SOURCE: An Introduction to Su Tung-P'o: Selections from a Sung Dynasty Poet, translated by Burton Watson, Columbia University Press, 1965, pp. 3-16.

[Watson is a scholar and translator of Chinese and Japanese literature whose numerous publications include Early Chinese Literature (1962) and Great Historical Figures of Japan (1978). Here, he presents an overview of Su 's life and works, touching on his style and the Buddhist and Taoist influences in his poetry.]

Culturally, the Sung period was one of the great ages of Chinese history. The dynasty, which lasted from 960 to 1279, faced powerful enemies abroad: the Liao, a Khitan state in the northeast; a Tangut state called Hsi-hsia in the northwest; and later the Jurchen Tungus and Mongols. Militarily too weak to overpower these menacing neighbors, it was forced to buy peace with heavy tribute, at the same time maintaining costly border defenses in case of duplicity. Internally this hardbought peace was put to good use. The empire was ruled by a strong central government whose elaborate bureaucracy functioned, at least until the fiscal strain of national defense became intolerable, with considerable efficiency. Cities grew in size, trade flourished, and education, encouraged by the civil service examination system and spread through government schools and private academies, reached a larger number of people than ever before. New philosophical systems evolved, voluminous histories and encyclopedias were compiled, and painting and porcelain reached their highest level of development.

In comparison with the preceding centuries, the Sung period was also strikingly modern in character. By Sung times the Chinese had gotten up off the floor and were sitting on chairs, contraptions that came in from the west with Buddhism and spread slowly throughout Chinese society; they were reading printed books, drinking tea, carrying on at least part of their monetary transactions with paper money, and experimenting with explosive weapons. Many of them lived in large cities—the main Sung capital, K'ai-feng, was almost certainly the largest city in the world at that time—and traveled freely about the empire by boat, horse, carriage, or palanquin over an elaborate system of roads and waterways. In their way of life, their values, and their interests, the Sung people were in many respects far closer to modern Western man than our European ancestors of the same period.

This perhaps explains why so much of their poetry reads like the product of our own time. Less intense and less brilliant than that of the T'ang, it is broader in scope and of greater philosophic depth and complexity. Whereas earlier poets had regarded certain themes as intrinsically outside the pale of poetry, the Sung poets tried their hand at every subject imaginable, from iron mines to body lice. Where T'ang poets were content to employ one perfect and profoundly suggestive metaphor, Sung poets piled up metaphors until they were satisfied they had said all they wanted to say—and, as the enormous volume of their work (estimated at several hundred thousand extant poems) suggests, they had a great deal to say. Poetry was for the Sung gentleman, even more than for his predecessor in the T'ang, a part of everyday life, a normal medium for expressing his thoughts and feelings on any subject he chose.

The work of Su Shih, the greatest of the Sung poets, more commonly known by his literary name, Su Tung-p'o, well illustrates these qualities. He was born in 1037 in Meishan, a town situated at the foot of Mount Omei in present-day Szechwan Province. His remote family background is uncertain, though there is reason to believe that his people were connected with the local weaving industry. His grandfather was illiterate, and his father, Su Hsün, did not begin serious literary studies until he was in his late twenties, though his father's older brother passed the civil service examination and became an official. His mother was from a prominent family, an educated woman and a devout Buddhist, and undoubtedly had a great influence upon her son's development. He had only one brother, Su Ch'e or Su Tzu-yu, three years younger than himself.

Su Tung-p'o and his brother were educated by their parents and at a private school in the neighborhood run by a Taoist priest, and by 1056 they felt confident enough to go to K'aifeng to take the government civil service examinations. Their father had taken them earlier and failed, but he accompanied his sons to the capital. The boys passed the first examination with distinction, and in the following year passed the second, receiving the chin-shih degree. At the same time Su Hsün won private recognition of his literary ability from prominent scholars in the capital.

Upon the death of their mother in 1057, the sons returned with their father to Szechwan to observe the customary three-year mourning period, actually a period of twenty-seven months. The three journeyed to the capital again in 1060, where Su Hsün received an official appointment and his sons, after passing the special examination the following year, were assigned to posts in the provinces. Thus the so-called Three sus, father and sons, were launched on the careers that would make their names famous in Chinese literary and political history.

I will not trace here all the moves in the subsequent career of the poet; it would be tedious and confusing.…

Instead I will list the principal facts in outline:

1061-65 Su Tung-p'o served as assistant magistrate in Shensi.

1065 Returned to the capital.

1066 Su Hsün died. His sons accompanied the body home to Szechwan and observed the mourning period. This was their last trip home.

1068 The two brothers occupied posts in the capital.

1071-79 Out of favor with the ruling clique in the capital, Su Tung-p'o moved about in a series of provincial posts. In the seventh month of 1079, he was arrested on charges of slandering the emperor, imprisoned in the capital, released, and banished to Huang-chou.

The last entry demands explanation. The dynasty's administrative and fiscal system was functioning badly because of the heavy strain of tribute and defense expenditures, and most thinking men of the time, including Su Tung-p'o and his father, agreed that reforms were needed. Attempts along this line had been made earlier, and when a forceful new statesman named Wang An-shih (1021-86) came to prominence in 1069, he began, with the full support of the ruler, Emperor Shen-tsung, a vigorous reform program known as the "New Laws." Just what these new laws were need not concern us here, but they were sufficiently radical to offend the more conservative elements in the government and, perhaps more from faulty administration than from the provisions of the laws themselves, caused considerable hardship in the provinces. Su Tung-p'o, living in the provinces, could see the hardship at first hand, and became more and more outspoken in his criticisms, until his enemies in the capital could no longer tolerate him. Using statements in his own poems as evidence, they tried him on charges of slander and effected what amounted to banishment by assigning him an insignificant post in the region of Huang-chou on the north bank of the Yangtze in central China. I would like to note, however, that by this time Wang An-shih, to whom is usually assigned all the blame for the failures and abuses of the reform program, was out of political life and living in retirement at Nanking. However much Su may have disagreed with Wang's political opinions, he seems to have borne no grudge against Wang himself, but on the contrary exchanged poems with him and went out of his way to visit him in later years. Political feelings ran high, but these were highly civilized men. Under the Sung, Su Tung-p'o and those who thought like him suffered the inconvenience and disgrace of banishment. Under almost any earlier dynasty they would very likely have lost their heads.

1080-84 Exiled to Huang-chou.

1085 Returned to the capital and high political office after the overthrow of the "New Laws" party.

1086-93 Held various posts in the capital and the provinces.

1094 Banished a second time with the return of the "New Laws" party to power. Ordered to proceed to Hui-chou in Kwangtung, east of present-day Canton.

1097 Ordered even father south to the island of Hainan.

1100 Permitted to return to the mainland; restored to favor and office.

1101 Became ill and died at Ch'ang-chou in Chekiang.

Two facts about the poet's life will be apparent from this outline. One is that he spent his entire adult years moving about from place to place, from office to office, which is why so much of his poetry deals with journeys. This was the ordinary life of a Chinese bureaucrat. After a man had entered the administration, usually by way of the civil service examinations, he was assigned to a post, sometimes in the capital but more often in the provinces. In the Sung period it was usual for an official to remain at a particular provincial post no longer than three years—long enough to learn what he needed to know about the region, but not so long that he would begin to identify himself too closely with local interests. Hence a man like Su Tung-p'o was destined to pick up his family and move, say good-by to old friends and start out to make new ones, at least every three years and sometimes ottener. The life of a high provincial official was not particularly difficult, his duties were hardly taxing, and in normal times at least his income was sufficient; but he was never permitted to stay in one place long enough to put down roots. Rootless wandering is said to be a characteristic of present-day Americans, but it is hard to think of any group in America, except perhaps migratory laborers, who could match the old-style Chinese official on this score.

Second, if Su Tung-p'o had been inclined toward bitterness, he had plenty of cause for it. Not only was he obliged by the bureaucratic system to spend almost all his life in separation from his homeland and the one person he felt closest to, his brother Tzu-yu; he was twice forced by political shifts into exile, the second time at an advanced age and to the torrid southernmost extremity of the empire. These periods of banishment not only brought disgrace and the frustration of all his political ambitions, but often involved real physical hardship. The surprising thing is that if he felt bitter or sorry for himself he seldom shows it in his poems. He writes occasionally in a mood of depression or despair; the infrequency of meetings with his brother is a theme that always brings out a strain of sadness. But he seems to have possessed an irrepressible interest in life, an engagement with his fellow men and his surroundings that made it impossible for him to brood for long. Far from being bitter, he is actually one of the most cheerful of the great Chinese poets.

He was not only a first-class poet and prose writer, but a distinguished painter and calligrapher as well, and he saw with a painter's eye. His descriptive passages are not limited to the conventional props and landscapes of earlier poetry, but depict all kinds of scene down to the most commonplace; within the confines of Chinese verse form, they are masterpieces of precision and detail. He tells the reader exactly what flowers are blooming, exactly what crops are growing in the fields, just what the weather is like and what people are doing. When later Chinese critics sometimes complained that his poetry lacks suggestiveness, it was probably this very fullness and precision they were objecting to.

He was also, like most major Sung poets, a philosopher. Although he has left no systematic exposition of his ideas, repeatedly he breaks into the descriptive passages of his poems with philosophical meditation. By Sung times, the sea of faith that had been Chinese Buddhism at its height was receding, and native Confucian ways of thought, oriented about the family and the state and strongly rational and humanistic, were beginning to reassert themselves. Su's own philosophy represents a combination of Confucian and Buddhist ideas, with a large mixture of philosophical Taoism.

The Confucian side of his thinking is less apparent in his poetry than in his political papers and his life as a whole— his strong family devotion, the fact that he chose a career in politics, the fearlessness with which he spoke out against abuses in government, the numerous public works for the benefit of the local inhabitants that he undertook at his various provincial posts. In his poetry it is rather the Buddhist and Taoist aspects of his thinking that find expression. His mother, it will be recalled, was a devout Buddhist. He himself took considerable interest in Buddhist literature and doctrine, and spent much time visiting temples in the areas where he was assigned. After his dismissal from office and banishment to Huang-chou in 1080 this interest deepened; and the influence of Buddhist thought, particularly that of the Zen sect, the most active and intellectual of the Buddhist schools at this time, is apparent in his writings of this period. It was also at this time that he began to call himself Tung-p'o chü-shih or "The Layman of Eastern Slope," after the plot of land he farmed. From this title his literary name Tung-p'o derives.

The influence of Taoism is most clearly seen in his sensitivity to the natural world. He was fascinated by stories of immortal spirits, elixirs of long life, and other popular lore, and good-naturedly took part in prayers for rain and similar ceremonies of the folk religion, though the rational Confucian side of his nature told him there was no basis for such acts or beliefs. And yet he repeatedly refers to a supernatural force which he calls "The Creator," a word taken from the works of Chuang Tzu, and which he often describes in terms of a child. It is a force which moves throughout the natural world, childlike in its lack of thought or plan, yet capable of influencing the destinies of all beings in the universe. And when man learns to be equally free of willfulness and to join in the Creator's game, then everything in the natural world will become his toy. It is no accident that Su in his descriptions of nature makes far freer use of personification and pathetic fallacy than any of his predecessors.

Su experimented with nearly every form in traditional Chinese literature.… Most of the poems I have translated are in the shih form, the standard form of classical Chinese poetry, characterized generally by lines of equal length and, with rare exceptions, an even number of lines. Enjambment is rare; there is almost always a pause at the end of each line. Poems in this form fall into two groups: those in the so-called old style, which allows occasional lines of irregular length and does not require any set tonal pattern within the lines; and those in the "modern style," which demands lines of equal length and sometimes of fixed number, and requires an elaborate internal tonal pattern the rules of which are too complex to go into here. Both forms employ end rhyme; sometimes the same rhyme is used throughout a single poem, sometimes in longer poems it changes at points where the poem shifts direction. Su composed in both styles, in most cases using a 5-character or a 7-character line.

Poetry was part of the everyday social life of an educated man in China, and it was customary for friends and acquaintances to exchange poems on various occasions or to get together and compose poems on a particular theme. Sometimes they assigned rhymes to each other; sometimes they composed poems employing the same rhyme as that of a friend's poem to which they were responding, occasionally (a real tour de force) using not only the same rhyme, but the very same rhyme words in the same order as those of the original poem. Su mentions all these practices in the introductions to his poems; he even carried the game a step farther by composing poems to the same rhymes as those of a poet of the distant past, T'ao Yüan-ming (365-427).

Nearly all the poems [I have translated] are descriptions of actual occurrences in the poet's life or scenes he had encountered. A few, however, belong to a genre very popular among Chinese poets: that of the poem written to accompany a painting, describing not an actual landscape but a pictured one. Because of their artificial and secondhand nature such poems have seldom appealed to me, but Su, as so often with other forms, has succeeded in giving life even to this rather stilted genre, and I have therefore included several poems of this type.

The second poetic form represented in my selection is the tz 'u, which employs lines of unequal length but follows a set line, rhyme, and tonal pattern. The tz'u were originally songwords written to accompany tunes that came in from Central Asia. It became the custom to write numerous lyrics to fit a single tune, so that in time a number of fixed metrical patterns were established, each known by the name of the tune it fitted. In late T'ang and Five Dynasties times, when the genre was new, these tz'u usually dealt with mildly erotic themes and were considered somewhat less respectable than the shih, but by Sung times the situation was changing. Su Tung-p'o, one of the acknowledged masters of the tz 'u form, employed it to treat many of the same themes he treated in his shih. He thus opened up new areas of expression for the tz 'u, though the people of his day, who did not always appreciate this fact, complained that his tz'u were actually shih in disguise. They also complained that his tz'u were difficult to sing, but since the tunes of the tz 'u were lost long ago, we cannot tell just what they meant by this.…

The third poetic form is represented by Su's two famous fu or prose poems on the Red Cliff. The fu form is old in Chinese literature and before Sung times it was employed usually for lengthy descriptive pieces, often of a fantastic nature, or briefer evocations of emotional states. It is most often a mixture of prose passages and rhymed sections, the latter in strongly rhythmical patterns with elaborate use of parallelism. Su employs a variation of the form known as wen fu or "prose fu," which is extremely loose in structure and makes only sparing use of rhyme and parallelism. Even so, it retains a sensuousness of language and rhythmical swing that set it off from pure prose.

Su wrote rapidly and, unlike many of his contemporaries, did not often go back to polish and rewrite. Some 2,400 poems of his have been preserved, about 90 percent of which can be dated. Many of them were printed and published during his lifetime, and though for political reasons his works were banned for a while after his death, the ban was later lifted and his writings circulated freely and widely. They have thus come down to us in excellent condition.…

The Chinese literary tradition, particularly in poetry, grew by feeding upon itself, and it is only natural that Su's poetry should contain echoes of earlier works, phrases and lines which he borrowed from his predecessors and adapted to his own use. Chinese commentators make it their job to point out such borrowings, and a glance at their notes on his poetry is apt to give the impression that his language is unduly bookish and derivative. This is not so. When he wrote, Chinese poetry already had a history of some fifteen hundred years, and he could hardly have avoided repeating the usages of the past without straining for novelty at every turn. A good poet was expected to draw aptly and skillfully upon the works of his predecessors, thereby adding a richness of association to his diction. But a great one had to have such complete mastery of the tradition that he could at the same time express his own thoughts freely and naturally, and could advance and enrich the tradition in some way, adding new depth and nuance. This Su Tung-p'o did … It is an indication of Su's greatness.… that.… allusions and associations constitute only a minor part of the interest of his poetry, and that without any knowledge of them his works can still be read with enjoyment and profit.…