with Han Yu of the Tang dynasty as a poet-exile who has earned his permanent place in history. As Su himself claimed in this poem written shortly before his death:

Written on My Portrait at Mount ]in' A mind already like wood turned to ash, [This] body like an unmoored boat: I ask you what have been the accomplishments of your lifetime"Huangzhou, Huizhou, and Danzhou."

The concept of inherent pattern and SuShi's constant broadening of it provide a flexible framework within which to discuss his growth as a poet. As the Qing scholar Ji Yun noted, however, "inherent pattern can be compared to rice. In a poem, you ferment

Introduction

5

it to make wine. In philosophical writing, you boil it for eating." 8 In poetry, this transformation of inherent pattern recasts questions of li into three general issues of poetic practice. As I approach the poems, I shall constantly return, first, to questions of how Su Shi organized his poems. How do they cohere, and how does SuShi's rhetoric ground that coherence in larger structures of meaning? Where, moreover, is the locus of that meaning: in the organizing, subjective imagination of the poet or in the world itself? Finally and most generally, I shall constantly note the way in which the relationship of the poems' content to their technique points to Su Shi's ever-broadening understanding of the patterns of human experience. Within these broad questions, however, my principal goal in each chapter is to explore the particular qualities of the poems Su Shi was writing at the time. The first chapter sets the stage through a brief presentation of the state of poetic practice in Su Shi's father's generation. It also introduces the problems of history and self-conscious subjectivity that Su Shi inherited from the major poets of that period. The second and third chapters treat Su Shi's early poems. His juvenilia, primarily poems written en route to the capital in 1059-60, are the topic of the second chapter, and the poems written during his first tour of duty (1062-65) are discussed in the third. The third chapter also presents the key texts for Su Shi's use of the term inherent pattern. The fourth chapter, on Su Shi's poems in Hangzhou, recounts the shift away from his earlier, strongly subjectivist style to a poetry with broader roots in his particular political and social milieu. The fifth chapter, on the poems SuShi wrote while serving as the prefect of three small towns, charts the manner in which Su Shi acknowledged the priority of the world of experience he encountered in Hangzhou. During this period, the earlier subjectivity of meaning becomes, instead, an explicit subjectivity of response. Su Shi here recognized the strong interpretive power of poetic composition as a means of defining and controlling the subjective element of that response. Finally, Chapter 6 discusses the poems SuShi wrote in exile in Huangzhou. These compositions reveal an uneasy self-repression and a determination, through the interpretive power of poetry, to locate himself within the constant patterns of rural life.

6

Introduction

Although the idea of an evolving poetry of inherent pattern unites the developments chronicled in the separate chapters, it cannot wholly account for them; nor does it exhaust the significance of the individual poems. It nonetheless allows one to see Su Shi's poetry in Huangzhou as something of a culmination in which the poems briefly realize one extreme in the relationship of the individual and the momentary to the general and the timeless. For a moment, through the mediation of li, there is no distinction. With the end of Su Shi's exile in Huangzhou, the nature of the main issues in the development of his poetry becomes quite different as Su finds himself both an important official and the greatest poet of the realm. Social interactions and the particular personalities of his most important students and colleagues come to the fore as key pressures in determining the shape of Su Shi's poetry. This initial study therefore ends just before the beginning of that era in Su Shi's life. This study began as a doctoral dissertation. In revising it for a broader readership, I nonetheless have preserved most of the scholarly apparatus of the dissertation because it has an important heuristic function. While I explore the development of Su Shi's shi poetry, my analysis of his poems also attempts to present the techniques of language and organization that form the basis of reading poetry in the classical Chinese tradition. The lore and the analyses that I offer present a context within which reading can begin. Reading is ultimately a private act of engagement with a text in which meaning arises out of the dialogue with the poem; all historical, philological, and rhetorical contexts play only an ancillary role. Thus, the scholarly apparatus is only an aid, but to read classical Chinese poetry well, it is an important aid. In the Chinese tradition, poetry is to be reread, and immediacy of response is gained only gradually through breadth of reading or access to copious footnotes. Su Shi's poetry is a good example. One of the two surviving Song dynasty collections of his poems is a popular edition that boasts of being "annotated by one hundred scholars." The interlinear commentary of Chinese editions of poetry serves the same function as the footnotes and other elements that we associate with "scholarly apparatus": it tells the readers what they ought to know about the language and the context of

Introduction

7

each poem. In both cases this cumbersome apparatus stands between us and the poem, but it also explicitly formalizes the very real distance between a modern audience and an ancient text that we must acknowledge if we hope to learn to read that text well. Hence, in my translations I place the explanatory notes at the end of the poem and use brackets to indicate information that the Chinese reader would infer from context and habits of reading. There is, however, a limit to the alienation one can successfully impose on a text. Perhaps I already have passed it; I hope not. One further level of estrangement that I have not used is the "technical translation." There is an unending debate among translators of foreign texts about the extent to which one should assimilate the language of the foreign work into the syntax, vocabulary, and cadences of English. There is no easy answer, and particular decisions must be based on the intended use and intended audience. The technical translation that attempts to preserve as much of the linguistic structure of the original as possible defines one end of the spectrum; the paraphrase defines the other. Most translations fall in between. The translations in this book tend toward the technical, but I have eschewed the inevitable exotic effect of using words that are unusual in English to represent very common words in Chinese. English, for example, has a good supply of words in current use to describe the various shades of red of the Chinese poetic vocabulary, but blues and greens are not so well represented. In translating certain common Chinese terms, like hi~ -which I render as "jade green" rather than the more intense and unusual "cyan"-! thus have chosen to accept a degree of inaccuracy as the price of avoiding unwanted "Oriental" overtones. In any case, the poems-the aesthetic artifacts-upon which I base my analyses remain the original Chinese texts. Although I have sought in the translations to reproduce as much of the stylistic effects of the original as possible, the English versions were never intended to stand on their own. Instead, I hope that my discussions of the poems will aid readers with little experience of Chinese to begin to see something of the qualities of the original poem within the rough scaffolding of the English translation. Su Shi is a great poet, but the very stuff of his poetry is not just the words on the page but the entirety of the artistic and intel-

8

Introduction

lectual traditions in which he wrote. If we are to hear him, we must hear him through those traditions. I hope that the reader will persevere and accept the difficulties imposed by the layers of mediating formal structures in this study. Part of the promise offered by the Chinese classical tradition is that mediation, once internalized, makes possible the return to an even more powerful immediacy.

ONE

Prelude: Voices of Mid-Northern Song Poetry

D EM o N s T R AT 1 N G the continuities between generations of poets is part of the work of literary history. By an inexorable logic of regression, the complete study of Su Shi's poetry and its role in the development of the Chinese poetic tradition properly begins with the dawn of Chinese culture. Pragmatic compromise, however, moves this date up to the middle of the eleventh century A.D., to the full flowering of the poets of Su Shi's father's generation. 1 The poetry of this period, like that of any period, divides into two artificial but nevertheless convenient categories, the representative-what might be called the period style-and the outstanding, the distinctive voices of the best poets of the time. Both categories contributed to the shaping of Su Shi as a poet. The habits of versifying seem to have had a largely negative influence: it is a style conspicuously absent in Su Shi's early poetry. The poetry of the major writers of the period-Ouyang Xiu ~~~. Mei Yaochen fa~g!, and Su Shunqin ~~HJz -exerted a more positive influence. The ways in which their individual styles differed from the common practice of the period were, collectively, the point of departure for SuShi's poetry.

Versifying In the Song, as in previous dynasties, officials were called on to write poetry. And as before, when inspiration failed or genius was lacking, a courtier in distress could turn to a body of conventions

10

Voices of Mid-Northern Song Poetry

of versification for help. Convention provided positive norms for the treatment of subgeneric themes; common practice told one how to organize a banquet poem or a poem on viewing objets d'art or one on climbing a tower. 2 Moreover, for officials of the same generation as the poets pre-eminent in Su Shi's childhood there were the additional negative guidelines of eschewing recondite allusions, self-consciously "crafted" couplets, and intense emotions. In the mid-Northern Song, the period style for polite poetry in regulated verse is a placid, rather unadorned continuation of the style of Late Tang verse. 3 A poem by Zhang Fangping '1.&:1JZfi (100791) is a fine example of the general type.

River Tower, a Dilatory Traveler 4 Beyond the stillness, my wandering spirit is far away. Within my view, wordly things are few. The sky ends where it reaches the distant water. 4 A bird flies with the evening sun to its back. When the leaves begin to shake and fall, Thoughts of my native region urge me homeward. 5 Though the mood ends, I leave unwillingly. s A dilatory traveler in a sliver of a boat turns for home.

liftil~ ~)i-iQ¥1]1$~

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The language and imagery are simple. The only allusive reference is a tag from the Classic of Poetry. The poem develops in a logical and orderly fashion. In the first couplet Zhang makes statements about his thoughts and about the scene that inspires his mood. The middle couplets develop the scene and explain why the poet's thoughts are distant. In the final couplet Zhang acts on his newly stirred longing and bids farewell to the tower. The seventh line in particular is typical of the conclusion of visiting poems of all sorts. The viewpoint of the poem does not shift: even when Zhang leaves, he describes his departure as it would be seen from the tower. Consistent with the general avoidance of overly crafted lines, the parallelism of yao luo ~~ (shake and fall) / shi wei JO\fl& (lit. "the use is little") in the third couplet is rather loose. Since the first couplet is also parallel, this looseness of parallelism in the third couplet is not unusual; but this is precisely the point: the poem follows well-established conventions with an easy yet refined competence.

Voices of Mid-Northern Song Poetry

II

This placid and elegant poetry was largely unchanged from the early ninth century and is well represented in the styles of such poets as Yao He ~Eii- (775-855?) and Jia Dao •Ch (779-843). 6 Du Mu t±~ (803-53) also used this style, and his "Four Rhymes on Muzhou" is a small, quietly and precisely observed scene that illustrates the continuity between Late Tang and Northern Song poetry. 7 Four Rhymes on Muzhou 8 The prefecture borders Angler's Terrace, Its glens and mountains truly are charming. There are houses, all hidden4 Everywhere is the purling of brooks. Fine trees sing with hidden birds. Blue-sky towers rise out of the outland mists. In late spring, the traveler from Duling s Is smitten by wine before the falling flowers.

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Su Shi replies in his poem: Imperial Tutor Ouyang Has Me Compose on the Stone Windscreen That He Has Collected 21

4

What person has left you [this] stone windscreen? On it are faint traces of an ink painting. He did not paint great forests of massive trees. He painted only the lone ten-thousand-year-old, unaging pine on the snowy west ridge of the Emei mountains.

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2.11[10 The cliffsides and ravines are sheer; [the trees] can be watched but cannot be reached. A lone mist at sunset makes the pine rain-hazy: Holding the wind, bent-[ the painting] has obtained [the pine's] true manner. s I now believe that in sculpting, there may be an artificer in the heavens. I suspect that when Bi Hong and Wei Yan died and were buried in Mount Guo, Their bones could rot, but the heart is hard to bring to an end. Their inspired sensibility and subtle thoughts were without means of expression. 12 They were transformed into mist that permeated the stone. From of old, painters are not vulgar menIn copying the image of phenomena, they on the whole are like poets. They wish you would write a poem to assuage your not meeting your time. 16 Do not force these two to hold in their indignation and weep in the Nether Palace.

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9/ Bi Hong ~:fi (ft. 750) and Wei Yan iltf! (ft. 760) were painters famous for their trees. Du Fu's "In Jest, a Song on the Painting of a Pair of Pines" (QTS [7]

Hangzhou: The Widening Circle

131

219/2305-6; TDSH, no. 10673), has the couplet "In the realm, what man can paint old pines?/ Bi Hong is already old, and Wei Yan still young."

Both the extreme metrical irregularities and the mythopoeic ideas of interpenetration and transformation are unusual in SuShi's poetry and come from Ouyang Xiu. It is interesting to note that Su Shi substitutes two Tang painters for the weeping ghosts. Although fabulous explanations of the origin of the windscreen seem obligatory, Su Shi humanizes the will behind the process of transformation. 28 The conceit is in jest, but it has a slightly eerie quality, as though artists are cast into a limbo: they still can watch the world, but their perception cannot bear fruit in creativity. 29 The "Stone Windscreen" is an anomalous poem in Su Shi's collection. Although he borrows Ouyang's "old-style" techniquewhich Ouyang in turn took from Li Bo-he does not repeat this style elsewhere. The other surviving poem that SuShi wrote while with Ouyang reveals the beginnings of a new quality that briefly appears here but manifests itself again only toward the end of Su Shi's tour of duty in Hangzhou. For an instant, the landscape takes on a symbolic aspect that Su Shi does not reduce, as was his wont, to a gesture of subjective will.

Accompanying the Honorable Mr. Ouyangfor a Banquet on West Lake 30

4

8

One might say you're just now at a hearty manhood, [yet) your whiskers are like snow. One might say you're already old, [yet) a gleam plays across your cheeks. Now we come to drink fine wine on the lake. After getting drunk, your sharp words still are fervent. The vegetation by the lakeside is newly covered with frost. The lotus and the late chrysanthemum compete in brilliance. Wearing a flower [in my hair) I rise to dance to wish you long life. And you say, "A lifetime [passes) like a wild wind." To travel with Chisong zi would not be bad,

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132

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r6

Hangzhou: The Widening Circle

But who can endure hunger and eat the herbs of immortality? [You) already [know) that early death or long life are the Lord of Heaven's [to decide). That group suffers; my difference is I am happy. On the city wall the crows have roosted, and evening clouds appear. The silver lamp-vessel and painted candles illumine the lake, bright. I will not leave off singing a poem urging you to drink. We have no Huan Yi who can play the zheng.

f&f!t:~=er~~~

:!BX:J:.,!M~lUi!f:.

~ ;¥ ;fX~'f lb ~ fik ~~m:w~g~~

This West Lake is in Yingzhou. The Chinese term gong ~ is a respectful term of address. When SuShi uses gong in the poem to address Ouyang Xiu directly, I translate the term simply as "you." 8/ Han Yu, "How Sad This Day, Presented to ZhangJi" (HCLS, p. 45; QTS [10], 337/3772; TDSH, no. 17812): "A man is not in his prime twice:/ A lifetime [passes] like a wild wind." 9/ Chisong zi, Master Red-pine, was an immortal from the prehistoric reign of Shennong. 12/ In an incident recorded in the Han shu (92/3713), Chen Zun llt~, who is famous for enjoying company so much that he would throw the axle pins of his guests' carriages down a well, said to Zhang Song '11~. "You constantly chant the Classics and Histories, are spartan and frugal, and do not dare make a misstep. And I am unbridled and do as I please, mixing with the commoners, but my position, rank, and fame are not less than yours. The only difference is that I am happy. Is not [my situation] indeed outstanding?" The "they" in Su's line is the group in the capital led by Wang Anshi seeking support for their policies through reinterpretations of the Classics, the Zhou Li in particular. See Higashi, pp. 146-47. 16/ According to thejin shu (81/2118-9), Xie An, the great statesman, had a son-in-law, Wang Guobao, whom he disliked. Although Xie An tried to prevent Wang's advancement, Wang, through assiduous flattery, wormed his way into the company of the high officials. As Xie An had feared, Wang's presence sowed dissension. Then one day the emperor invited Huan Yi to drink with him, and Xie An also attended. Huan Yi, called on to play the zheng and sing, used the occasion to warn the emperor of the danger of mistrusting his loyal officials and relying on sycophants. Xie An, brought to tears both by the moving music and the bold warning, leapt up to embrace Huan Yi (actually, to grab his whiskers) and praised his outstanding character. The emperor looked properly admonished. The allusion is an obvious attack on Wang Anshi.

Lines five and six and thirteen and fourteen reveal SuShi's growing sureness in the use of quiet descriptive couplets. The first pair unobtrusively provides a corollary in the natural world to Ouyang Xiu's grace and strength in his old age. Su Shi includes no gram-

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matical markers here to reveal the intention behind the juxtaposition: the pattern is truly in the world even if Su Shi sees it only now in the poem. 31 The second couplet works as a transition from relatively abstract arguments back to the physical particularity of the occasion of the poem. They have been on the lake all afternoon -otherwise the flowers could not have been so brilliant-but now the sun sets. True to the "Old Poem" admonition, they bring out candles and lanterns rather than return. 32 The image embodies the sense throughout the poem of a determination to persist "against the dying of the light," both against the aging of Su Shi's old mentor, Ouyang Xiu, and against their shared political eclipse. The substantial presence of the landscape in "Accompanying the Honorable Mr. Ouyang" remains, however, an isolated phenomenon in Su Shi's poetry at the time. In general, landscape for Su Shi remains merely part of an evanescent experience, and the meaning is in the inner logic of the experience rather than in the scene per se. Thus, some of the more famous poems from Su Shi's voyage to Hangzhou rely in their recounting of events on earlier techniques and perspectives. "The Sixteenth Day of the Tenth Month, Noting What I Saw," for example, explores the sense of wonder in witnessing an afternoon hailstorm in a manner similar to "Traveling at Night, Observing the Stars." "At Yingzhou, When First Parting with Ziyou, two poems," resembles in part "Bidding Farewell to the Year" and in part Su Shi's earlier farewell to his brother. The two other poems of importance, "Leaving Yingkou, First Seeing the Mountains of the Huai, I Reached Shouzhou This Day" 33 and "An Outing to Mount Jin Temple," also rely on descriptive techniques used in earlier poems. "The Sixteenth Day of the Tenth Month, Noting What I Saw" displays the development of a precise descriptive technique with a strong narrative structure.

The Sixteenth Day of the Tenth Month, Noting What I Saw 34 The wind was high, the moon darkened, the clouds and water brown. I set out from Huaiyin at night, and by morning I was in Shanyang.

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The dawn fog at Shanyang was like fine rain. The light of the sun on first rising was cold and without brilliance. When the clouds cleared and the fog rolled away, it already was noon. There was a wind from the north, cold, almost freezing me stiff. Suddenly I was startled by flying hailstones coming through the window. s So rapidly appearing, [the storm] did not allow one time to take cover. The people in the market stumbled about, the merchants were thrown into confusion. Urgent thunder, a single sound like a collapsing wall. The prefect came to call [me out]; in the late afternoon he set out wine. r2 By the time all were seated, the sun again was shining on the veranda. Dazed, I misdoubted that what I had seen was all a dream: A hundred varieties of strange marvels successively vanished. They say when a dragon tires of its old cave, r6 The fish and lizards follow, emptying the pools and ponds. Foolish scholars, without understanding, keep to chapter and verse: Discoursing on black and white, they surmise [the hail's] portent. Only the words of our host are of use: 35 20 The sky is cold, there will be snow: drink this cup. 4

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There is a justness and niceness in the initial descriptive lineslines one, three, and four-that is concerned less with terms of correspondence than simply with presenting the physical scene. Although the particular details prove to be subordinate to a contemplation of the transitoriness of all such detail, SuShi's argument here is not to prove a rather trivial philosophic truth but to describe the experience of the change in the weather, the sense of wonder that sudden, violent squalls produce. As in "Traveling at Night, Observing the Stars," Su Shi proceeds in the second half of the

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poem by a process of emptying out. First he gives his own immediate response- "It does not seem real to me now" -then offers a folk explanation, the dragon's shifting of abodes. Next, as in "Observing the Stars," he dismisses all literalist attempts to import meaning. Finally, since the poem presumably is a banquet poem, he returns to the graciousness and direct wisdom of the host. This is a very conventional ending for a banquet poem, and the pleasure in Su Shi's performance here is in the seemingly effortless way in which he moves from one aspect to another to reach the generically appropriate finale. The sense of ease apparent in the poetry written during the journey from Kaifeng to Hangzhou reveals the mastery Su Shi had acquired over the old-style verse forms. Although bold similes do not entirely disappear, the movement of thought in the poems now seems more completely naturalized into the available conventional language. In "At Yingzhou, When First Parting with Ziyou," for example, Su Shi's familiarity with the "old yuefu" creates the effect of artlessness. At Yingzhou, When First Parting with Ziyou, second of two 36 When parting is to be but a short distance, one's countenance does not change. When parting is to be far, tears drench one's breast. If, separated by a foot, we cannot see one another, 4 It in effect is the same as a thousand miles. If in life there were no partings, Who would know the strength of affection? When I first arrived at Wan Knoll, s They tugged at my clothes, the capering children. Then I came to understand this regret was there: [It] detained me 'til the autumn wind passed. And the autumn wind has passed, 12 But the regret of parting is without end. You ask when I shall return. I say, "When Jupiter is in the East." Since parting and uniting are cyclic, r6 Sorrow and joy succeed one another. Saying this, I heave a great sigh:

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My life is like a tumbleweed's. With many griefs, one's hair turns white early: Do you not see Liu-yi Weng?

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7/ That is, Chenzhou. 20/ That is, Ouyang Xiu. Weng ~ is an often affectionate term for an old man; if "geezer" were more elegant, it would be fairly close.

The language of the poem resembles "Bidding Farewell to the Year," written in Fengxiang, and it revolves around the same contrasts of linear and cyclic time. Yet the parting in "Bidding Farewell to the Year" was with an abstract entity, time. In "At Yingzhou, When First Parting with Ziyou," SuShi takes the generalized language and yuefu conventions of the former poem and domesticates them to relate a far more intimate scene of farewell. Use of the persona of the Jian'an poet here marks an important shift, a gesture of community in which Su Shi partly assimilates the particular occasion into larger patterns of human experience. Nonetheless, SuShi the poet does not disappear. The poem adeptly orchestrates the language and sentiments of yuefu, and the particular qualities of Su Shi's intent ( ~ yi) appear in this thoughtful structuring of the conventional material. Ji Yun especially praises the naturalness Su Shi achieves within the poem's complex structure: "[The poem is] the utmost in twisting and turning [qu zhe E!E:JJT; i.e., changing and reformulating the argument], but it is as forthright as speech. This probably is because the emotion has natural truth and Su Shi's brush is adequate to convey it." 37 This shifting structure makes the tonalities Su Shi achieves in the poem cumbersome to analyze, in contrast to the "naturalness" and ease of the effect in reading the poem. To simplify the analysis, "At Yingzhou" can be roughly divided into three sections: an introduction (lines one-six), a description of the particular occasion (lines sevensixteen), and a concluding response (lines seventeen-twenty). In lines one through four Su Shi offers an initial statement in which, as in "Traveling at Night, Observing the Stars," he once again analyzes the odd illogic of customary behavior. The language approaches that of speech: the grammar is strongly hypotactic, and Su Shi uses prosy grammatical particles with great ease. The effect is odd. On the one hand, the four lines are general statements. On

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the other hand, they set forth a refusal of the sorts of consolations and mediation of sorrow that such abstract language usually offers. Having raised the problem of consolation that fails, Su Shi then formulates a new, more intellectually compelling version, though still expressed in prosy and general language: If in life there were no partings, Who would know the strength of affection?

The shei mt, "who," is particularly effective because it reaches beyond the present parting with Su Che to an awareness that many have shared this experience. Indeed, the language of the couplet itself asserts this commonality: the lines echo the conclusion of the verse "Poem of Emotion" by Zhang Hua 7.&-¥ (232-300): Had there never been distant partings, How would we know to esteem our companions? 38

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Having found a consoling context for parting, Su Shi then describes the actual occasion of the poem. Yet even in this section Su Shi retains the language and sentiments of "old yuifu." The persona of the Jian'an poet is more than a device: SuShi defines the moment of farewell at Yingzhou as a particular instance within a larger continuum. A few specific details of his technique of portraiture merit comment. For example, a paraphrase of lines seven through twelve would run "I've dreaded this farewell ever since I arrived in Chenzhou, so I've delayed as long as possible." In fact Su Shi writes: When I first arrived at Wan Knoll, They tugged at my clothes, the capering children. Then I came to understand this regret was there: [It] detained me 'til the autumn wind passed. And the autumn wind has passed, But the regret of parting is without end.

The formulaic repetition of "autumn wind" between couplets (lines ten and eleven) and the concluding contrast between the passage of the season and the constancy of sorrow achieve a specificity and intensity of emotion within the generality of "old" language.

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By the second half of the narrative section, Su Shi almost disappears into the anonymity of a Jian'an poet. In contrast to the specificity of the "I" (wo ~) in the earlier "When I first" (shi wo ~iliX; line seven) and "[It] detained me" (liu wo fll:fX; line ten), the quality of the "me" in "You asked me" (wen wo rp,:fX; line thirteen) is that of formulaic poetry. Moreover, SuShi invokes grand rhetoric to say that he and Su Che will meet again in three years: You ask when I shall return. I say, "When Jupiter is in the East." Since parting and uniting are cyclic, Sorrow and joy succeed one another.

The anonymity of the persona here is, however, an all but transparent mask. Through it Su Shi makes his gesture of self-repression and stoic discipline. He argues here that they must accept the inevitable patterns of historical process to which all are subject. Their present sorrow simply counterbalances the joy they shared and will again share in three years. In the concluding section Su Shi preserves both the linguistic and imaginative gestures toward community even as he returns from formulaic response to the specificity of the actual farewell: Saying this, I heave a great sigh: My life is like a tumbleweed's. With many griefs, one's hair turns white early: Do you not see Liu-yi Weng?

Ouyang Xiu is their revered mentor precisely because he has been willing to submit himself to the endless cycles of joy and sorrow that they now confront in their turn. "At Yingzhou, When First Parting with Ziyou" offers SuShi's skillful self-presentation through the traditional language of the "old yuefu." Yet Su Shi pays a price for the mastery of technique. The poem has neither the emotional subtlety nor the intensity of Su Shi's farewell to his brother in "The Nineteenth Day of the Eleventh Month." Separation has become more routine. In Su Shi's gestures of communality, separation becomes correspondingly less uniquely personal and, therefore, more completely assimilable into rhetoric and art.

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"An Outing to Mount Jin Temple" perhaps best represents the transitional style of Su Shi's journey to Hangzhou. Like the preceding example, the poem is organized through constant shifts, and the use of "old" rhetoric largely replaces figures of thought as the means of making the language of the poem adequate to the expenence. ~~U-J~

An Outing to Mount ]in Temple 39 40

My home is at the source of the River's waters. In government service I have accompanied the River to the sea. 41 I hear that the tide [at Hangzhou], at highest flood, has an eight-foot [rise]. 4 The sky is cold: [the high-water] marks on the sand still remain. On the southern bank of Zhongling there is a gnarled boulder. From ancient [times], it has appeared and submerged with the billows. I thought I'd climb to the very top to look for my home: s South of the river, north of the river, there are many green mountains. With a traveler's sorrow, I feared [the afternoon was getting] late and looked for a returning boat. But a monk of the mountain pressed me to stay to watch the setting sun. A light wind: for ten thousand acres the ripples were boot-leather fine 12 Broken mists filled half the sky with fishtail crimson. At this time the river moon was just beginning its faint [earth-glow]. At second watch, when the moon set, the sky was a deep black. At the heart of the river there seemed to be the brightness of a torch. 42 16 The flying blaze lit up the mountain, the roosting rooks were startled. I returned and lay down, pensively ill at ease-l could not recognize what it was.

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It was not a demon; it was not a man; what then was it? Though the mountains and river are like this, I do not return to the mountains. The river god manifested a strange phenomenon to startle me from my obdurateness. 43 I thank the river god: [yet now] have I a choice? [But] if I acquire land [in Shu] and do not return home, [may I be] as the River's waters. 44

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Mount Jin, at the time in the middle of the Yangtze River, faces another mountain, Mount Jiao ~. It is near the mouth of the Zhen River in Jiangsu Province. 3/ The tidal bore at Hangzhou was a famous tourist attraction. Mount Jin is near enough the mouth of the Yangtze to be influenced by the tides. I 3J That is, the new moon re-reflects the light reflected from the Earth. I 5/ This glow seems to be a ghost fire of some sort and not a reflection of the moon in the water. I8/ SuShi's note: "What I saw this night was like this."

SuShi begins here, as he frequently did in the Fengxiang poems, with a brief biographical comment. The language of lines one and two, however, strongly evokes the literary traditions surrounding the image of water and transforms merely personal, incidental history into a fragment of myth. The waters in the "Autumn Waters" chapter of the Zhuang zi travel down the river to the sea, only to discover that the river, even at its height, is nothing compared to the vastness of the ocean. The Bo wu zhi if~ lit records the journey of a man who climbed on a raft as it sailed out of the mouth of the Yangtze River into the sea. He then drifted on the Milky Way back to the Yangtze's origins in Shu. The ceaseless flow of water, always departing, is also the flow of time. 45 In "An Outing to Mount Jin Temple," as in "Bidding Farewell to the Year," traveling down the river to the sea is a journey from which there is no return, a journey that threatens dissolution and assimilation into the boundlessness of the ocean. The poem's first couplet introduces the theme of return through the poet's fear that, since he is like the waters in their flowing to the sea, he may also be like them in being unable to return to their origins. Since, moreover, Su Shi's home is at the source of the waters, he is by implication out of place in the lowlands, where people have lost touch with their original nature (see the discussion of "Teacher Chong of the Liuho Temple ... " below). Su Shi here begins to delineate

Hangzhou: The Widening Circle his persona of "mountain man among the city slickers," a pose that becomes more frequent in his poems in Hangzhou (see below). Having introduced himself and explained why he has come to Mount Jin, Su Shi next turns to the scene in front of him. The quality imparted to lines three through six by the introductory phrase "I hear that" is not of an objectively described landscape from which the poet has withdrawn in the manner of Wang Wei, but of a scene witnessed through the poet's eyes. The details that he notices are limited and rather odd: first the lowered winter river, then the high-water marks, then the boulders at the river's edge. The quiet objectivity of these surface observations is possible, however, precisely because Su Shi's mind is elsewhere. In line seven, vague restlessness and homesickness prod him to seek the expansiveness of the view from the top of the mountain. Line eight underscores the change in Su Shi's technique in Hangzhou: the repetition of "South of the river, north of the river" has the simple, evocative ring of old-style yuefu and gives the observation a categorical quality. It becomes the lament, at the same time both particular and universal, of the traveler longing for his home. The categorical strength, moreover, rests not on the poet's imaginative assertion but on his more self-effacing use of the resonant quality of the poetic language itself. The vision of the mountains is the first high point in the poem. The next couplet, lines nine and ten, returns the poem to time and particularity. Line nine begins with Su Shi's participation in the universal traveler's sorrow: he, like the river, must always be on the move. More specifically-as the line returns to Su Shi's actual itinerary-he must find a boat to cross from Mount Jin before sunset. In line ten, the poet is entirely in the narrative present: a monk, with officious kindness, urges Su Shi to stay to watch the sunset and then discreetly withdraws from the poem. SuShi views the scene with a delicate, passive receptivity. The images "bootleather ripples" and "fishtail crimson" impress themselves on the poet; they do not arise through an active intervention signaled by explicit verbs of comparison. As the moon rises and then sets, the poet returns to his earlier, detached gaze. He suddenly notes, however, some remarkable brightness in the water, a brightness to which the startled rooks give objective, if conventional, confirma-

Hangzhou: The Widening Circle tion. This is the second "spot in time" in the poem: a moment of intense perception of an impenetrable presence. It stands as a complement to the earlier view from the mountains in which Su confronts an impenetrable absence. The final section of "An Outing to Mount Jin Temple" untangles the unspoken emotions of the day's expedition. The river god of the poem is like the mountain god of Han Yu's "Visiting the Temple on Mount Heng," a vehicle to explain the power of the experience. 46 The way in which Su Shi leads up to the river god once again shows the nicety of his organizational skill. Line seventeen brings him back to his lodging in a sad, vacant mood, and the statement "I could not recognize what it was" demands a resolution in the lines that follow. Line eighteen, however, answers the question with a question: Whatever he saw deeply affected him, but what in fact did he see? Line nineteen answers this question with a non sequitur: he saw the strange phenomenon because he had not returned to the mountains. Although the idea of return has been a subterranean presence throughout the poem, it suddenly breaks in here and proves to be the key both to what Su Shi saw and to what he felt. Further explanation, however, waits until line twenty, where Su Shi introduces the image of the river god. In lines nineteen and twenty, Su Shi quietly reinterprets the meaning of the river water in the first couplet. In saying, "Though the mountains and river are like this, I do not return to the mountains," SuShi subsumes the mountains of both Shu and the lower Yangtze region into the general category of those mountains through which the river passes. Thus in the first couplet, the river is a force of disjunction, both spatial and temporal, but here it becomes a means of connecting the present scene to the mountains of home for which Su Shi longs. Similarly, the river god is not merely a local presence but encompasses the entire river from its origins in Shu. Its concern for Su Shi's "obdurateness" is in its own way a projected voice from home. The poet's interpretation of the gleam in the water as a warning from the river god is also a means of presenting his longing without ever explicitly naming it. The god accuses him in fact of just the opposite, of not wanting to go home enough, not paying heed to the natural call to return. This urge to go back to Shu thus

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attains an objective status independent of the poet's merely individual longing. In the final oath, however, Su Shi seems to return to the river's initial significance. At the outset of the poem, he is worried that in fact he is "like the River's waters," flowing to the sea never to return to their origins again. In the vow, Su Shi asserts that if he passes up the opportunity to return, then he deserves to be forever adrift like those waters rather than like the water embodied in the river god. The sound qualities of the last five lines contribute significantly to the formulaic resonance of the final vow. On the one hand, no line follows logically or grammatically from the line before, and within each line the caesura between the fourth and fifth characters is quite strong. These structures create a rhythm of short phrases. On the other hand, linking repetitions abound.

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Thus, in creating coherence of meaning in the poem, the sound probably to some extent overwhelms the sense it ostensibly conveys.

Hangzhou: The Poet in Society Su Shi arrived in Hangzhou on the twenty-eighth day of the eleventh month of Xining 4 (December 22, 1071). He wasted little time before turning the discomfort of his new official duties into pointed verse. On New Year's Eve, a little more than a month after his arrival, for example, he composed the following, rather painful poem. Written on the Wall of the Prefectural Audience Hall 47

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On New Year's Eve one ought to return early. But I am detained by official matters. Holding a brush, I face them, weeping, Mourning these jailed prisoners. Men of little stature make their schemes for foodstuff, And when caught in the net, know no shame. I too am enamored of my meager salary. Toeing the line, I failed to return to retirement. One need not speak of the worthy and the dolt: Both make plans in order to eat. Who can obtain a temporary reprieve? In wordless dejection, I am ashamed before former worthies.

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4/ As Wang Wen'gao notes in his commentary to this poem and Hatch had more than (p. 928) explains, the very zealous salt commissioner Lu Bing 17 ,ooo people in the Hangzhou area arrested in one year for violation of the newly established laws on salt trading. See also Chikusa, So Toba, pp. II5-I9. I I/ The commentaries cite numerous examples of magistrates who freed their prisoners for New Year's Eve. The prisoners were always so impressed by the humaneness of the official that they all returned at the appointed time.

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The prefects under whom SuShi served in Hangzhou-Shen Li ttli, Chen Xiang Jltg, and, briefly, Yang Hui m~-were not partisans of the reform regime. 48 Hangzhou, moreover, was at a safe distance from the capital. Su Shi therefore undoubtedly found himself less constrained in his criticism of the new government policies. Nonetheless, Su Shi frequently complained in his testimony in the

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Wutai shi an ,~:J:~c!f:~ (The case of (Su Shi's] poetry at the Black Terrace) that throughout the period former friends and acquaintances dissociated themselves from him as they continued to rise in the bureaucracy. 49 It is difficult to assess the validity of this claim, but the gradual disappearance of blatant criticism from Su Shi's verse does suggest that he was bowing to increasing pressure from both friends and enemies. Official responsibilities and social duties seem to dominate Su Shi's poetry in Hangzhou. Ji Yun, for example, notes the subdued, distracted, or offhand quality of Su Shi's poems of the period. Because [Su] Dongpo's official post was among the mountains and lakes [of Hangzhou], it was fitting that he have lofty compositions, but in this [eighth]juan there are not very many remarkable poems. Could it be that official matters burdened his thoughts? 50

Ji Yun's comment on the last poem in the ninth juan is in the same vem: This juan has many offhand compositions and social verses. This poem is especially deep and striking, and thus one knows that poems on a real object are different from aimless versifying. Moreover, if no significance can be drawn from the occasion, even Dongpo cannot write a good poem. 5 1

Finally, Ji Yun remarks on the change in Su Shi's poetry once he leaves Hangzhou: As soon as [Su Shi] leaves Hangzhou, his poetry becomes deep and striking. Was it not that the limpidity of his inner thoughts was half used up on official records and reports, half used up on social outings? It is true indeed that poetry, if not written with a quiet strength, cannot be skillful. Although Dongpo has natural genius, even he at a time of great perturbation cannot write as freely as he would. 52

SuShi's poems and prose writings, his biography, and the other available sources that Wang Wen' gao assembles in his commentary give a rather bare outline of those distracting official duties that cast a pall over Su Shi's poetry during his three years in Hangzhou. A tong pan ~#'U, or vice-administrator, "exercised authority in matters of all kinds, including judicial administration." 53 From the very

Hangzhou: The Widening Circle beginning of his tour, Su Shi was in charge of sentencing violators of the salt monopoly laws. In the eighth month of Xining s (September-October 1072), he presided over the provincial examination. Two months later he was knee-deep in mud as he directed the dredging of a salt-transport canal. At the end of the year, he went to Huzhou to inspect the repair of dikeworks. The next year, Su Shi made several tours of judicial inspection in the outlying towns, but he seems to have remained most of the time in Hangzhou. In the winter of that year, however, heavy rain led to flooding and to widespread famine, and in the eleventh month of Xining 6 (December 1073) Su Shi set out to oversee relief efforts. He did not return to Hangzhou until the sixth month of Xining 7 (July 1074). Two months later he set out again to organize the killing oflocusts. These were not the best of times. He received his posting to Mizhou when he returned in the ninth month. Aside from these official duties, Su Shi's position imposed social demands on him as well. For example, Chen Xiang, SuShi's superior, wrote a poem to him commenting on his too frequent failure to attend banquets. 54 Su Shi's growing reputation seems to have compounded his obligation to write social verse. 55 In addition to requests for prose introductions, prefaces, postfaces, colophons, and the like, people also sent verses to Su Shi matching the rhymes of his own compositions, to which he was expected to reply in turn. The response in Su Shi's poetry to these political pressures and social demands, and to the hardships of the populace that he encountered in his official duties, is not so much a linear progression as a gradual, evolutionary drift. As new needs and conditions arise, Su Shi adapts old techniques and introduces new ones to meet the changes. The two best-known poems from the period just after his arrival in Hangzhou, for example, are seven-character old-style poems that contain much that is old, but at the same time they epitomize the trends that appear in Su Shi's use of the form since his return from mourning. The first poem, translated below, is a fully developed integration of yuefu musicality into Su Shi's seemingly easy, natural descriptive style. The second, "Jesting with Ziyou," on the other hand, develops the baldly satiric aspect (see below). As in "Written on the Wall of the Prefectural Audience Hall," SuShi aims the satire in both poems at himself.

Hangzhou: The Widening Circle First Day of the Twelfth Month, an Outing to Lone Hill to Visit the Two Monks Huiqin and Huisi 56 A sky of immanent snow, Clouds filled the lake. 57 The towers and terraces glimmered and vanished; the mountains were barely visible. The water was clear [enough]-rocks exposed-to count the fish. 4 The grove was deep and without people; the birds called out to one another. The first day of the twelfth month I did not return to be with my wife and children. In name I was seeking out the men of the Way; in fact I was amusing myself. Where is the residence of the men of the Way? s In front of Baoyun mountain, the road winds about. Lone Hill is lonely and cut off; who would willingly live there? For the men of the Way, who have the Way, the hill is not lonely. Through paper windows, the bamboo[-roofed] rooms are deep and naturally warm. r2 Wrapped in coarse clothing, [the monks] sit asleep on round mats. That the sky is cold and the road far worries my servant. He readies the cart and urges me to return that we rna y arrive before dusk. Coming out of the hills, I turn back to gaze: the clouds and trees join together. r6 I can see only a wild falcon wheeling about the temple pagoda. This outing has been simple but replete withjoy. Reaching home, I was dazed, as though just waking from a dream. I wrote [this] poem swiftly as fire, pursuing the evanescent20 A pure scene, once lost, is impossible to describe later. rb

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5/ "Day of La" can refer to several days. It can mean the eighth day of the twelfth month, the day of the historical Buddha's enlightenment. It can also mean the third occurrence of a dog (xu EX;) day after the winter solstice-the day of the winter [a HI sacrifices. And finally, it can mean the first day of the twelfth month.

Hangzhou: The Widening Circle The Shi commentary states that Su Shi visited the temple three days after his arrival, which would make it the first. 9/ Lone Hill is an island in West Lake just off the shore. Although the usual translation of shan llJ is "mountain," the island is in fact no more than a small hill. 17/ The phrase youyu i'r~ means "have an excess of," with both the extensive quality of "lingering" and the intensive sense of "to surfeit." 18/ The last two characters, qu qu jjjjij, form a descriptive reduplicative and refer to a famous passage in the Zhuang zi at the end of the "Qiwu" chapter, Master Zhuang dreams that he is a butterfly. When he awakes he is still dazed (qu qu), uncertain whether he is Master Zhuang dreaming that he is a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming that he is Master Zhuang.

Ji Yun notes that "now each line rhymes, now every other line rhymes. 5 8 The marvelousness of the [poem's] rhythm is the naturalness of its movement, which never allows any stagnation. Its origin is in old yuefu." 59 The first part of the poem in particular displays a great attention to rhythm. The beat initially is short and energetic. The first line is broken into two three-character lines. 60 The second has a very strong caesura between the fourth and fifth words, and the fifth character is the new grammatical subject of the second half of the line. 61 The line, describing the effect of clouds moving rapidly across the scene, moreover repeats the verb/ negation-of-verb pattern in each of its halves. The depiction of the landscape here relies not on conceptual categories of correspondence, as in "Clouds are born as if belched forth and then held in" of the earlier "Entering the Gorges" (see Chapter 2), but on inherent qualities of the language. The syntactic and aural rhythmic weight of words, in their shaping of the texture of the poem, here represents the texture of experience in an explicitly literary manner. That is, SuShi in this poem-and in Hangzhou generally-more fully exploits the material qualities of the medium of his art. The third and fourth lines continue the short beat, with relatively strong caesuras both between words two and three and between words four and five. In line three, for example, even though the unifying topic is the clearness of the water, the three subject/verb pairs break the line into three linked but largely selfcontained segments. Line four is similar, but the wu ren ~A, literally "there are no people," avoids an exact, stiff repetition of the syntax of line three. Varying the rhythm, Su Shi next explains in a conversational couplet that he is essentially playing hooky. His

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confession that "in name I was seeking out the men of the Way; in fact I was amusing myself" extends the status/negation-of-status pattern of each half of line two over a full line. Having introduced the "men of the Way" in line six, Su Shi repeats the phrase at the beginning of line seven to link the third and fourth couplets. Lines seven and eight use a question/indirect-answer pairing similar to the couplet from "Temple of the White Emperor," a much earlier poem: Gloomy, where is [the wind] going? They all point up the dark mountain road.

Here, however, the road goes down from the foot of the mountain to the lake and then across to Lone Hill. The regularities of the opening section strengthen the effect of the choppy, repetitive organization of lines nine and ten. The first word of line nine, "lone," rhymes with the last word of the previous line (and therefore follows the rhyme of the poem). The second word, "hill," repeats the third word of line eight in the same way that the beginning of line seven repeats the third and fourth words of line six. Similarly, the last words of line ten repeat the first words of line nine. To present these effects more clearly, the italicized words in the following couplet represent repeated words: Lone Hill is lonely and cut off; who would willingly live there? For the men of the Way, who have the Way, the hill is not lonely.

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These repetitions between lines, combined with the internal repetitions of the first four words in both lines nine and ten, create a sing-song yuefu effect that is heightened by the quick rhythm of the fairly strong caesurae in the two lines. The couplet, however, has more than a merely musical role in the poem. The lines, for example, repeat the status/negation-of-status pattern for a third time, though in a more elaborate, extended manner. Lines nine and ten, like all the lines in the poem, also have a narrative function that underlies their explicit descriptive or discursive role. In line eight Su Shi is on the road leading down to Lone Hill, in line nine he is on the island, and by the end of line ten he is at the temple. Finally,

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the couplet's playful exploitation of the island's name has a touch of a Buddhist gathii that is appropriate for a poem written about a temple. 62 In this respect it resembles the opening couplet of "Written on the Wall for Head Monk Lun on Mountjiao": 63 The teacher of the Dharma lives on Mount Jiao. But in reality he has never resided [here).

Having reached the temple, SuShi changes the pace and introduces a quiet descriptive line in an objective, Late Tang style. The last three words, "deep and naturally warm," in particular have the ease and elegance of that style. The second half of the couplet, line twelve, gives the only glimpse in the poem of the two monks whom Su Shi is visiting. Since Huiqin was an acquaintance of Ouyang Xiu's whom Su Shi visited on Ouyang's recommendation, this cursory reference is rather strange. The poem breaks neatly into five groups of four lines. The first four lines describe the lake scenery, the next four recount Su Shi's own situation as he sets out, and the third four get him to the temple. Line thirteen begins the return trip. Once again Su Shi introduces an auxiliary actor to effect the turn in the poem-the servant who previously had thought Su Shi odd for grieving at parting. By having the ever-practical servant worry about transportation, snow, and so on, Su Shi implies that if left to his own devices he would have remained at the temple until long after dark, totally oblivious to worldly constraints. Thus he avoids the opprobrium with which he once viewed the old man in an earlier narrative poem, "Mount Wu", who left the mountain when his thoughts turned to the city. 64 When Su Shi reaches the mainland, he looks back at the temple he has just left. Ji Yun points out that lines fifteen and sixteen, which describe this scene, are similar in technique to SuShi's description of his brother in "The Nineteenth Day of the Eleventh Month": Climbing to high (ground], turning my head, the hills are between us. I see only [your] black cap appearing then sinking again.

The construction of the first line of the two couplets is almost identical. In the description in each of the second lines, there is

Hangzhou: The Widening Circle only a small, repetitive movement that points to the desired object otherwise hidden by the large landscape. As these similarities in technique suggest, the last eight lines of "An Outing to Lone Hill" are in general closer to Su Shi's earlier work than is the poem's beginning. The final four lines are a generically appropriate, summary response that turns on the theme of the insubstantiality of particular, historical experience. The allusion to the Zhuang zi in line eighteen implies the question "Did the event ever in fact happen?" just as Master Zhuang is left wondering whether he is a butterfly dreaming he is now a man or a man who has just dreamt that he was a butterfly. The questioning state of mind, as a response to a templevisiting poem, raises an appropriately Buddhist theme. The final two lines, which convert the entire poem into a self-conscious act of preservation of experience, show, however, that the issue of evanescence is a real concern as well as a rhetorical convenience. A poem that started out as "old yuefu" and made a passing nod to the Tang becomes in the last two lines unmistakably Song and unmistakably Su Shi. The first half of "An Outing to Lone Hill" shows the full maturity of Su Shi's use of "old yuefu" musicality. Yuefu in the Song dynasty, however, had another important meaning: the term was one name for ci, the song genre that was growing in popularity among the literati in Su Shi's lifetime. According to Wang Wen'gao, Su Shi's first composition in this form was written in the first month of Xining 5 (January-February 1072), a little more than a month after Su Shi arrived in Hangzhou. 65 Ci is an explicitly musical form and therefore presents a different set of musical requirements, as well as a different conception of musical form, from that which Su Shi seems to be exploring in "An Outing to Lone Hill." Although during his tour of duty in Hangzhou Su Shi continues to write poems using the techniques of "old yuifu" in order to develop the possibilities for inherently musical organization in shi, his interest in musical technique seems largely to have been diverted to problems of writing in the ci form. The second major poem that Su Shi wrote soon after his arrival in Hangzhou is "Jesting with Ziyou," which was composed at about the same time as "An Outing to Lone Hill" and "Written on the

Hangzhou: The Widening Circle Wall of the Prefectural Audience Hall." In the poem, SuShi mixes the wit of his early poetry and his interest in old-style forms with political indignation. The result is simultaneously funny, pathetic, bitter, and baldly sarcastic. ~rffi

Jesting with Ziyou 66 67

The master of Wan Hill is as tall as a hill. The schoolhouse of Wan Hill is as small as a boat. Most of the time he recites the Classics and Histories with lowered head. 4 Suddenly he stretches out and hits his head on the roof. A slanting wind blows the door curtain, rain splashes his face. The master is not ashamed, but onlookers are embarrassed. So let the overfed laugh at [Dong]fang Shuo. s Would he, standing in the rain, be willing to seek out You [Zhan]? One need not even mention that the family women quarrel before your [very] eyesTo deal with the six emotions, one needs heavenwandering [untrammeledness]. [Ziyou] reads ten thousand volumes of books, but reads no laws: 12 In bringing our lord to rule like Yao and Shun, he knows there is no technique. The caps and carriage roofs of those urging on the farmers are as turbulent as a cloud. For the years of old age, brine-pickles and salt are as sweet as honey. The myriad affairs outside your gate do not catch your eye. 16 Though your head is always lowered, your spirits are unbent. The vice-prefect of Hangzhou has no accomplishments, [Yet] his painted hall, fifty feet high, can accommodate [tall] banners. His towers above towers mount into the void; the sound of the rain is far. 20 The rooms are many, the people few, the wind blows strong. I now feel no shame in doing what formerly would have been shameful.

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Sitting facing the exhausted populace, I order canings and whippings one after another. On the road, meeting Yang Hu, who calls to me to talk with himIn my heart I know he is wrong, but my mouth assents. Truly, what boots it that I live in elevation with a degraded moral will? My mettle has worn away; now almost nothing remains. Literature is a minor craft, how can it be worthy of mention? You, the schoolmaster, and I, the vice-prefect, of old were of equal name. And now, old and decrepit, neither are of any use. I leave it to the people at large to decide who is the greater, who the lesser.

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7/ According to his biography in the Han shu (65/2843), Dongfang Shuo complained to the Han emperor Wu, "Your midgets are about three feet tall, and I am six feet tall, yet we both get the same salary-a bag of rice and two hundred cash. They are about to die from overeating and I about to die from hunger." 8/ You Zhan, a dwarf, was well known for his humorous conversation. One rainy night Qin Shihuang arranged a banquet. When You arrived, he noticed that the guards, standing in the rain, were getting drenched. When standing up to toast Shihuang, he walked over to the railing and commented that the guards' superior stature only earned them onerous duty, whereas he, being short, could be at ease indoors. Shihuang got the point and ordered the guards to stand under the cover of the eaves (Shiji, 126jpo2). IO/ "Wai wu" 7f-¥o "External Things" chapter, Zhuang zi: "The mind has a heaven-wandering [capacity]. In a household, if there is no empty space, then the women will argue. [Similarly,] if the mind has no heaven-wandering, then the six emotions will aggravate one another." The line is a humorously allusive way of implying that in Ziyou's house "there is no empty space." 13/ Kracke (Early Sung China, p. 51) translates quannong I!J:J: as "agricultural intendant." The post was established as an irregular office outside the normal bureaucracy during the reign of Tang emperor Xuanzong (r. 713-55). The office went through several reorganizations during the Song. Here Su Shi broadly refers to all the new positions created to oversee the implementation of the New Laws. The phrase "Caps and carriage roofs are like clouds" comes from Ban Gu's "Western Capital Fu" and describes a throng of officials. The phrase ru yun ~Q~ appears in "Going out the Eastern Gate," Shijing poem no. 93: "There are women [gathered] like clouds." 14/ Although pickles ordinarily suggest poverty, the additional point here is that salt has become scarce because of the government monopoly, and thus Su Che prizes the brine flavoring even more. I8/ According to Qin Shihuang's plan for the Afang Palace described in his

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biography in the Shi ji (6j256), "Above, it could seat ten thousand men; below, one could stand up fifty-foot banners." 24/ Yang Hu, also called Yang Huo ~~.was a minister of Lu contemporary with Confucius. The opening passage of the "Yang Huo" section of the Lun yu (17.1) describes Confucius' encounter with him. Yang Huo was supposed to persuade Confucius to serve at the court of Lu. His argument was on the order of "If you're so great at governing, why aren't you at court?" To end the conversation, Confucius gave a lukewarm assent.

In organization, "Jesting with Ziyou" is a straightforward, pointby-point comparison. Su Che is hard at work in his cramped schoolhouse, which is so small it cannot protect him from the rain if the wind blows at all. Su Shi's audience room is a huge hall; he lives in a tall, spacious dwelling. If he hears the wind at all, he knows it must be blowing strongly. Su Che is not ashamed of his low position, and his spirit is unbowed. Su Shi is ashamed of what he finds himself doing in his high position but meekly toes the line. Su Che, as a schoolteacher, stays aloof from Wang Anshi's agricultural policies. Su Shi enforces them. In "Jesting with Ziyou" Su Shi brings to a political/social moment the same wit and habits of thought, language, and organization that he applies to more private experience. The specificity of the result is, in the broader context of Song poetry, quite exceptional. Although rural hardship and the cruelty of officials were standard themes in Song poetry, poets usually presented these sorrows as generalized tales recounted by anonymous, "old-style" narrators. 68 Song poets rarely named names or pointed fingers. Mei Yaochen's poem, "The Blowfish," hints that it is a parable of the dangerous allure of the factionalism that Fan Zhongyan mfrflltt (989-1052) used to tempt Mei and his friends to a fall. 69 Ouyang Xiu in "Crying Birds" laments that he was slandered. Both hint and suggest. 70 Su Shi, on the other hand, is quite explicit: officials in Kaifeng who disagree with Wang Anshi are all but gagged. The New Laws of the reform regime are bringing the peasantry to ruin. Su Shi not only writes direct criticism, he does so in his own voice. When earlier he used "old-style" poetic conventions in "Seeing off Liu Bin," he only half-disappeared into the generalJian'an persona. Now, even though SuShi starts writing "Jesting with Ziyou" in an indefinite voice, his description of his own plight becomes very personal and, given the lightness of the beginning, surprisingly

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somber. The extravagance of Su Shi's comparison of his own moral inadequacy with Confucius' meeting with Yang Huo suggests that both the poet and his poem are caught up in his predicament and lack the balancing perspective implied by the use of a more crafted and aesthetically mediated yuefu persona.

Su Shi as Vice-prefect: Three Masks and a Temptation After SuShi's first few months in Hangzhou, the political sentiments of his poetry become more muted and lose the anguish of "Jesting with Ziyou" and "Written on the Wall of the Prefectural Audience Hall." 71 Su Shi begins to see his political role as part of a broader social self-definition, and he reduces his political opposition to merely an expression of larger, more permanent social relations. In his poetry, he begins to make use of a series of standard poetic personae-the lackadaisical local official, the tipsy old man, the recluse-to embody this cultural self-definition and to displace explicit political reference. These personae, however, remain masks, rhetorical modes within which Su Shi defines his place in the larger world of social relations he encounters in Hangzhou. In solitude, these masks slip off, and Su Shi reveals a lingering restless discontent that the personae he has assumed cannot accommodate. Personae One of the conventional self-portraits that Su Shi used frequently and seems to have found congenial is that of the old fool.

4

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Su Shi presents himself as a lazy, muddled bungler who cannot quite figure out why he and the world are at odds but lacks the refined qualities of spirit that would allow him to withdraw from the world altogether. It is an ingenious portrait. Su Shi explains through it that he remains in office not from ambition but from sedentariness. Moreover, he fails to advance in the bureaucracy not because of his differences with the clique in power but out of ineptitude, like the dove's inability to build a nest. A persona very similar to the incompetent old man is the odd and impulsive one, the "old crazy" (lao kuang ~ff). Su Shi complains in the Wutai shi an that those in power at the time could not tolerate his excessively free-spoken (kuangzhi 1I1.l) manner.7 4 He uses the crazy-old-coot persona both as an apology for and as a representation (re-presentation; that is, an aesthetically displaced continuation) of his idiosyncratic political boldness. The Winter Solstice, a Lone Excursion to ]ixiang Temple 75 At the well's bottom, intimations of the vernal force, have they returned or not? In gloomy gusts, the cold rain drenches the parched grass's roots.

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I/ According to the "Yue ling" J:l% chapter in the Book of Rites, wellsprings feel the influence of the yang force on the day of the winter solstice. 4/ The Jixiang Temple apparently had a reputation for its peonies. The whimsical portrait Su Shi presents here is of a man looking down the temple's well in the middle of a pouring rain. Yet an undercurrent that runs through the poem is the notion of "knowing the times," of looking for the incipient springs of actions rather than waiting for their full manifestation. This aspect of the poem is, however, no more than a cloak of Confucian seriousness that SuShi lightly throws over the physical level of meaning. Su Shi's out-of-season visit to the temple is not veiled allegory and cannot be reduced simply to an emblem of Su Shi's opposition to the political climate of the time. Instead, both his visit and his opposition, complete in themselves, are analogous correlates: a man who in his eccentric indifference to externals would do the one would do the other. The persona, however, also develops a life of its own.

Appreciating the Peonies at ]ixiang Temple 76

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Though the man is old, he feels no shame in sticking flowers in his hair. The flowers must be embarrassed to be on an old man's head. Returning drunk, helped along the road: I'm sure people will laugh. For ten li the bead curtains are half rolled up. 77

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The persona SuShi presents here seems to have become entirely independent of its roots in political opposition. Yet a point that becomes ever clearer in Su Shi's poetic career is that personalityat least SuShi's personality-is inescapably political: his very indifference is a refusal to acknowledge the power of those in authority over him. He asserts that the culture has other, deeper norms than those championed by the present clique. Tactical questions aside, however, why did Su Shi write such poems as "Seeing off Staffauthor Cen" and the two quatrains on visiting Jixiang Temple?

Hangzhou: The Widening Circle What were the motives behind, and the aesthetic value of, their rhetoric of self-depreciation? Su Shi had passed the xian liang fang zheng examination with a rarely given grade and had the respect of many of the most important men in the realm. He was an assistant prefect of a major city. Certainly neither he nor his audience took these poems at face value. The tactical aspect--the poems' denial of Su Shi's political efficacy-perhaps points to a broader strategic issue. Buffoonery-whether Ouyang Xiu's "drunk old man" or SuShi's madcap official-raises the questions of spontaneity, of the relation of character to role, and of authenticity of action. As in "Seeing off Staff-author Cen" and "Appreciating the Peonies at Jixiang Temple," the poet often includes observers within the poem itself to judge the poet's self-consciously eccentric actions. Why are they there? The observers see and comment on the surface action. The poet presumes that his audience understands the deeper causes and sides with the poet rather than with the invented viewer. Su Shi's readers know that the role-by which the viewers within the poem judge the poet-cannot exhaust the character of the man. The disparity between the man and his position, over which the invented onlookers laugh, portrays the manner in which the poet remains separate from his prescribed role. Unconventional behavior as an assertion of freedom is a wellworn cliche, but I think the question becomes of particular interest in the Song when the poet's identity comes to be defined primarily vis-a-vis the official political culture. At least for Ouyang Xiu and SuShi, the two prime examples of self-conscious clowning in the Northern Song, there is not the sort of countervailing sense of membership within a clan organization that was part of Tang culture. 78 The problem of the ground of identity and its shift from the Tang to the Song, and in particular, the different sources of self-definition for the major poets within those dynasties, are large issues that require more systematic investigation than this study can provide. Nonetheless, they are also important aspects of the reading of Su Shi's social poetry that must be raised even if they cannot be conveniently answered. A third way in which Su Shi represents (asserts and maintains) the disparity between himself and the general tenor of the time is not in terms of age or idiosyncrasies of character but in terms of

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distance and geography. Being from the mountains of Shu, SuShi lacks the nature to be an official in the lowlands. On the Lake, Returning at Nighf7 9 I drank [wine, but] did not [even] finish a cup: When half-tipsy the flavor is especially strong. In a sedan chair I returned by the lake. The spring wind sprinkling my face is cool. 80 4 When we had reached west of Lone Hill, The night sky already had grown dark, dark blue. My unsullied chant mixed with dreams: s Getting a line, I'd immediately forget it again. I still recall the pear-blossom village: I smelled the unseen, vague fragrance. When I entered the city, what time was it? 12 Half the market crowd was gone. My sleep-dimmed eyes suddenly started and stared about: A profusion of lanterns disturbed [the peace of] Sandbank Road. The people of the market clapped their hands and laughed: 16 My appearance was like [that of] a deer who had strayed from the forest. 81 I began to realize that for a rustic disposition, Interests not my own were difficult to sustain by force. In life, how can one find joy? 20 My plans have been particularly bad.

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Su Shi is the vice-prefect of Hangzhou, a major urban center, and the intended audience for this poem presumably is his peers. How then should one take the last six lines? Are they merely the rhetorical elaboration of an experience of being startled from sleep by the bright lights of the market? Or does Su Shi mean what he says? This either/or choice is probably inappropriate. Although the persona of the out-of-place rustic is a pose, this self-portrait still makes certain sorts of statements both possible and acceptable: "On the Lake, Returning at Night" reveals in an indirect, ironic manner that SuShi remains ill at ease in Hangzhou.

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A Temptation The various personae in the poems analyzed above did not provide resolutions to the new and pressing social demands that Su Shi encountered in Hangzhou. They simply were traditionally sanctioned forms for the articulation of those tensions. A more direct solution would have been to withdraw, but as Su Shi stated in "An Outing to Mount Jin Temple," this was not a real possibility. Instead Su sought the occasional respite of solitary visits to the Buddhist temples that surrounded Hangzhou. 82

While Ill, an Excursion to the Hall of the Patriarchal Stupa 83 Purple plums and yellow melons are fragrant on the village road. The black silk and white linen of the Buddhist garb are cool. In the rustic temple, gates closed, the shadow of the pine revolves. Resting on a pillow on the veranda, the traveler's dream is long. I do not at all dislike getting time off for sickness. And there is no better prescription than a mind self-composed. The monks do not begrudge the water [from the spring] before the steps. They have loaned me a calabash so I can drink as I please.

~Z;;JWH~iFM*/G~ ~,e,,J£~~ 1W::fi:J~. So Toba shishu ~:It.!&: ~~~. 3 vols. Tokyo: Chikuma mit', 1983, 1984, 1986. - - - . So Toba sha ~:It.!&:~. Chiigoku bunmei sen 9='~3tafl~, vol. 2. Tokyo: Asahi Shinbun 1MB ¥Jf~, 1972. Okamura Shigeru IMJH~. Bunshin choryo sakuin )({,,Jlftft~~51. Hiroshima: Hiroshima University, 1950. Ouyang Xiu ~~~. Ouyang Wenzhong Gong wen ji~lliJi)(,~,i::X~. SBCK.

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