SOURCE: "Self and Landscape in Su Shih," Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 86, 1966, pp. 377-96.

[March is a professor of geology, anthropology, and China humanities who has written many journal articles and The Idea of China: Myth and Theory in Geographic Thought (1974). In the following excerpt, he explores the connection between Su's concept of art, his understanding of landscape, and his striving to perfect himself according to the principles of the Tao.]

Su Shih's Fertile and energetic mind was more poetic than discursive, and the weight of his ideas is often carried by images appealing to experience rather than by rational argument. Landscape images in particular form a coherent pattern in his writings, and the experience of landscape seems central to his artistic, ethical, and social conceptions of self.

By landscape I mean part of what we often call nature, but the trouble with nature is that the word has far too many other senses (as in human nature, God and nature, mother nature) and hence is uncontrollably suggestive and vague. Landscape, as in the terms landscape painting and landscape poetry, is somewhat sharper and more manageable. It means here not any class of objects which could be defined by enumeration, but, like certain geographical terms (resource, boundary, route), one kind of human interpretation of environment. This interpretation selects the parts of the world (on the scale of our ordinary perceptions) which are relatively unsocialized: where there is relatively little sign of man, and where occupance, especially by men in groups, is relatively sparse. The most prominent objects are non-human ones—rocks, trees, hills, streams. The strongest contrast is with the densely socialized space of cities, and cities have probably been a prerequisite for the emergence of landscape as a distinct category of experience.

There is no Chinese term quite like landscape. Typical expressions are "hills (mountains) and waters," "river and hill," "hills, streams, herbs, trees," or even "hills, streams, herbs, trees, birds, beasts, fish, reptiles, insects"—selective generic lists of landscape's most common elements. Though often not referring to any specific assemblage, these terms are concrete and give a sharp if composite image unlike that conveyed by the word nature. The key criterion, however, is still that of landscape: these things are non-human and are relatively undetermined by society.

Landscape, Su Shih felt, is not located and timed like social things, but is everywhere and always essentially the same. As the human mind experiences landscape, these qualities are translated into detachment and spontaneity; the social self, and the death that goes with it, appear superfluous and illusory. Su Shih casts these ideas especially, though not exclusively, in an elaborate symbolism of water, or fluid in general.

Landscape, and the experience of landscape, are placeless: they have no specific spatial focus or boundary. Describing a painting Misty Yangtze and Folded Hills, Su writes:

Above the river, heavy on the heart, thousand-fold
  hills:
Layers of green floating in the sky like mist.
Mountains? clouds? too far away to tell
Till clouds part, mist scatters, on mountains that
    remain.
Then I see, in gorge cliffs, black-green clefts
Where a hundred waterfalls leap from the sky,
Threading woods, tangling rocks, lost and seen
  again,
Falling to valley mouths to feed swift streams.
Where the river broadens, mountains part,
 foothill
  forests end,
A small bridge, a country store set against the
 slope:
Now and then travelers pass beyond tall trees;
A fishing boat—one speck where the river
  swallows
   the sky.…

As he describes it, the painting (evidently a horizontal scroll) creates a space without center or edge, through which in imagination the viewer can move freely, unhampered by scientific perspective, and can stop here and there to share in what is happening. Su continues, after the part quoted above, with a return in thought to real landscapes he has seen—the painting is something continuous with the real world, not abstracted from or opposed to it. Landscape itself goes on and on like an endless scroll and has no boundaries or regularly defined outlines:

About painting, I have said that people, birds and animals, buildings, and vessels all have set shapes; as for hills, rocks, bamboos, trees, water, waves, mist, and clouds, although they have no set shapes, they do have set principles. Everyone knows when the set shape is missing, but even those versed in painting cannot all tell when the set principle is not there. So anyone who dishonestly makes a reputation in painting must do it in genres without set shapes. However, when a set shape is missed, that is all there is to it—the painting as a whole is not hurt. But if the set principles are not there, the whole thing is spoiled: since the shapes are not set, great care must be taken with the principles. There are artisans who can get the shapes exact, but as for the principles, only highly educated and gifted men can see them.…

As the mind, guided only by these "principles," expands into indefinite spaces, it seems to lose the sense of its own uniqueness among the landscape things.

"Crossing at Seven Li Shallows"

A boat, light as a leaf
Two oars frighten wild geese.
Water reflects the clear sky, lucid waves
  are smooth.
Fish wriggle in the weedy mirror
Herons dot misty spits.
Across the sand brook, swift
The frost brook, cold
The moon brook, bright.

Layer upon layer, like a painting
Bend after bend, like a screen.
Remember empty old Yen Ling long ago.
'Lord,' 'Minister'—a dream;
Now, of old: vain fames.
Only, the far hills are long
The cloud hills tumbled
The dawn hills green.

"Like a painting" this space is boundless (not infinite): "layer upon layer," "bend after bend," "far hills," "cloud hills"; and it is not centered so that anything would seem to point at the poet. Especially the last three lines of each stanza, with their various aspects of brook and hill, exclude any focus on a particular self or a particular spot. Vague horizons, and blurred focus connoting loss of the self's uniqueness are also in this poem (which has no "I" in the original):

Drunk, abob in a light boat
Letting it drift, into the thick of the flowers
Fooled by the sensory world
I hadn't meant to stop in here.

Far misty water
Thousand miles' slanted evening sunlight
Numberless hills
Riot of red like rain
I don't remember how I came.

There is the same feeling of space in imagery expressing Su's experience as an official who never stayed more than a few years or months in one place, adrift like the unrooted duckweed:

… Man's life goes everywhere, duckweed
   drifting.…
 … When will this life's floating and drifting
   cease?

Whatever other possibilities such a feeling of space may hold, to Su the point was that all landscapes, in experience, are essentially the same, and that therefore one need have no attachment to particular landscapes.

Eighty some paces below Lin-kao House [where he was staying] is the Great River [Yangtze]. Half of it is meltwater from the snows of O-mei [near his birth-place in Szechuan], and I use it for cooking, drinking, and washing. What need to go back home? River and hill, wind and moon really have no set owner: the man of leisure owns them.…

On the twelfth night of the tenth moon of the sixth year of Yuanfeng [1083], I had undressed and was going to bed, when the moonlight entered my door, and I got up, happy of heart. There was no one to share this happiness with me, so I walked over to the Changtien Temple to look for Huaimin. He, too, had not yet gone to bed, and we paced about in the garden. It looked like a transparent pool with the shadows of bamboos and pine trees cast by the moonlight. Isn't there a moon every night? And aren't there bamboos and pine trees everywhere? But there are few carefree [lit., leisurely] people like the two of us.

Like painted ones, real landscapes have "set principles"; if one can appreciate these, then the "set shapes" of particular places and circumstance do not matter. Places are interchangeable, and the self is not limited or determined by place.

When I stayed at Chia-yu Temple in Hui-chou, once I was walking below Pine Wind House. My feet were tired, and had no strength; I longed to go to bed. I stopped to rest, looked up at the House which was still at treetop level, and said to myself, "How shall I ever get there?" After a time I exclaimed, "Why can't I rest right here?" Then I felt like a hooked fish who suddenly manages to get free. If a person has this insight, then even if two armies are joining in battle, drums sounding like thunder, where to go forward is to die at the hands of the enemy, to go back is to die in the hands of the law—even at a time like that, there is nothing to keep him from deeply resting.

As appears in this last essay, places come to stand for all external circumstances and particular things, a point that Su makes more explicit elsewhere:

There is nothing that is not worth attending to in some respect; and if a thing is worth attending to it can give delight. There is no need for things to be rare or exceptional, luxurious or perfect. Common rice wine can make one drunk, and ordinary fruits and vegetables can fill one's hunger. Reasoning so, where can I go that I would not have delight? … [He argues that if external contingencies are rightly seen, our pleasure and pain need not depend on them. He tells of his transfer from a fine gay place to a poor dull one, and describes how even here he found much to delight him. He has built a terrace to which his brother has given the name "Elevation",] to show that I find delight wherever I go, as I move outside of [attachment to particular] things.

Thus the centerless, always equivalent space of landscape, as he experienced it in his official wanderings, meant to Su that one could and ought to feel unattached to particular places, and indeed independent of all external circumstances.

His landscape time resembles this space in several ways. Even more than the place, the time at which one lives is beyond one's control, and Su was capable of the conventional complaint that he was "born too late." But in the landscape, there is a blurring and an opening up of time as there is of space so that the present instant, like the immediate place, does not have unique importance. In the poem on the "Misty Yangtze" painting (above), it is clear that Su does not consider himself to be looking at an instantaneous image, like a photograph. In imagination, he is moving about in time as well as in space; he is wandering here and there as the scroll unwinds, and sharing in the continuing actions of the painted people. Again, in "Crossing at Seven Li Shallows," the scene is not presented as an instantaneous cross-section of time. What is felt as present is present in experience, not necessarily in a given moment of external time. Landscape impressions which, if taken as simultaneous, call up slightly contradictory images, occur together in the poem: clear sky/cloud, mist; dawn/moon. In the second stanza, the expansion outward in space is joined by an expansion backward in a time, which, too, is not infinite but has no definite boundaries. And what is real turns out to be the landscape which does not change, being no different (in "set principles") now from in Yen Ling's day, whereas political concerns, contingent on the historical moment, are "a dream" and "vain" (empty). Landscape is the same at all times, as it is at all places; and if a man emphasizes the sides of himself that he associates with landscape, he can feel as detached from particular moments or periods as from particular places and things.

Landscape time is not empty or abstract, but events in it have a legendary, rather than historical, cast, and its activities are leisurely and spontaneous. We can approach these points through the Rip-van-Winklesque tale of Wang Chih, to which Su alludes in a poem. Wang Chih, who lived at Ch'ü-chou in Chekiang province in the mid Chin dynasty, went into the mountains to cut wood, and came upon a cave in which two young men were playing a game like checkers, or else making music and singing. Chih put down his ax and watched, and they gave him something like a datestone to put in his mouth which made him feel no hunger or thirst. They told him, "You have been here a long time; better go back." He picked up his ax and saw that the handle had all rotted away. Hurrying home, he found that decades (or centuries) had passed, and none of his relatives or friends were left. He went back to the mountains and got the Tao (became immortal); occasionally someone saw him there, and hence the mountain was called Rotten Ax Handle Mountain.

At the beginning of this story, Wang Chih appears as a historical figure in that we know where and when he lived, and there is nothing unusual about his going to cut wood. But when he is in the cave, time for him is not just historical time running at a different rate—it has a quite other quality, so that his trip back to his village and final return to the mountain can no longer be placed in any dynasty. "Long time," "decades," "centuries"—time has vaguely continued to pass, but as it were in a different direction, diverging from history. By calling such events in landscape time legendary, I mean to imply two things: that they have a popular, little-tradition quality in that they are not precisely dated or verified; and that they do not fit into any continuing scheme of historical development with its plots of before and after, purpose and cause. Here is another example of legend in landscape:

"On the Red Cliff"

The waves of the mighty River flowing eastward
Have swept away the brilliant figures of a
  thousand
  generations.
West of the old fortress,
So people say, is Lord Chou's Red Cliff of the
  time of
   the Three States.
The tumbling rocks thrust into the air;
The roaring surges dash upon the shore,
Rolling into a thousand drifts of snow.
The River and the mountains make a vivid
  picture—
What a host of heroes once were!
It reminds me of the young Lord then,
When the fair Younger Ch'iao newly married
 him,
Whose valorous features were shown forth;
With a feather fan and a silken cap,
Amid talking and laughing, he put his enemy's
 ships
  to ashes and smoke.
While my thoughts wander in the country of old,
Romantic persons might smile at my early grey
  hair.
Ah! life is but like a dream;
With a cup of wine, let me yet pour a libation to
 the
  moon on the River.

The old battle is not seen as history with a plot or a lesson; in the poem, Su cares nothing about its rights and wrongs, or its causes, purposes, or effects. It is dated, but Su is unconcerned whether this is its actual site: "so people say"; "it reminds me"; elsewhere he says that he does not know whether the battle took place here (and in fact it did not).

Su Shih, of course, by no means always saw past events in this legendary light; he had a strong sense of historical time too, as we shall see farther on. Probably it was his very knowledge of history that gave him a realistic appreciation of time's immensity such that, even with the withdrawal of history's ordering scaffold of dynasties, reigns, and years, great depth was left in the landscape's present.

On the scale of immediate human activities, landscape time has a leisurely quality which is also illustrated in the story of Wang Chih. The young men's checkers or music, and Wang Chih's watching, are not an empty idleness, but chronology and duration are irrelevant to them: they are not directed from outside, nor are they controlled by a plan made in the past or a purpose reaching into the future, in contrast to Wang Chih's original intent to cut wood. That leisure is a prerequisite for appreciation of landscape appears in two of the pieces quoted earlier ("Eighty some paces …" and "On the twelfth night …") This is also the time mode of spontaneity—it too is cut off from past and future, and complete in itself.

Landscape time in Su Shih is deeply colored by death. The timelessness of landscape makes an ironic contrast with man's temporary life. Landscape time is all quality, but man sees time also as duration, at the end of a certain quantity of which he must die. But if a person can associate himself with landscape to the point of becoming a part of it (like Wang Chih), perhaps its timelessness can be converted to something like an eternity of duration, and he can escape the death that ordinary social time would have brought him:

… Now Ts'ao Ts'an was a famous official under the Han, and Mr. Ko was his teacher: an eminent man, surely. But the histories do not record his death. Was he not a Perfect Man of old, who got the Tao and did not die? Chiao-hsi on the east borders the sea; to the south it reaches to Chiu-hsien Mountain; in the north it goes to Lao Mountain. In this area there are many noble hermits. If they are heard of, they are not seen; if they are seen, you cannot make them come. For all I know, Mr. Ko comes and goes as one of them. But I am not worthy to have sight of him.

Le-t'ien built a thatched hut on Lu-shan in order to refine the elixir. He had almost accomplished it when his stove and cauldron failed, and the next day a letter arrived appointing him Governor of Chung-chou. By this we may know the impossibility of living in the world and at the same time being free of worldly affairs.…

Actually, Su doubted that anyone had ever really become immortal:

Ever since I reached the age of understanding, I have heard about what people call Taoists, who have the art of prolonging their years, such as Chao Pao-i, Hsü Teng, and Chang Yüan-meng, who all lived to be nearly a hundred. But in the end they died, just like ordinary people. When I came to Huang-chou I heard … of an outstanding Different [immortal] man called Chu Yüanching (?); very many high officials honored him as their teacher. But finally he too got sick, and died of a stroke and spasms. He really was an alchemist, though; he left behind some medicines and elixir gold, which were all taken over by the government. I do not know if there really are no Different men in the world, or if there are, but no one sees them; anyhow, these I have mentioned were not such. I wonder if what was anciently recorded of Different men is true or false. Probably they were much the same as these, and people with an interest in strange matters have embellished it.

All these themes—self, space, time, and death—coalesce for Su Shih in the symbol of water. Water fascinated him above all else in the landscape, and he saw it everywhere, in innumerable shapes and forms.

When I first came to the South Sea [to Hainan] and looked all around at the unbroken sky and water, I lamented sorrowfully, "When will I ever be able to depart from this island?" But when I think about it, heaven and earth are in the midst of the waters, the Nine Continents are in the Great Ying Ocean, China is in a smaller ocean—what lives that is not on an island?

This mountain is set in the air.
Milky water fills its stomach,
And where it finds a fissure, comes to view,
Always with its own same taste and smell.
Sometimes it is shallow, sometimes deep,
Square or round, depending on what holds it.
Sometimes it sounds and makes mist;
Sometimes it forms a broken thread.
In places it cries in empty caverns,
Zitherns and lutes amid chinking girdle-stones.
In places it runs in clefts of green rock,
With the writhing gait of dragons and
 phoenixes.…

Mysterious interconnections and circulations link the earth's waters together in one vast system:

… Water travels underground, appearing and disappearing at distances of thousands of li, uninterrupted even by rivers and seas.…

Water is a primary and irreducible image, and a highly effective one. I can only add (less effectively) that it stands for something like an undifferentiated, timeless, and selfless essence of the landscape. The individual human self is simply a part of this essence, separated, until death, from the rest, temporarily and precariously contained in the body as in a stream channel, a boat, a well, or a jar. This is the meaning, in Su Shih, of the old image that compares man's life to a stream flowing eastwards across China to the sea. Thus he writes, eulogizing a Taoist,

… He is a riverful of vernal water flowing
  east,
A mighty stream, emptying straight into the
  wide sea,
Never flagging till it runs up onto P'eng-lai [the
   island of the immortals in the Eastern Sea].

Of himself, he says:

My home is where the [Yangtze] River's water
 has its
  source;
In my official travels I have followed it right
  down
   to the sea.…

Again, a drifting boat—connoting also detachment from particular places—is a kind of container, holding man apart for a while:

Last year I visited New Hall
After spring wind had melted off the snow;
In the pond, half a punt-pole of water
Along the pond, a thousand feet of willows,
And lovely ladies like blooms of peach and
 plum:
Butterflies came into the sleeves of their gowns.
Where is that landscape now? …(?)
The years and months cannot be grasped by
 thought,
Speedy as a boat loose upon a current.
Pomp and circumstance truly are a dream,
Flourishings and failings go their quiet way.
Only the same old moon
Still shines on a cup of wine,
And must be sorry for one in the boat,
Sitting steady, oblivious of time.

The water-clock (or leak: lou), which I give as "time" in the last line, marks the passage of time by a small constant flow of water and so, like our sands of time in the hour-glass, is an image of the measure of human life: time runs out. Su hints that the man in the boat, borne on the waters of time, leaks like a water-clock; here as elsewhere, death means that the separation from the general waters of the world is not maintained, and the individual self is dissipated in their impersonal circulations. Man is more explicitly likened to a water-clock in the "Inscription for the Lotus Clepsydra at Hsü-chou," and to a leaking jar in the "Notice of 'Hall of Thought,'" and I shall quote these two essays later in other contexts.

Accordingly, the earth's waters have in them something of men who have died and become as timeless and ubiquitous as the landscape they now belong to. Their presence can be focused anew at particular places and times, contained, here, as in a well or spring.

"Temple Inscription for Han Wen-kung at Ch'ao-chou"

[Han was banished to Ch'ao-chou. Su praises him, and points out that the people here still revere him and sacrifice to his spirit.]

… You might say, "He was ten thousand li from his country, in exile at Ch'ao-chou. He was here less than a year before he went back. If he has consciousness after his death, it is certain that he has no special regard for Ch'ao-chou." I say, Not so. His spirit is in the world as water is in the ground: there is nowhere one can go where it is not. But only the people of Ch'ao-chou believe in him deeply and think of him to the utmost, "vapors of death bringing sadness" [Li Chi 24/26] (?). Your view is as if one were to dig a well and having found water were to say, "Here is the only place that there is water." How could that be right?

"Inscription for Six One Spring"

When Ou-yang Wen-chung was getting old he called himself the Six One Retired Gentleman. When I was made Vice-Administrator at Ch'ien-t'ang, I saw him south of Ju-yin. He said, "Hui-ch'in, a monk of West Lake, is a highly educated man, and good at poetry.

Once I wrote 'Pleasure in the Mountains' in three parts as a present for him. When you have leisure from the affairs of the people, and are at a loss for company among the mountains and lakes, then go and spend some time with Ch'in!"

Three days after I had arrived at my post I visited Ch'in below Ku-shan. He clapped his hands and discussed personalities, and said, "He [Ou-yang] is a man of heaven [has the Tao]. People see him when he temporarily dwells among them, but they do not know that he mounts the clouds and rides the wind, crosses the Five Peaks and bestrides the wide sea. People in these parts are sorry that he never comes. But he has the ends of the earth at his beck and call; there is nowhere he does not reach. No one is fit to possess the beauties of river and mountain, but their rare and lovely, elegant and refined breath is something that good writers constantly use. Thus I say that West Lake is, as it were, just an object on Ou-yang's writing table." Although Ch'in's words were magical and strange, still the principle is quite true.

The next year Ou-yang died, and I wept for him at Ch'in's dwelling. After another eighteen years, I was made Magistrate of Ch'ien-t'ang. Ch'in too had long since undergone his metamorphosis. I visited his old place, and his disciple Erh Chung was there. He had made portraits of Ou-yang and Ch'in and served them as if they were alive. Below the dwelling there had previously been no spring, but a few months before I arrived a spring started behind the lecture hall at the foot of Ku-shan. It welled up and ran over, very clear and sweet. On its site the cliff had been cut away and stones set up to make a building. Erh-chung said to me, "The Teacher heard you were coming, and sent out the spring to ease your fatigue. Is it proper for you to make no answer?" Then I pondered deeply the meaning of the things Ch'in had said long ago, and I named it Six One Spring, and wrote this inscription for it:

"The spring emerged thousands of li from him, and eighteen years after his death, and yet it is named Six One. Is this not almost nonsensical? I say: The beneficent influence of a noble man surely does not just reach to five generations and then stop. In the proper hands; it should be able to extend to a hundred generations. I will try to climb Ku-shan with my sons, and look out over Wu and Yüen, sing 'Pleasure in the Mountains,' and drink this water. Then the residual presence of his noble personality will also perhaps be manifested to them in this spring."

What has become of the problem of death, and the ironic contrast between mortal man and timeless landscape? Evidently the landscape does allow a certain immortality (at least for noble men), but it is of a bitter sort because, whatever residues may be tapped by those coming later, the body is dead and with it the individual self.

But if the fluids can be forced to stay in the body, in defiance of their natural tendency to escape, then, Su felt, the physical body and the separate self need not die at all. So it is argued in the following excerpts from two of his essays on Taoist theories of "nourishing life" (yang-sheng). The terminology is that of alchemy, but the elements are used to dramatize the motions of the soul in a manner roughly parallel to psychoanalysis. Dragon, mercury, and water are equivalent, as are tiger, lead, and fire.

"Discourse on Dragon and Tiger (Lead and Mercury)"

All the reasons for men's living and dying proceed from [the trigrams] k'an [water] and li [fire]. When k'an and li are joined, there is life; when they are separated, there is death;—this is an ineluctable principle. Li is the heart [and mind], k'an is the kidneys [and testicles]. What the heart assents to is always right. Even in Chieh [the wicked last emperor of Hsia] and Chih [an ancient bandit] this is so; the reason they behave as they do is simply that they make light of what is within themselves, and emphasize externals, and thus always do things to which the heart would not assent. When the kidneys are strong and overflow, then one has thoughts of desire. Even in Yao [the ancient sage-emperor] and Yen [a favorite disciple of Confucius] this is so; the reason they behave as they do is simply that they emphasize what is within themselves, and make light of externals, and thus always do things to which the heart assents. Seen in this light, the heart's nature is law-abiding and right, and the kidney's nature is lewd and wrong; these are certainly the properties of fire and water.

… The dragon is what is watery; it is semen and blood. It issues from the kidneys and is stored in the liver. Its sign is k'an. The tiger is what is fiery. It is lead, and breath, and strength. It issues from the heart and the lungs control it. Its sign is li. When the heart is moved, then the breath acts with it; when the kidneys overflow, then the semen and blood flow with them—and they are like fire's smoke and flame, which never return again to the firewood.

In people who do not study the Tao, the dragon always comes out with the water, hence the dragon flies and the mercury is light; and the tiger always comes out with the fire, hence the tiger runs away, and the lead is withered. This is the usual way of living men; those who obey it die—but those who rebel against it are immortal. Hence the True Man's words: "Acting in accordance, is man; acting in opposition, is Tao" [or: "obeying the Elements makes man, rebelling against the Elements makes Tao"]. And again:

"The art of reversing the Five Elements:
The dragon comes out of the fire.
Acting contrary to the Five Elements:
The tiger is born into the midst of the water."

[He describes the manipulation of breath and saliva, and the meditation, whereby these results can be obtained.]

… Now li is li [attached]: to show itself in attachment to things is the nature of fire. My eyes are drawn by color, my ears by sound, my mouth by taste, my nose by fragrance, and at once the fire follows along and attaches to the object. But if I am still, and not drawn by anything external, the fire has nothing to attach itself to. Then where will it go? It will necessarily tend to associate itself with its consort, water.

K'an is hsien [pit]: to receive things when they come is the nature of water, so of course it will receive its own mate. When water and fire are united, then the fire will not blaze up, and the water will rise of its own accord. Then you have "the dragon coming out of the fire." When the dragon comes out of the fire, then the dragon does not fly, and the mercury does not dry up. [More on technique.]

… This theory is curious yet comprehensible, marvellous yet simple, and deserves complete credence. But I have a great sorrow. All my life I have again and again expressed my ambition to practice this, but I have always gone wide of the mark and not been able to accomplish it. I think this Tao cannot be accomplished unless one spoils one's body following it, violently purifies one's mind to receive it, and spends one's whole life keeping it. [He tells of his recent very arduous efforts to practice it.]… I did not go for walks in the country, and except for seeing Taoists, I received no guests and did not drink with anyone. It was all to no avail—I greatly fear that with my easyflowing nature I cannot follow out these prescriptions to the end.…

"On Nourishing Life" (Continued)

… What is meant by "lead"? all breath is called lead. It may run or hurry, inhale or exhale, grasp or strike— everything that moves is lead. The breath is expelled and taken in by the lungs: the lungs are metal and the white tiger, and so are called "lead" and "tiger". What is meant by "mercury"? all water is called mercury. Spit, tears, pus, blood, semen, sweat, excreta— everything wet is mercury. It is housed and stored in the liver: the liver is wood and the green dragon, and so is called "mercury" and "dragon".…

When the heart is not in charge, and the kidneys govern, sounds and colors entice from without, and wicked lust arises within, the watery quintessence flows down [as semen] to make a man, or to turn putrid—this is the mercury dragon coming out of the water. Liking, anger, grief, and joy are all things that come from the heart. Liking is followed by grasping and taking; anger, by fighting and hitting; grief, by beating the breast and leaping; joy, by tapping the time and dancing. The heart moves inside, and the breath responds to it outside. This is the lead tiger coming out of the fire. When mercury dragons come out of the water, and lead tigers come out of the fire, can any go back, once out? Thus it is said that these are both the ways of death.…

The fluid in the body is analyzed into two aspects, water and fire. In the ordinary course of life, the quintessential part of both escapes, drawn by sensual attractions and pushed by desire (water), or as gestures expressing emotions by which the heart (mind) is moved. Most men let this happen, and that is why they die. In a good man fire is dominant, and his conduct is right; in an evil man water is dominant, and his conduct is wicked. But both die. The Taoist struggles against death by allowing neither emo-tions nor sensual attractions to push or lure the fire and water out of his body. He turns his attention inward, cutting himself off from the outer worlds of landscape and of men, and forces the two elements to cancel each other's spontaneous outward flow: such is the road to immortality of body and self.

This discipline is a stubborn resistance to man's tendency to be like, or indeed part of, the landscape: "Acting in accordance, is man; acting in opposition, is Tao." The Taoist says, in effect, "I will not let myself be carried along like all other things; I am a man and different from them, and I will do all I can to maintain my separate self in man's here and now—my living body and my lifetime. I will not be cheated by the phantasm of an immortality without self in the timeless landscape, but I will have an immortality with self in human time—even if it means giving up all else that makes life worth while" for to "act in opposition" is immensely difficult and disagreeable, requiring that one do violence to body and mind.

The space between heaven and earth
Is mostly occupied by water.
Man comes and man goes
Like a pelican in a river.
Going with the flow,
He sails like a cloud, speeds like a bird;
The water abets him,
A thousand li are like a foot.
But wading against the current,
When it rises above his knees, he stops;
The water opposes him,
A foot is like a thousand li.…

Much easier is to ride with the current and accept the death of the body, like Su's admired friend Wu Fu-ku, a Taoist of another sort who considered "long life and immortality as irrelevancies, and breathing exercises and medicines as rubbish"; and at the same time to accept life in the ordinary sense, letting desires and emotions come out as they arise, as befitted what Su called his "easy-flowing" (i liu) nature.

If the death of the body is accepted, man is no longer in opposition to what the landscape stands for, and the comparison between man and landscape has lost its irony. To a friend regretting the brevity of life and envying the river and the moon that do not die, Su says,

Do you know how it is with the water and the moon? The one flows on like this, but is never gone; the other waxes and wanes like that, but in the end has not shrunk or grown. If you consider their changefulness, then heaven and earth have never been still for an instant. If you consider their changelessness, then we with everything else have no end. What is there to be envious about?

Man is included again in a homogeneous world, so that if you fully understand the water and the moon, man's life and death are clear to you too. In the enduring flux of such a world, there is no place for a unique and continuing human self which would be different from all else. The conscious ego which the Taoist feared would die with his body can be regarded as an illusion even before his death.

… Recently, Prefectural Supervisor Chu Yen studied Ch'an [Zen] for a long time. Suddenly in the Surangama Sutra he seemed to grasp something. He asked the teaching monk I-chiang, "After the body dies, where is the mind?" Chiang said, "Before the body dies, where is the mind?"…

The contained fluid which seems to be man's separate self is not really unique in the general flow of things, and in any case it is probably impossible to hold it in and escape death. How, then, should one let it out? The belief that man and landscape are ultimately identical provided Su Shih with an explanation and justification for much of his own behavior: what the landscape does is art, and art in turn is the standard of true human conduct, the way one should go about emptying the container. Su saw his own life in these terms.

In both process and product, art is the same as landscape. The sameness is neither formal nor static, but one of principle and motion.

The excellence of writers of old was not that they could write, but that they could not help writing. Hills and streams have mists, plants have flowers and fruit, which when full and ripe appear outside—even if they wished not to have them, could they help it? Ever since youth we have heard our father discuss literature. He holds that it is a thing made by ancient sages when they had something that they could not stop themselves from writing. Hence although my brother Ch'e and I write a great deal, we have never ventured to write with premeditation.

In the year chi-hai [1059] we accompanied [our father, Su Hsün] on a trip in the mid-Yangtze valley.… The elegance and beauty of landscapes, the simplicity and rudeness of customs, the mementos of sages and noble men, and all that our ears and eyes encountered, evoked various responses in us which we expressed in our verses.… These writings come from the midst of talk and laughter, and were not laboriously put together. .

My writing is like a ten-thousand-gallon spring. It can issue from the ground anywhere at all. On smooth ground it rushes swiftly on and covers a thousand li, in a single day without difficulty. When it twists and turns among mountains and rocks, it fits its form to the things it meets: unknowable. What can be known is, it always goes where it must go, always steps where it cannot help stopping—nothing else. More than that even I cannot know.

"At Kuo Hsiang-cheng's When I was Drunk, I Painted Bamboos and Rocks upon the Wall.…"

My empty guts get wine, and tips of sprouts
appear,
Liver and lungs fork and branch, bearing
bamboos
  and rocks.
Lushly they will be made, cannot be turned
back.
I spit them at the snow white walls, Sir, of
your
  house.
My whole life I have loved poems, long loved
paintings
   too;
I have met many angry words for scribbling
and
   daubing on walls.…

Alas! is it because Yü-k'o so loved beauty and rarity, or is it that "having no employment (in government) he acquired many arts?" [Analects IX/6, after Legge]. First I saw his poems and prose, then I had the opportunity of seeing his [calligraphy in the] running, draft, seal, and chancery [styles]. I thought this was all, but a year after he died I also saw his "flying white." What manifold beauties, as it shows all aspects of the myriad things! It moves in the air, like a thin cloud before the moon. It flutters, like a pennon curling in the long wind. It is supple, like floating gossamer wound round willow catkins. It is slender and graceful, like the stems of the floating-heart dancing in running water. Standing far apart, [the strokes] are distant but still relate to each other; standing near together, they are close but still do not crowd. His skill reached such heights as this, and I did not know it until now. So my knowledge of Yü-k'o was certainly very slight, and what I did not know about him must be beyond reckoning. Alas!

The monk Huai-ch'u showed me two sutras written in the hand of Jo-k'uei. There are several chapters to a sutra, several hymns to a chapter, several verses to a hymn, several characters to a verse, several brushstrokes to a character. There is an unlimited number of strokes, yet the characters and strokes are everywhere one and equal. They have no high and low, light and heavy, great and small. And how can they all be one? Because the self is forgotten. If the self is not forgotten, there are already two phenomena present in a single stroke, to say nothing of many strokes. Like sand by the sea: no one polishes it, but it is naturally uniform, with no difference of coarse and fine. Like rain in the air: no one spreads it, but it scatters naturally, with no difference of sparse or dense.…

… Although I sometimes still keep one [a pleasing painting or calligraphy], if someone takes it away, I do not regret it. They are like mists and clouds passing before one's eyes, like the many birds stirring one's ear—does one not welcome them with delight? yet one does not think of them again when they are gone.…

Describing art with this abundance of landscape images, Su imbues it with landscape's qualities. Place, or particular circumstances, are irrelevant to it: "it can issue from the ground anywhere at all" and "covers a thousand li in a single day." Works of art are interchangeable, like landscapes: "one does not think of them again when they are gone." Art has the same time as landscape, being independent of plan or forethought, memory or regret; it is an unpredictable unpremeditated local upwelling of the watery essence that man, beneath his conscious knowledge, has in common with landscape. Periodically, when a certain fullness is reached, it issues irresistably from the artist just as mists from hills and rivers, flowers and fruits from plants, water from springs, bamboo from the ground. Without conscious purpose, and unlimited by place or time, it shows no individuality or evidence of self: like sand and rain, Jo-k'uei's brushstrokes seem to arrange and assort themselves spontaneously.

This rhythm—gathering to fullness in the unknown dark of the body (underground), then emitting—is that of the release of various things from the body, especially excreta, semen, and progeny, and from one point of view Su undoubtedly read his own physiology into the landscape. I think the closest parallel is with male orgasm. This interpretation is born out by Su's implicit equating of art with desire (in "Notice of 'Hall of Thought,'" below), and by the short period of execution and the small scale of most of his own works. Such a male idea of art also is consonant with the opposition between art and yang-sheng: Su makes plain that "nourishing life" is modeled on the longer female rhythms of conception, gestation, and birth, and that the intent is to become one's own mother and pass one's individual self on to an immortal child.

Each of the various arts, as one would expect, represents an aspect of the fluid-like essence in the artist, and artistic expression is a little like decanting a pousse-café:

Yü-k'o's prose is the lees of his virtue. Yü-k'o's poetry is the residue of his prose. What his poetry cannot exhaust overflows and is calligraphy, changes and is painting. Both are left over from the poetry. But fewer people love his prose and poetry [than love his painting and calligraphy]. Is there anyone to love his virtue as much as his painting? Alas!

Not only the arts, but virtue as well is made of this one same stuff, and Su's ideal man (Gentleman or Sage) is one whose whole conduct, whether specifically art or not, is informed with the qualities Su felt in the landscape. Such a man acts spontaneously, i.e. his behavior comes from within, and is unplanned and unforced; he does not thoughtfully apply preconceived standards of right and wrong, but reacts immediately and sensually to good or evil.

"Notice of 'Hall of Thought'"

Chang Chih-fu of Chien-an built a room west of the public office building and named it "Thought". He said, "I will come here morning and evening, and in everything I do, I will always think before I act. You write me a notice on it."

Alas! I am the man in the empire most wanting in premeditative thought. When something comes up I speak out, and do not take time off to think. If I thought before I spoke, [the event] would [still] be incomplete; if I thought after having spoken, it would be too late [or: When something comes up, it happens all at once, and I do not take time to think. To think of it before it happens, I have not learned to do; to think of it after it happens, would be too late]. And so all my life I do not know what I would have "thought". Words arise in my mind, and rush into my mouth. If I spit them out it offends people, if I swallow them back it offends me; and thinking it better to offend other people, in the end I spit them out.

The Gentleman reacts to good just as he loves a lovely color, toward evil just as he hates a hateful smell. How could it be that when he is confronted with a matter he thinks, calculating and deliberating its good and evil aspects, and only then rejects or espouses it? Hence if one, in a situation where righteousness is called for, thinks of advantage, the righteousness must come to nothing; in a situation where war is called for, if one thinks of life, the war will be feeble. Our failure and success, gain and loss, death and life, misfortune and good luck are matters of fate [and should be left to fate].

When I was young I met a hermit who said, "Infants are close to the Tao—they have little thought and few desires." I said, "Then thought is on a par with desire?" He said, "It is worse than desire." In the yard were two jars for storing water. The hermit pointed to them and said, "This one has a tiny leak, from that one a quart is taken every day and thrown away. Which will be empty first?" I said, "It would have to be the one with the tiny leak." The way premeditative thought steals from a man is in small amounts but unceasingly. What the hermit said makes sense to me, and I act accordingly. Besides, the joys of not thinking are indescribable: one is empty yet enlightened, one yet universal, tranquil yet not slack, at rest without settling down in retirement, intoxicated without drinking wine, asleep without shutting an eye.

Is it not a mistake to use all this as a notice for a Hall of Thought? Well, every one of these things has its place, and "all things develop together, but do not harm one another; their ways run along together, but do not infringe upon each other" [The Mean 30/3]. With Chih-fu's nobility of character, what he means by "thought" is surely not the vulgar kind of bustling premeditative thought. The Book of Changes says "without thought, without action." I should like to learn this. The Book of Songs says "thought without wrong." Chih-fu has this.…

Infants are near the Tao (immortality) because they lose from themselves almost nothing of the contained essence symbolized by water—without trying, they seem to carry out the theory of "nourishing life" which, as we have seen, Su Shih could not do. How should an adult like him empty the jug? Evidently not by the slow leak of "thought" (anxiety about the consequences of one's behavior): for all his "alas!" Su is proud of rejecting thought, as does his ideal Gentleman. If one cannot keep it in and live forever, one should let the water come out of itself, when and as it will, without calculation, like the landscape and like the artist who writes or paints when he cannot help it. This, in the hermit's parable, is desire: the expenditure is by whole quarts but not continuous. One will die, but not so soon as with thought, and meanwhile the path of desire brings joy, freedom from anxiety, and a sense of integrity; and one can be a true Gentleman.

For Su Shih, the function of art was expressed by this complex of images relating it to landscape on the one hand and to conduct on the other. The practice of the arts was a way of realizing in oneself the sagely state of mind, which could then be extended to include all one's conduct. After that, there is no longer any particular reason to practice the arts in the narrower sense.

With Yü-k'o's ink bamboos, it used to be that when he saw fine boiled silk or good paper, he would start painting away enthusiastically—he could not help it. His guests would vie with each other for the pictures and take them away to keep, which Yü-k'o did not much mind. Later on when he saw someone laying out the brushes and inkstones he would recoil and go away. You could beg till the end of the year for a picture and not get one. On being asked the reason, Yü-k'o said, "I was studying the Tao and not reaching it. My purpose was frustrated, and having nowhere to direct it I uttered it all in ink bamboos. It was a sickness. Now I am well, so why should I act like that?"

As I see it, Yü-k'o has not been able to keep his sickness for himself. But if he cannot contain it, will he not utter it? I will spy out the utterances and lay hold of them; and if he still thinks it sickness, I too will profit by it. The fact is, I am sick too.…

Art to Su was by no means amoral, nor was it just a vehicle or ornament of moral truth and external to it, as the Neo-Confucians and their forerunners considered: springing from the same source as virtue and described in the same images as sagely conduct, art was itself an aspect of the Tao. Actual arts such as painting and lute-playing were not themselves the Tao, but expressions of one's motion toward it (i.e., toward the more general Tao of truth or sageliness, not the immortality of the Taoists), they could, like the Buddhist sutras, be regarded as waystations.

… The Ch'ien-t'ang monk Ssu-ts'ung at the age of seven played the lute well. At twelve he gave up the lute and studied calligraphy. After he became skilled in calligraphy, in ten years he gave it up and studied poetry; in his poems there are extraordinary passages. Then he read the Hua-yen Sutra, and entered into the Realm of Reality and the Sea of Wisdom … I have heard that when one's thoughts are trained so they are reaching close to the Tao, the Hua-yen, the Realm of Reality, and the Sea of Wisdom are only way-stations; and this is even more true of calligraphy, poetry, and the lute. No matter how hard he tries, no student of the Tao achieves it if he starts from nothing … If Ts'ung does achieve it, his lute-playing and calligraphy, and above all his poetry, will have had something to do with it. Like water, Ts'ung will be able to reflect all things in one, and his calligraphy and poetry will become still more extraordinary. I will keep watch on them, and take them as indications of how profoundly Ts'ung achieves the Tao.

As artist, man acts like landscape, because his behavior is a limited expression of the very essence that actuates landscape. As sage, man acts artistically, emitting this same essence freely and spontaneously. Artist and sage have no self, and hence no guilt and no anxiety about death. But one could not be in society, let alone an official as Su was for most of his life, without a continuing self, a self that looked ahead, that willy-nilly had its place, that was held responsible for past and future acts. This self was still vulnerable to the leaks in the clock and jar, to "thought," guilt, and anxiety. History and society, the great tradition of Chinese civilization, created the conditions in which a distinct landscape experience was possible, but at the same time negated it.

Landscape is by definition asocial, and it will not have escaped the reader that Su's art and sageliness, associated as they were with landscape, had an asocial or even antisocial cast. These emissions from the body can be rude and repellent: he "spits" his paintings at the wall of his friend's house, and has "met many angry words for scribbling and daubing on walls"; if he spits his words out he offends other people, if he swallows them back he offends himself, "and thinking it better to offend other people, in the end I spit them out." Again, he writes,

… By nature I am not careful of what I say. No matter who I am talking to, I always empty out my insides. If there is anything left, it is like eating something I cannot swallow—I have to spit it out and have done with it. But some people remember my rudeness and hold it against me.…

And in the hermit's image of the water-jar, Su chooses "desire" as preferable, in any event, to "thought." This desire is not only like landscape and like art and sageliness, it is also the very desire that gives rise to the antisocial behavior of the depraved emperor and the notorious bandit in the essays on the Dragon and Tiger; their heart-mind (organ of thought as well as of right moral sense) is subordinate to their kidneys-testicles (organ of desire). Art, and the sageliness modeled on it, are socially ambivalent, disconcerting, and unpredictable.

Carried over into political life, in the circumstances of the times, this was a dangerous attitude. "In any matter," Su Shih's brother wrote of him, "he had to be straight; he could not temporize and conform to the common view." From the time when Wang An-shih first came to court (1069), Su's frank speech and writings repeatedly evoked the enmity of one or another clique and he was harassed with onerous assignments, investigations, banishments, imprisonment, loss of rank, and the threat of execution. The Taoist notion that letting out (as opposed to bottling up) would shorten one's life was reinforced externally by the very real possibility that one would be harmed or killed by the antagonisms that political frankness aroused.

The relation in Su's thought between landscape and society can be approached through the self whose existence the asocial landscape excluded. This was the social self, a myth without which no society could function. In its various groups, from the family to the state, society attributes to its members, and they accept, unique selves (represented by proper names) which maintain an identity through time, can be expected to plan and remember, are susceptible to satisfaction or guilt for the past and anxiety or hope for the future, and are at least fairly predictable and responsible. As an official, Su was exposed to this myth in an extreme form: the political self.

The ordinary social self has meaning in respect to limited groups of family, friends, and colleagues, within a lifetime or a narrow string of ancestors and descendants. But the political self, especially for a prominent official such as Su became, was theoretically the self in respect to no particular group but vis-á-vis the whole country (mankind), all history (past and future), and the ultimate in political authority and legitimacy (the emperor). While "career-minded" or "abusive" bureaucrats might merely pay lip service to or even ignore such a universal selfconcept, an "idealistic scholar-official" like Su insisted on swallowing it and trying to reconcile it with his other parts. This maximum conception of the political self was summed up a generation before Su Shih in Fan Chungyen's description of the ideal official:

… When they [virtuous men of old] held high office at the court, they were anxious for the people; when they were in banishment far among the rivers and lakes, they were anxious for their prince. Thus in favor they had cares, in disgrace they had them as well. When, then, were they joyous? The answer must necessarily be: they were the first in the empire to be sorrowful, the last in the empire to be joyous. 0h! were it not for such men, whom should I take as my model?…

By Su Shih's time the slow development of the government system had reached a point where such an elevated view of the ideal bureaucrat, combining broad sensibilities and subtle understanding with complete dedication to the state in the person of the emperor, could not be put into practice (if indeed it ever had been possible). Political centralization, whose growth had faltered during the late T'ang and the Five Dynasties, more than recouped its losses in the Northern Sung which had a smaller territory to administer, was under military pressure from several border peoples, and was eager to forestall a new emergency of local power such as had plagued China for two hundred years. In the capital, the authority of the emperor was intensified at the expense of the high officials, many of whose powers were either transferred to him or dispersed. Thus for example the emperor in T'ang apparently could only veto or put his seal to edicts written by the Prime Minister, while Sung Prime Ministers were restricted to submitting drafts or memoranda which the emperor then made into edicts himself. Local government was made more strictly dependent on the capital; like court officials, local officials retained a rank and a nominal post in the central government, and were considered to be on temporary assignment. Local revenues seem all to have been ascribed to the central government, instead of only in part as before. Thorough checks operated on officials at all levels—Prefectural Administrators, for example, were doubled with a concurrent Vice-Administrator whose signature was required before the Administrator's directives could take effect, and who memorialized directly to the capital. Even nepotism was formalized and exploited in a system of "controlled sponsorship" which made officials responsible for the future conduct of appointees they had brought into the government. Officials were subject to rapid promotion and demotion, and might be moved arbitrarily around the country, often staying only a few months in a given assignment, sometimes having their orders changed while they were en route. By Su Shih's time there was an excess of officials who had to compete with each other for positions, thereby (like Marx's industrial reserve army) weakening themselves vis-á-vis the central government. (Despite the concentration of power in their hands, however, the Northern Sung emperors did not themselves actually behave oppressively or despotically.)

In general, the measures taken by the fashioners of the Sung constitution to ensure that the country would not again suffer a fragmentation of the central power were successful, but only at the price of considerable confusion, ambiguity, and inefficiency in the bureaucracy, and the risk of disillusionment of idealistic scholar-bureaucrats like Su Shih who found themselves unable to devote their entire energies and loyalties to the emperor's service. The ideal political self became untenable through the operations of the antagonistic factions, succeeding each other in power, and using (at least in Su's case) the Censorate as their main instrument to suppress opposition.

Thus Su Shih during the greater part of his life was not his own man; where he went and what he did, in his official capacities, were matters beyond his control (though not always entirely beyond his influence). The emperor's power over his life was very much like fate, except that fate was inscrutable while state power, as exercised by the factions, was not. Superlatively creative and original in so much of his life, Su did not wholly succeed in adjusting his political ideas to this situation. Nor did the political thought of his day offer him a means of doing justice to his own conception of the ideal man as a selfless artist and sage who could be fully involved in political issues without denying what was represented by the landscape experience.

The ideal self of the Confucian tradition as current in Su's time was highly political, yet, in theory, harmonized also with man's place in the natural world. This self was defined and placed so as to be proof against travel, demotion, or death, but it was inadequate to the reality whose symbols Su read in the landscape.

Just as in real political space everything was centered on the capital, and the whereabouts of every official was known and controlled, so the Confucian conceptual space was oriented to, and a rationalization of, social man. Cosmology, epistemology, and ethics are integrated into this system, and the social self, first taking shape in the family, becomes a political, and indeed a cosmic one. Thus of the emperor Su writes:

The Sovereign of men takes the utmost integrity as his Way and the utmost compassion as his virtue.… What is utmost integrity? from the great ministers above to the little people below, from his family on the inside to the Four Barbarians without, to treat all with sincerity.… If one atom of falsity arises in his mind, then, as sickness shows first in the pulse and wine in the complexion, there will be some tiny sign in his voice or expression, and mistrust will spread to a thousand li and more. The strong will become his enemies and the weak will murmur against him. [Everywhere] within the Four Seas [people will think of him] with the hatred of bandits for the authorities, with the fear of game for the hunter. Then the Sovereign of men will stand alone and be in great peril.…

And from the viewpoint of a subject or official, Chang Tsai writes:

Heaven is my father and earth is my mother, and even such a small creature as I finds an intimate place in their midst.

Therefore that which extends throughout the universe I regard as my body and that which directs the universe I consider as my nature.

All people are my brothers and sisters, and all things are my companions.

The great ruler [the emperor] is the eldest son of my parents [Heaven and earth], and the great ministers are his stewards.…

Do nothing shameful even in the recesses of your own house and thus bring no dishonor to them [Heaven and earth].…

A similar schema of the political self appears in the following Chinese box of sorites from the Great Learning:

The ancients who wished clearly to exemplify illustrious virtue throughout the world, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulate their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their own persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their minds. Wishing to rectify their minds, they first sought for absolute sincerity in their thoughts. Wishing for absolute sincerity in their thoughts, they first extended their knowledge. This extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things.

Things being investigated, knowledge became complete. Their knowledge being complete, their thoughts became sincere. Their thoughts being sincere, their minds were then rectified. Their minds being rectified; their persons became cultivated. Their persons being cultivated, their families were regulated. Their families being regulated, their states were rightly governed. Their states being rightly governed, the world was at peace.

The ancients were concerned first with the world (or "empire"), treated as an extension of society; their persons, with mind, thoughts, knowledge, were only means. They were precisely located in the middle of a nested hierarchy of relations, none of which was in contradiction to another. The whole structure rested in the faith that nothing would turn up in the investigation of things which would lead a person to go contrary to family, state, or world. Since the argument begins and ends with the world, it has the effect of a command not to discover anything that might distract from the development of a strong political self. Everything hinges on the "extension of knowledge" by the "investigation of things."

It was asked whether the investigation of things required an investigation of them one by one, or whether one might simply investigate a single thing, and thereby come to a complete understanding of the Principles of all? The reply [of Ch'eng Yi] was: How can one expect to comprehend them all at once? Not even Master Yen [Confucius's disciple] would have dared to claim that by merely investigating a single thing one could comprehend the Principles of all. What is necessary is today to investigate one thing, and tomorrow to investigate another. Only after this has been practiced over a long period can one reach a free and automatic comprehension of all.

The solution to the problem is already contained in the method. "Today … tomorrow … long period"—it is a systematic and prolonged accumulation of knowledge, and hence takes for granted that man's continuing, planning, responsible self is no myth. Like the joy of Fan Chungyen's sages, spontaneity ("free and automatic comprehension") is indefinitely postponed.

The diametric contrast of these images with the centerless space of Su's landscape is evident. Equally great is the difference from his conception of knowledge, in which effortless spontaneity and delight are not afterthoughts but the very keys to the artist's and sage's understanding.

Someone said, the Recluse Lung-mien painted the picture Mountain Home in such a way that afterwards people going to the mountain could let their legs carry them where they would, they would naturally find out the roads and paths, as if they were seeing something they had dreamed, or remembered from a previous life. Without asking, they would know the names of the springs, rocks, grasses, and trees on the mountain; when they met fishermen, woodcutters, and hermits on the mountain, they would recognize them without being told their names. Is this not because [Lung-mien] made strenuous efforts of memory, and did not forget [these details when he painted the picture]?

I said, Not so. When people paint the sun, it often looks like a cookie, but this does not mean they have forgotten the sun. When you are drunk, you do not drink through your nose; in dreams, you do not grasp things with your toes: what comes naturally to you, you remember spontaneously, without effort. When the Recluse was on the mountain, he did not dwell upon any one thing, hence his spirit was linked to all things and his knowledge was that of all the artisans put together [each of which has intimate knowledge of only one kind of thing].…

…"When we have intelligence resulting from sincerity, this condition is to be ascribed to nature; when we have sincerity resulting from intelligence, this condition is to be ascribed to instruction. But given the sincerity, and there shall be the intelligence; given the intelligence, and there shall be the sincerity" [The Mean 21, Legge's translation].

Now, what is sincerity? it means having delight. To have delight is to have spontaneous confidence, hence it is called sincerity. And what is intelligence? it means knowing. To know is to be wise, hence it is called intelligence. Sages are those who, before they know, already delight.…"The Master said: To know is not so good as to love; to love is not so good as to delight" [Analects VI/18]. Knowing, and delighting: this is the difference between the [mere] virtuous man and the sage.…

This emphasis on spontaneity and delight, rather than a calculated accumulation of knowledge, is at odds with the strong social time of the Chinese state as reflected in Su's own thought. The Confucian political self was exactly poised in the calendrical time of history between the edifying past and the judging future. The study of history was far from an immediate experience, in the landscape, of quasi-legendary past events. It was a guide to planned, reasoned, unspontaneous action; the deeds and fortunes of the men whose biographies made up history were to be taken as examples to follow or shun.

If there was once someone who succeeded by doing this, I must do likewise; if there was once someone who failed by doing that, I must do the opposite.…

This is a far cry from loving good like a lovely color and hating evil like a hateful smell: it is the very "thought" that Su distrusted and disowned.

Death is experienced only vicariously and in social time, since a person's own death has no immediate meaning to him other than as symbol or forethought. The political self is strongly aware of being a historical personage who will die, and it is interested in its own biography and in the special kind of immortality which is the preservation of name and reputation in future ages. When Su shows concern with posthumous fame, it is almost invariably in respect to those of his writings he considered to belong to the great tradition in which history happens—his commentaries on the Book of Changes and the Book of History, and his Analysis of the Analects, rather than the less formal occasional pieces (poems, notices, letters, etc.) for which he is chiefly remembered and admired today. For example:

… We anchored for the night out in the ocean. The sea and the sky met, and the sky was filled by the Milky Way. I got up, and sat looking to the four quarters, and sighed deeply. How unfortunate to take this risk! I made the crossing [from Hainan] to Hsü-wen and now I am in the same danger again. My youngest son Kuo was snoring away beside me; I called him but he did not answer. I had with me my commentaries on the Book of History, the Book of Changes, and the Analects, and there are no other copies in the world. I held them and exclaimed, "If heaven does not want these to be lost (?), we shall get safely ashore again!"—and so we did.…

The incompatibility of all this with Su's landscape ideas is clear. The contrast between the egoless self represented by landscape and the strong self presupposed by political life was a difference between two areas of his own experience, both of which he felt as valid and neither of which he was willing to suppress or anesthetize.

That the social self, with its imputed responsibility and guilt, was a myth, he came to realize fully on the occasion of his first banishment, at Huang-chou.

In Yüan-feng 2 [1079-80], 12th month, I, as magistrate of Wu-hsing, committed offenses. The Emperor refrained from executing me, and made me Assistant Commandant of Militia at Huang-chou so that I might think on my errors and renew myself there. In the second month of the following year I arrived at Huang-chou.

When I had more or less solved the problem of living quarters, and had some scant provision of food and clothing, I closed the door and made a clean start. I summoned my faculties and humbly reflected, seeking a way of renewing myself. I looked back on all my utterances and activities: they had all missed the Tao, not only the things by which I had given offense at present. Starting to reform one thing, I feared I was missing the others. I sought them out methodically, and some I regretted unendurably. So I sighed deeply, and said, "My Tao is not equal to controlling my energies; my character is not equal to mastering my habits. I am not digging at the roots, but merely pruning among the branches. Even if I reform now, I will surely act the same again later. Why not restore my integrity like a Buddhist monk (?), and seek to wash it all clean at once?"

I found a monastery south of the town, called An-kuo Temple, with fine woods and tall bamboos, ponds and pavillions. Every two or three days I went there and burned incense and sat in silence, investigating myself deeply. And "things" and "self' forgot each other; my person and my mind were all emptiness. I sought whence the faults were first born, but could not find out. My whole consciousness was pure and clean, and the staining dirt fell away of itself. Inside and out, I was untrammeled and independent. Privately, I rejoiced in this.…

The political system assumed that a disgraced official was shamed, and should accept that shame by feeling guilt. Here Su deliberately seeks for the continuing self in which the unendurable guilt lay, and finds instead no guilt and no self. The political acceptability of his conduct could not be guaranteed by any identifiable inner standard which would accurately reflect the outer.

Why then go on acting as if the political self were true, and continue to expose oneself to such vicissitudes and disillusionments? Undoubtedly in part simply from early indoctrination and habit, as witness this episode from Su's childhood:

Once his mother was reading from the Eastern Han History and came to the biography of Fan P'ang [an official who voluntarily gave himself up to arrest and execution, with the approval of his mother who said that if he had a good name, why should he expect long life too?]. She sighed grievously. Su Shih was in attendance and said, "If I act as P'ang did, would my mother condone it?" She answered, "If you can be a Fan P'ang, can I not be a Fan P'ang's mother?"

But Su is quite capable of admiring the opposite extreme, an ignorant man completely disengaged from society:

Shuai Tzu-lien was a farmer of Heng-shan. Ignorant, uncouth, and stubborn, he was generally known as Ox Shuai. In his old age he joined South Peak Monastery and became a Taoist. Seven li southwest of the monastery is Tzu-hsü Pavillion, a shrine of the former Wei Fu-jen. None of the Taoists would live there because of its desolation and solitude. Only Tzu-lien liked it; he simply sat erect and silent (?), and no one saw what he did. But he was quite addicted to wine. Sometimes when he was drunk he would lie among the mountains and woods, and even if a great storm came up he would not be aware of it; likewise tigers and wolves would pass before him and not molest him.

The former Executive of the Ministry of Rites Wang Hu was sent to be magistrate of Ch'ang-sha, and he received an imperial command to conduct prayers to the South Peak. He visited the shrine of Wei Fu-jen, and there was Tzu-lien, too drunk to stand up. He looked straight at the magistrate and said, "Country Taoists love wine, but cannot always get it. When they do get it, they at once get drunk. Will the official excuse me?" The magistrate observed what an unusual man he was, and had him carried back with him. He stayed more than a month, withdrawn and not speaking, and was sent back to the mountain again. [The magistrate] said, "An old man like me cannot fathom the hidden light and inner splendor of the honored teacher.

[Ox Shuai predicts the day of his death, and afterwards his grave is opened and his corpse found to be gone, showing that he had achieved the Tao.]

… The Recluse of East Slope [Su Shih] says: If a man harbors something within himself, even some small knack, he is not quick to make it known; with a Perfect Man [Taoist immortal] this is even more true—you surely will not find out what he is. It is hard to find anyone who can recognize a Perfect Man. If Mr. Wang had not himself had the Tao, he would not have been able to know how extraordinary Ox Shuai was.…

Su, of course, could not uneducate himself, and the possibility of a life like Ox Shuai's was in any case diminished for him by his unsuccess with the techniques of Taoism. But more importantly it was the narrowness of such a life, excluding art and scholarship as well as direct participation in society, that made it just as unacceptable as an entire submergence in the political life. The breadth that could come only from learning and from preparing for public service was indispensable. Thus "only highly educated and gifted men can see" the all-important "principles" in landscape; Lung-mien's "knowledge was that of all the artisans put together"; and similarly, "in Chao Yun-tzu's paintings even where the brush has hardly touched it is clear what he means—artisan [painters] cannot do this." Without the education of a scholar-official, and the social sensibilities that went with it, one could not understand landscape or art or (therefore) true sageliness.

Moreover, the ideal political man, whether emperor or official, does not in fact set out to engage in politics or administration. His qualities are precisely those of the artist-sage—detachment, spontaneity, selflessness—except that he is ready, if necessary, to break his self-containment in response to the needs of society when something is amiss. Thus Su advised the Emperor Shen-tsung: "I wish you would wait quietly for things to come up, and then respond to them." One should not want to administer, and if all is well in society administration is superfluous. "The Noble Man," Su writes, "moves according to a reason; when the reason is gone, he stops. In response to a matter, he acts; when the matter is over, he leaves off; and he goes on to praise an official who "was never angry, yet the people committed no crimes; he never held investigations, yet his staff did not cheat. With nothing to attend to from morning to night, all he did was whistle and sing." And Su himself professes to prefer retirement to government service (one also lives longer in retirement):

… I have wanted to retire for the last ten years, and have begged for it earnestly and unceasingly, but the best I have got is provincial assignments. If things go well for a gentleman, and he is lucky, he can rise to the rank of minister as easily as turning over his hand; but it is retiring that has always been the hard thing.…

I had read in Tzu-mei's poem Temple of Six Accords the lines: "Waiting for the goldfish at Pine Bridge/Tarrying alone expectantly till evening" and had not understood them. When I was Vice-Administrator at Ch'ien-t'ang I learned that this fish, colored like gold, was in a pool behind the temple. Yesterday I myself went beside the pool and spent a long time dropping biscuit in. Finally he came out, just barely; he rejected the biscuit and went back, to be seen no more.

Since it was over forty years ago that Tzu-mei wrote that poem, and he already speaks of "tarrying," this fish must have been chary of himself for a long time. If it were not for his reluctance to come forward and his readiness to retire, and his care about what he eats, how would he have ever lived so long?

But in service or out, the ideal is the same. The political self—that to which shame and glory would be relevant— distorts one's understanding and management of social matters, just as it falsifies one's perception of landscape.

"Inscription for the Lotus Clepsydra at Hsü-chou"

… What people have faith in is their hands and feet, their eyes and ears. The eyes tell many and few, the hands know heavy and light. Yet no one takes measurements with his hands or makes calculations with his eyes; for this people always depend on measuring instruments and scales. Is this not mistrusting oneself and trusting instead to things? The reason is, people feel that because [these instruments] are without purposefulness and without self, they get at the truth about all things. Thus though heaven and earth are cold or hot, sun and moon are bright or dim, and the K'un-lun range stretches over more than 387,000 li, they cannot escape the three-foot indicator-rod and the five-quart vase [of the water-clock]; though with a clap of thunder day is darkened by wind, rain, and snow, still [the clock's] rate has a measurement which is not speeded or slowed.

If every official, like the vase filling with water, would not exceed his capacity; like the water that floats the indicator-rod, would not depart from the level; and, like the rise and fall of the rod, would show the ups and downs of the times, and fall without counting it shame, rise without counting it glory—then the people would be docile and submit in their hearts, and trust their life and death to us.

The sage is not responsible for the ups and downs of the times; all he must do is be available to repair things if necessary, and if opportunity arises.

… Master Su says: Although the Sages cannot make the times, still they do not miss the times. The times cannot be made by the Sages—all the Sages can do is not miss the times.…

The artist expends himself in art as part of his personal spiritual progress, because of internal needs or "sickness"; the more complete sage, adding social concern, expends himself also when something is wrong in society. If neither the person nor the society is sick, then there is no expenditure, and even the Taoist ideal of immortality through complete self-containment is realized effortlessly. But society, if not perhaps the person, is always sick, and hence there is social time, death, and history.

Such an idealized view of political man was, as we have seen, greatly at variance with Su's experience of politics in theory and practice. And in fact he did not believe the contradiction could be resolved within the state as he knew it; for the type of the harmonious society, he turns outside history to the quasi-legendary dawn of civilization, when the sage-kings first felt obliged to give the people rites (mores and institutions) and implements:

Anciently, in their original state, the people were ignorant of implements with which to sustain life. Hitting, grabbing, yanking, tearing, they struggled with the birds and beasts for each day's survival. In constant anxiety, at morning they could make no provision for evening, and lived in mortal fear of running short. Hence there arose no trickery or deceit, and the people had no knowledge.

But the Sages deplored the fact that they made no distinctions [among persons], and grieved that they had no [secure] livelihood. Therefore they devised and perfected all such things as pots, ploughs, bows and arrows, boats, carts, and nets, so that the people were happy and comfortable and became lords of nature, bending all things to their wishes. For the first time people had the means to satisfy the desires of their mouths, bellies, ears, and eyes. With implements and ease came trickery and deceit. Getting what they sought and following their desires, they wanted more and more. Then the Sages grieved at their cruelty, treachery, fickleness, and deceit, and at their unruliness. Therefore they established the rites to restore the original situation: the purpose of the rites is to restore the root and revert to the beginning.…

The Sages had no intention of gaining empire. They were like the rivers and seas, into which all valleys lead. They were like the unicorn and phoenix, around which the birds and beasts congregate. Even if they wished to refuse, how could they? … These three Sages [Yü, T'ang, and Wu] tried to decline, but could not get rid of it; tried to escape, but could not avoid it.…

Only here, on the dreamlike horizon of time where landscape, history, legend, and art seem to converge in a single experience, did all contradictions disappear.

… Since Ch'in united the empire and extinguished the Rites and Music, the shao has not been performed for 1313 years. If the instruments were preserved and the performers missing, the shao would be a mystery; so much the more when both instruments and performers' [skills] are gone and have not been handed down. But although the shao is lost, there is something that is not lost and is still preserved, for it is always with sun and moon, heat and cold, dark and light, wind and rain between heaven and earth. Nowadays … people's ears have never heard earth's music, still less can they hear heaven's [natural] music. But if one's ear does hear heaven's music, then everything that has shape and sound is his feathers and tail, shield and ax, pipes and stone chimes, gourds and strings [i.e., the antique paraphernalia of music and dance].

… I have climbed up on Shao Rock, below Shun Peak, and looked out to Ts'ang-wu Mountain in the distance, and the Chiu-i Range. I attended to the spitting and swallowing of rivers and mountains, the swaying of the trees and herbs, the cries of the birds and animals, the breathing of all the apertures: and all these doings were harmonious song. There was no numbered measure, yet an even rhythm formed of itself. Is this not the shao in all its perfection? The limits established in heaven set the world in order. If man is in accord the Air [breath, energy] answers; if the Air answers, there is music. And then 'the nine melodies of the shao, the coming of the phoenix, the dancing of the hundred beasts' all are there, spread out before him in glory.…