SOURCE: "Su Shih: A Theory of Perception in Art," in Images and Ideas in Chinese Classical Prose: Studies of Four Masters, Stanford University Press, 1988, pp. 133-53.

[Here, Yu-Shih Chen explores Su's intellectual and artistic development during the period of 1071 to 1085, characterizing him as an intuitive and unorthodox thinker.]

Su Shih (1036-1101) was 30 years younger than his patron Ou-yang Hsiu, and so their careers and thoughts were not … closely intertwined.… Politically, Su Shih, like Ou-yang Hsiu in his later years, was part of the conservative opposition to the New Law Reform. In literary theory, they are frequently mentioned together in the context of the ku-wen revival of the early Sung. Although intellectually and artistically they were of different generations and differed in almost every essential aspect, … they have been perceived by critics and literary historians as the principal advocates of ku-wen in the Sung and as leading stylists who so perfected ku-wen and its theoretical basis that they determined its development for centuries to come.

The Impact of Political Exile

Like his father, Su Hsün (1009-66), and his younger brother, Su Ch'e (1039-1112), Su Shih commanded a formidable prose style, which won him a great reputation in the famous chin-shih examination of 1057, administered by Ou-yang Hsiu, and in a special examination of 1060, for which Ou-yang Hsiu sponsored him. He was promoted from the provinces to the capital in 1065, but his career there was interrupted at the outset by the compulsory mourning for his father, and he returned only in 1069, just as Wang An-shih was coming to power. Because of his outspoken opposition to Wang's administrative reforms, Su Shih was demoted in 1071 and served in a series of provincial posts until he was dismissed from office in 1079 and banished to Huang-chou (in modern Hopei). He returned to the capital in 1085, after the fall of the reform party, and briefly held high posts in the central government at various times in the following eight years. When the reformists regained power in 1094, they banished him to the extreme south, where he remained until shortly before his death.

Su Shih was thus only superficially involved in the great struggle between the conservative party of Han Ch'i and Ssu-ma Kuang and the radical reformist party of Wang An-shih; despite his early promise and ambition, he never quite attained sufficient eminence to become a central participant. Even when his party was in power, it denied him preferment during most of his career, distrusting his independence of mind. Su Shih, then, was unsuccessful in public life, and his preeminence in the eyes of posterity largely results from his prodigious literary talent.

As the twentieth-century scholar Kuo Shao-yü has noted, Su Shih was not primarily interested in literature for the sake of reviving the Confucian tao, or any tao for that matter. He was interested in the art of literature.

The literary theories of Su [Hsun], Su [Shih], and Su [Ch'e] were basically different from those of Ou[-yang Hsiu] and Tseng [Kung, 1019-83]. The reason they were different was their different underlying attitude toward literature.& The Confucians Liu [K'ai], Mu [Hsiu], and Tseng [Kung] studied the literary works of the ancients with a view to seeking the too embodied in those works. Although they did not necessarily find the too, they never dared to announce boldly to the world, as Su Hsun did, that they were studying literature for literature's sake.… The Sus theorized only about the style of literature, not its content.& This is what was seminal about the literary theories of the three Sus. [Vol. 1]

It is important to note here that the relationship between too and wen in Su Shih's thinking marked a decisive turn away from Han Yu's and Ou-yang Hsiu's idea of "literature as a vehicle for the too." Su Shih's "way of literature" approximated the ancient concept of art or consummate skill in the Chuang-tzu. Therefore, in discussing his theory and practice of ku-wen, we must pay special attention to his distinctive tendency to equate ku-wen with wen in general and the too of ku-wen with the too of the arts in general. Reflecting his reorientation of ku-wen theory toward a general theory of art and letters, Su Shih explicitly included technique (fa) among the criteria for evaluating literature. This addition of fa to the theory of literature was unprecedented, and it marks the second significant departure in the Sung development of ku-wen, the first being Ou-yang Hsiu's introduction of the ideas of simplicity and universality.

Philosophically, Su Shih stood with the generation of Neo-Confucian thinkers that included Chou Tun-yi, Shao Yung, and Chang Tsai, rather than with his patron Ou-yang Hsiu; he shared his older Neo-Confucian contemporaries' fascination with the "ultimate" and with the metaphysics derived from the Yi ching. He was interested in Chou Tun-yi's attempt "to explain how the countless differentiated phenomena of existence derive from an original source which is itself … undifferentiated" [De Bary]. Shao Yung's theory of a numerical universe, of number as an essential concept for interpreting existence, influenced Su's thinking on the nature of change and its meaning for man's life. From Chang Tsai he borrowed the idea that the primal material force (ch'i) "is a constant process of change, integrating to form human beings and the other creatures of the world, disintegrating again to return to the state of the Great Vacuity. Man's task in the world is to comprehend this process of change and to harmonize his action with it."

In discussing Su Shih's intellectual and literary development, it is expedient to focus on the years 1071 to 1085, from his demotion to the provinces through his first banishment. It was during this time, especially during his exile at Huang-chou, that his ideas crystallized and matured and found expression in several of his greatest works. It is clear from his writings that in exile Su Shih relied heavily on Buddhism to forget his frustrations in the political sphere. Buddhism helped him to maintain his intellectual and emotional equilibrium—he did not indulge in the bitter rage and self-pity of Liu Tsung-yüan or the immoderate drinking of Ou-yang Hsiu—and in his works of this period, he arrived at a transcendent view of life in the general scheme of things that could be called positively optimistic.

Nature and the World of Art: Yi, Fa, and Kung

The reorientation of the literary ideal in the eleventh century from the extraordinary (ch'i) to the universal (ch'ang), as we now know, was related to a revised view of nature among Sung writers. Writers like Ou-yang Hsiu came to identify the universal in nature with a life-affirming and life-sustaining constant. Su Shih, by contrast, saw the universal as a process of dynamic fluctuation that is essentially inconclusive: dissolution succeeds growth, completion is followed by destruction. All things in nature dissolve in time, and in time they assume new forms and appearances. Thus, change, when viewed not as a finite phenomenon in human life but as an infinite succession of dissolution and growth flowing through time, becomes continuity. This new vision of an infinite process forming the content of the universal gave rise to an immensely productive idea in Su Shih's writings—the notion that dissolution and growth, change and continuity, death and life, are but two phases of a single and harmonious whole. The phenomenon of change and the impermanence of life merged in Su Shih's thought into a central concept, which I shall call the "two-oneness" of change and continuity in time. The concept is important because it offers a rare point of focus for discussing visible turning points in the Sung development of ku-wen.

Su Shih formulated his idea of continuity-in-change after his arrival at Huang-chou in 1080. Thereafter, he elaborated various aspects of the concept in his correspondence and in miscellaneous writings and applied these different aspects in his creative works. In the following, I first consider Su Shih's views after 1080 on the vicissitudes of nature as represented in the art of painting and refer to earlier remarks he made on literary style that contained germs of his mature conception of art in general. Then I examine his famous "Rhymeprose on the Red Cliff" (1082) as an illustration of how he used these ideas in his creative writings and of how they elucidate some difficult passages in that work.

The impressive transformation in Su Shih's writings after his arrival at Huang-chou was noted by his younger brother, Su Ch'e:

Once he said to [me] Ch'e, "In my opinion, you are the only one among today's scholars who can compete with me." When he was demoted and banished to Huang-chou, he closed his door to the world and gave full rein to his brush and ink. His writings suddenly changed, becoming like [the rush of] a river in flood; and [I] Ch'e was left staring, never able to equal him again.

The simile of a river in flood suggests a considerable growth of vitality and resources, an expansion of vistas, and a proportionate loosening of set, conscious bounds. To appreciate what Su Ch'e meant by the simile in terms of Su Suih's literary style, it would be useful to examine some of the principles that had guided Su Shih's writings before the Huang-chou period.

The Preface to the First Volume of the Journey South (1059) contains a revealing passage:

For the writers of former times, [literary] craft did not mean merely that one was able to write in this or that manner; craft meant that one could not but write in this or that manner. Like the clouds above mountains and rivers, like the flowers and fruits of plants and trees, it was the outward manifestation of [innate] fullness and luxuriance; even if they had wished not to have such a manifestation, would that have been possible?

Ever since my youth, I have heard my father discourse on literature, remarking that the sages of ancient times composed because they could not but do so. [I] Shih and my younger brother, Ch'e, wrote a great deal, but never with the conscious intent [yi] to compose anything. In the year chi-hai [1059], we accompanied our father on a trip to Ch'u. There was nothing to do on the boat, because gambling, chess playing, and drinking are not what a family should enjoy together. The beauty of the scenery, the simplicity of the local customs, the historical associations of former worthies [with the region], and all that with which our senses came into contact stimulated our hearts and issued forth in lyrical verses.… These verses were done while we were talking and laughing together; they were not labored writings.

Su Shih was 24 years old when the preface was written. His distinction here between writings that are noted for their literary craft or artistry (kung) and writings that are distinguished for their level of conscious intent or conception (yi) is significant, as is his distinction between literary craft that stems from effort and literary craft that is spontaneous and free from human control. Of these two kinds of craft, Su Shih valued the latter more, and he seemed pleased that it informed most of his own writings at that time. Of writings distinguished for their level of conscious intent, he gives us no criterion of value judgment here except to hold up the compositions of the ancient sages as the ideal.

As Su Shih's critical thinking developed, the emphasis on yi over kung in evaluating a work became more pronounced. For example, although Su Shih did not dispute that novelty (hsin), extraordinariness (ch'i), loftiness (kao), and ornateness (hua) are characteristics of kung, he looked on them with distaste when the intent (yi) behind these skillful displays was nothing more than to gain conventional approval. By 1072, Su Shih had begun to emphasize change and to criticize the exaltation of the constant or universal (ch'ang), the cornerstone of Ou-yang Hsiu's critical theories, when it reflected man's conceptual manipulation of the natural course of events. In his Preface to the Collected Poems of Shao Mao-ch'eng, he wrote: "It is indeed difficult for human desires to coincide with the natural course.… How can [the coincidental] be universal? When such a coincidence occurs by chance, people then insist that it should be universal. This is why men are mostly discontented and lacking in understanding."

In Su Shih's mature reflections on art, after 1080, we find a consistent tendency to emphasize nature (t'ien) over man (jen) and a shift of focus from craft or artistry (kung) to intent or conception (yi;) in Ch'ien Chung-shu's words, there was a propensity in Su Shih's thinking on art to "turn from the work of art to the mind of the artist." In contrast to Su's definition of literary craft quoted above, the basis of evaluating kung shifted from the criterion of spontaneity, which pertains to the stylistic quality of a literary work, to the writer's mode of thought, which reflects his philosophical thinking as well as his ethical outlook. For example, in contrasting nature and man, Su Shih ceased to identify yi with the writings of sages alone and began to link it with nature (t'ien). At this point, yi became an increasingly important critical concept in his literary theory. A given subject, when seen from the detached perspective of the natural course of events, assumes a form of expression and dictates a set of technical rules very different from those of the same subject seen from the perspective of individual human bias.

Much of Su Shih's critical discussion of yi dealt with the art of painting, and not by coincidence. Painting communicates and represents nature directly, and to Su Shih, an accomplished painter himself, it was the art of nature par excellence: the painter's art, insofar as it seeks to approximate that which naturally exists in the absence of human agency, mirrors the working of nature (t'ien kung) and its yi (t'ien yi). An examination of Su Shih's discussion of painting is illuminating not only because he obviously considered the arts of painting and poetry in unison but also because ideas concerning the two forms of art can generally be conveyed more vividly and more convincingly in terms of the visual art. Cyril Drummond Le Gros Clark deemed "the close comparison between the painter and the poet" to be "important to an elucidation of Su Shih's philosophy of art." However, what is crucial in Su Shih's association of the poet with the painter is not so much a comparison as a convergence of the painter's and the poet's minds on the conceptual level with regard to an understanding of the working of nature and an appraisal of the role of artistic expression in the total process of creating a work of art, whether verbal or pictorial.

Water, especially water in motion, is a favorite symbol in Su Shih's criticism of literature and art. It symbolizes spontaneity, freedom, change, continuity, and all aspects of nature in which man aspires to participate. In his "Post-script to the Paintings of P'u Yung-sheng" (ca. 1081), Su Shih commented:

Most painters of water, ancient and modern, have painted it as extending far over a level surface with fine ripples. Those skilled at this technique can at best make it rise and fall in waves, so that people touch it with their hands, thinking it really three-dimensional; this they take to be the highest achievement. But in merit, these paintings hardly differ by a hair's breadth from the craftsmanship of representing water on blockprint sheets.

During the Kuang-ming era [880-81] of the T'ang dynasty, the private scholar Sun Wei first formulated an original conception [hsin-yi] [in painting water]. He painted [it in] dashing torrents and huge waves, turning and twisting with the mountains and rocks, taking its form from whatever things [wu] it encountered. He showed water in all its various aspects, and his work was pronounced "creative and preeminent" [shen-yi]. Later, two natives of Shu, Huang Ch'üan and Sun Chih-wei, mastered the technique [fa] of his brush strokes.… In recent years, P'u Yung-sheng of Ch'eng-tu … began to paint water in motion. He showed a grasp of the original conception [yi] of the two Suns.

In the postscript, Su Shih states that three things are to be considered in the painting of water: yi, fa, and kung—that is, the painter's conception of the subject, his technique, and his execution. Of the three, yi prescribes the technique and determines the merit of the execution. The character of water, when conceived in its essentially changeable nature, is expressed as "taking its form from whatever things it encountered" in the painting. But when conceived in its local appearances, it is generally represented as "extending far over a level surface with fine ripples." The difference between the two conceptions (yi) of water is reflected in the technique (fa), resulting in two methods of painting water. Sun Wei was able to realize the first conception of water, and so Su Shih describes his painting as "creative and preeminent." Sun Chih-wei mastered Sun Wei's technique and was able to execute the same effect, but because the original conception did not come from him, his painting is praised only for its forcefulness. P'u Yung-sheng recreated the fa and the yi of the two Suns in making water come alive in his painting, but it is hard to imagine that Su Shih regarded his accomplishment as anything more than skillful execution since neither the yi nor the fa of painting water in motion originated with him.

Su Shih, indirectly through a postscript that discussed three painters and their representations of water in motion, underlined the close and well-ordered relationship among yi, fa, and kung in a finished work of art. In his "Discourse on Literature," he described his own style:

My writing is like ten thousand barrels of spring water, gushing from the ground, choosing no specific outlet. On level ground, it floods and covers thousands of miles in a day without the least effort. Turning and twisting with the mountains and rocks, it takes its forms from whatever things it encounters, unpredictably. All that can be foretold is that it always goes where it should go, and it always stops where it cannot but stop. That is all. As for the rest, I myself am unable to tell.

And in his "Letter in Answer to Hsieh Min-shih" he said,

I have perused the letters and verses and miscellaneous essays you sent me. On the whole, they are like moving clouds and flowing water, without any fixed quality, just going always where they should go and stopping always where they cannot but stop. Your style is natural, and it expresses itself exuberantly.

Critics are wont to quote these two passages as indicative of Su Shih's ideal of literary style. However, once the inherent relationship among yi, fa, and kung is clear, we can see that there is a qualitative difference between the two styles. Like the two painters of "living water" in the "Postscript," the lack of an expressed source of being in Hsieh Min-shih's writing precludes the presence of a vital, productive yi. Su Shih's own writing, on the other hand, has a definite origin (gushing from a spring under-ground) and a well-formulated method of expression (taking its forms from whatever things it encounters). The spring is an admirable image of a great, abundant, and natural reservoir of vitality, accumulated over time (fed by constant practice, continued reflection, and vast learning) and the fountainhead of his literary output. Once above ground, its spontaneity in action is to be understood in the same sense as the lack of selfconsciousness of the master carver in the Chuang-tzu, whose skill is already one with the tao and no longer needs the mediation or guidance of conscious method. Such spontaneous skill, as a natural expression of the artist's spiritual communion with the tao, is certainly not to be compared to the moving clouds in Hsieh Min-shih's case, which, to all appearance, have no real connection with the topography of the sky.

To attain such unconscious skill, which implies a direct communication between the tao and execution, it is imperative that the conceiving spirit (shen) be free of all emotional affect. In his "Postscript to the Calligraphy of the Six Tan'g Masters" (1081), Su Shih pointed to the undesirable effect of emotional and moral bias in a work of art: "In the case of petty men, even if their calligraphic art is craftsmanlike (kung), it invariably carries an expression that is smug and ingratiating. The fact is that a man's feelings always show through with his thoughts. Is this not what Master Han said about the axe thief?"

When affected by emotion, the conceiving mind, the agent of direct communication between man and nature and between nature and art, becomes individualized and consequently carries the taint of a localized and unnatural form. How is a writer to attain a style of writing comparable to the category of creative and preeminent (shen-yi) in painting and be freed, so to speak, from the appearance of an axe thief?

In another passage of the letter to Hsieh Min-shih, Su Shih, elaborated on the concept of tz'u-ta ("language must communicate") as the ultimate achievement in literary skill, the stylistic equivalent of shen-yi in painting.

Confucius said, "Language not in good style will not travel far." He also said, "It is sufficient if language communicates the meaning." However, language that merely communicates [the author's] intent [yi] is often suspected of being less than good style; this is greatly in error. To seek out the innermost mystery of things is like trying to tether the wind or capture a shadow. Not one man in thousands can have a perfect understanding [of the mystery] in his mind, much less be able to make it perfectly intelligible in speech or in writing. To be able to do this is what is meant by "language communicating the meaning." When language communicates, it is in more than sufficiently good style.

What language communicates, after all, is yi. And to make language communicate, a writer, according to Su Shih, must first have "the mystery of things" clearly conceived in his mind—that is, he must conceive his subject as a painter conceives nature, with his mind detached from personal emotions; his mind must also be free of moral bias, so that things will communicate by themselves in speech or in writing. One way to accomplish this is to see the subject in the way a painter sees water, through a series of external changes, because change is the the visible way in which things express themselves in nature: dashing torrents, huge waves, and gushing springs, all changing form at every encounter with things, express the nature of water.

The "Two-Oneness" of Change and Continuation in the "Rhymeprose on the Red Cliff

Once this conception and expression of change in nature are transferred to the conception of change in the human world, man's life and history, with all their ups and downs and their monumental events, become one with the twists and turns of the torrents and waves. The "Rhymeprose on the Red Cliff" (1082) may be viewed as a literary recreation of this transference of perspective, the natural rhythm of change applied to the vicissitudes of human life and history; as the transient in man merges with the continual process of dissolution and growth in nature, the boundaries between finite mind and infinite nature dissolve.…

One question often raised about the "Rhymeprose on the Red Cliff" is whether the work is to be read as two pieces or one. In fact, the first part is much more often read than the second, which is not infrequently omitted from anthologies. This practice is based on a failure to appreciate the underlying unity of the two parts. Another question concerns the discrepancy between the single crane and the two feather-robed Taoist priests in the second part; this problem is closely related to the issue of whether the "Rhymeprose on the Red Cliff" is one work or two. The problem of the crane has elicited the interest of many scholars and created much discomfort among critics. A common solution has been textual emendation: "two Taoist priests" is changed to "one Taoist priest," and the discrepancy conveniently disappears, although some editions of Su Shih's collected works persist in printing "two Taoist priests." But this textual problem of two or one can probably best be solved by an examination of the themes of the rhymeprose and of the idea of two-oneness.

Part I of the prose poem opens with Su Shih and his guests riding in a boat under the Red Cliff by the light of the full moon in the seventh month of the year. They are in a convivial mood, drinking and chanting poetry. Presently one of the guests begins to play his flute. The plaintiveness of the music rouses Su Shih to ask why he plays so sadly. The guest replies that the scene has reminded him of a poem written below the Red Cliff by the great hero Ts'ao Ts'ao in his prime, nearly 900 years before. That reminder has caused him to reflect on his own mortality. He envies the river, which flows endlessly, and wishes that he could roam the heavens forever as a companion to the moon. But knowing that his wish is impossible, he can only express his sadness in music. Su Shih counters the guest's lament by pointing out that the river and the moon remain ever the same despite the appearance of continual change. There is no occasion for envy or sadness, Su Shih says, since from the standpoint of change, nothing ever endures, and nature cannot be possessed by the force of human desires and aspirations. All that man can do is to enjoy what is offered him in his encounters with nature. Thereupon, the guest takes heart, and all present continue their carousal till daybreak, when they are all drunk and pillowed on one another.

The first piece, then, is a statement on human mortality and freedom cast in the form of a dialogue between Su Shih and his guest. The guest mourns the transience of man's life and fame and aspires to immortality. According to Su Shih, however, there is no such thing as mortality or immortality; these are merely human concepts prompted by human desires and aspirations. If one can contemplate the manifestations of mortality and transience in life and in history in the same way in which he contemplates the water and the moon in nature—detached from personal sentiments and desires—then he will see that there is no cause to mourn.

Part II of the rhymeprose recounts another visit to the Red Cliff three months later. The season and the mood are both quite different. It is again a clear, moonlit night, but in place of the soft breeze on the water, there is a heavy frost on the ground. The conviviality of the occasion is not so pronounced since food and drink are not ready at hand. Su Shih's conversation with his guests, which bears on the latter problem, is in sharp contrast to the earlier exalted discourse on the exploits of past heroes and the impermanence of life. There is again a boat ride, but the center of action shifts to the land.

Su Shih is seen walking with two guests through a winter landscape from his country retreat to his home. Presently, having obtained fish and wine, they are on their way to the Red Cliff. Su Shih then leaves his guests and climbs to the top of the cliff. The scene has changed beyond recognition since his last visit, and Su Shih is oppressed by its bleakness. High above the river, he sits alone and whistles to the wind; but it is too cold to stay there long, and he descends and returns to the boat. It is almost midnight. A solitary crane flies by. Shortly after, the guests leave and Su Shih goes home to sleep. In a dream, he encounters two Taoist priests, in feather robes, who inquire about his excursion that night. Suddenly realizing that the priests are the very crane that flew by his boat earlier, he awakes with a start. He looks out of his door, but there is no sign of the priests.

In comparison with the first part, the second is quite low-keyed. It is tempting to interpret its subdued tone in the same light as that in which some critics interpret the change in scenery and mood—that is, as a deliberate attempt to bring out by contrast the theme of change and transience in life. Such an interpretation, however, entails serious contradictions not only in the development of the two parts of the piece itself but also with regard to what we have already understood of Su Shih's appreciation of the phenomenon of change in nature. Within the rhymeprose itself, Master Su has already argued in the first part that there is no basis for melancholy over the passing of good moments in history and in life; he has offered the moon and the running water as two arresting images of how things can be seen from the dualistic perspective of change-continuity. The moon and the water are still present in the second part. Which of the two, then, are we to accept as representing the basic theme of the whole piece— the changing mood of Su Shih under two different circumstances or the consistently unchanging moon and water? This issue, a highly speculative one, is visibly projected in the one-crane two-priests enigma.

Before we examine the conception of change implied in the shift of number from one to two, let us consider the use of the dream in literature as a device for expressing speculative thought. One example that comes readily to mind is the dream in the second chapter of the Chuang-tzu, where, after a long discussion of dreams and their interpretation, it is said that Chuang Chou dreamt that he was a butterfly.

Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou. But he didn't know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou. Between Chuang Chou and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.

The dream in the Chuang-tzu, as in the second part of Su Shih's rhymeprose, suggests a move away from reality toward meditation on what constitutes reality. The issue in question in the Chuang-tzu is not whether it is Chuang Chou dreaming or the butterfly dreaming. The dream is the framework in which the idea of the "transformation of things" is expressed. Poised between two possible modes of reality—Chuang Chou dreaming and the butterfly dreaming—but committed to neither, one is forced by the lack of resolution on a realistic level to take notice of the idea of "transformation," which pre-sents a resolution on the speculative level; namely, the merging of the two differentiated states of being in time— Chuang Chou and the butterfly. This merging in time constitutes the formai structure of the idea of "transformation."

Similarly, the lack of a resolution between the apparently contradictory positions of Su Shih in Parts I and II forces one to seek a unifying standpoint on the speculative level—that is, through the idea of two-oneness as projected in the dream: the transformation of one crane into two Taoist priests. What the dream in the second part seeks to communicate is essentially the same speculation about change as that expressed in the dialogue between Master Su and his guest in the first part. But now there is an implicit exchange of positions: Su Shih assumes the position of the guest, and the dream speaks for his own previous position. In the dream, not only is emotional bias verbally excluded from the depiction of the coexist-ence of change and continuity, but differentiated time, the usual context of change, is eliminated as well. In terms of differentiated existence over time, one that approximates the numerically rational correspondences of nature seen in distinct, arrested moments, one crane should indeed "change" into one Taoist priest (or vice versa provided that that kind of change is considered more possible than changing into two). But if existence is seen in terms of undifferentiated continuity, the crane, on the speculative level, is at once itself and the Taoist priest, which makes two. The dream, therefore, is a poetic marker of this shift in modes of thought; it is the author's way of calling attention to the fact that what is under consideration is only a speculative idea—a theme, so to speak—which is not something that can be proved in realistic terms or be called true or false.

In an early controversy over the two-one problem, a Sung scholar remarked that the passage about the crane and two Taoist priests may contain an allusion to a story about the T'ang emperor Ming-huang. According to the story, the emperor Ming-huang went hunting on the Double Ninth and shot a solitary crane flying in the mountains. The crane flew away to the southwest with the arrow. Nearby was a temple that an itinerant Taoist priest was accustomed to visit three or four times every year. One day, the priest arrived with an arrow in his hand. He told the residents of the temple that the owner of the arrow would be there two years later and that they should return the arrow to him. Two years later, the emperor visited the temple. When he saw the arrow and the date inscribed on it, he realized that the crane he had shot on that ninth day of the ninth month was the very same itinerant Taoist priest.

The inference here is, of course, that Su Shih may have been alluding to the crane in the story of the emperor Ming-huang and translating the possibility of their being one and the same crane into the presence of two Taoist priests in the dream (for what more apt image could one use to express the idea of possibility?). Or, if one wants to be witty, the crane of the rhymeprose could merely have joined the crane of the story of the emperor Ming-huang, and both cranes continued their existence as priests. At any rate, "playing" with the allusion also collapses the chronology, making the Ming-huang crane a contemporary, in some way, of the rhymeprose crane. This collapse of time is achieved by the image of two priests walking together. One priest would constitute a simple allusion to the previous test. However, even if we grant this playfulness to the author, this is still a local solution, which explains the dream but does not elucidate the total unity of the two prose poems.

The "Rhymeprose on the Red Cliff" was, in my opin-ion, certainly conceived as one piece twice enacted in different moments of life. The theme is that of time and life as conceived from the two complementary viewpoints of change and continuity. From the first part to the sec-ond, there is a steady progression from the concrete to the abstract, from the human to the natural, and from change-in-time (historical moments such as Ts'ao Ts'ao's battle at the Red Cliff) to timeless becoming (the dream). The order of progression in the two parts strongly suggests that the abstract and timeless (one crane) encompasses the concrete and differentiated (two priests). This idea of "two-oneness" is at once the beginning and the origin of all successive changes in time.

L. E. J. Brouwer, the Dutch philosopher and mathematician, said the following about man's intuition of two-oneness as the origin of numbers:

This neo-intuitionism considers the falling apart of moments of life into qualitatively different parts, to be reunited only while remaining separated by time, as the fundamental phenomenon of the intellect, passing by abstracting from its emotional content into the fundamental phenomenon of mathematical thinking, the intuition of two-oneness, the basal intuition of mathematics, creates not only the numbers one and two, but also all finite ordinal numbers, in as much as one of the elements of the two-oneness may be thought of as a new two-oneness, which process may be repeated indefinitely.

This pregnant passage can be seen as bringing Su Shih's fundamental insight on change and continuity to the highest level of abstraction, removing all specificity from every concrete phenomenon of change and grasping the absolute essentials of identity and difference. The abstraction of all emotional content contrasts well with Su Shih's similar demand for the less austere purpose of avoiding bias. But, of course, Su Shih's crane image is much more evocative than a simple mathematical concept. The crane suggests not only two-oneness but a whole process of change and continuity, a variation on a theme that takes on its own life and escapes abstraction.

Change, or transformation, need not be a tragic phenomenon; it may simply be the process of coming into being or passing from one state of being to another. Change may be the law governing not decline and death but the incessant process of generation, as in the Yi ching; it may be the law governing incipiency, birth, and the phenomenal world. In other words, death is tragic and the phenomenon of existence impermanent only if one in-sists on seeing them from the perspective of a single life-death succession (sheng-ssu). Su Shih, in his "Rhymeprose on the Red Cliff," has eliminated the sense of the tragic view of life (which is not the same as eliminating the sense of the tragic in life) by broadening the span of life beyond the confines of one life-death succession to the life-[death]-life succession (sheng-sheng) of the Yi ching tradition. He has thereby escaped the law governing change as decline and death and has attained freedom from the necessity of the tragic, as Han Yü, Liu Tsung-yüan, and Ou-yang Hsiu did before him.

Han Yü attained freedom through identification with the orthodox Confucian tradition, thereby transcending time. Liu Tsung-yüan attained it through an affirmation of the necessity of moral good in man, thus transcending the necessity of physical law (tzu-jan) of nature and history. Ou-yang Hsiu liberated himself through a firm grasp of the irreducible facts in life, which comprehend different phases and levels of man's achievement and which make reality credible. Su Shih achieved the same end by dissolving the boundary between the real and the unreal, between the desirable and the undesirable, and finally between life and death. Because all four men ultimately derived the inspiration for their affirmation of life from the schools of thought of ancient times (ku) and because each produced a body of prose works expressing that affirmation, they are usually considered together as writ-ers of the ancient-prose style (ku-wen). The fact that Su Shih articulated his most penetrating statement on tao and wen in rhymeprose—which is not purely a prose form— need not prevent us from considering him within the framework of the ku-wen movement. The keynote of dissolution of the boundary between manifested (literary) forms in Su Shih's concept of literature and art is eminently present in this work of literary art. This dissolution of boundary in Su Shih's thinking about wen and tao (whether in terms of the Yi ching or Buddhism or Taoism) marks a second turn away from the norm established by Han Yü in his program for ku-wen writers, which insists on a pure integration of the ancient (Confucian) tao with established, classical literary forms.

As many of Su Shih's critics charged in his lifetime, he was an eclectic and unorthodox thinker. A central characteristic of his eclecticism is that he seems never to have followed any one line of thought to a definitive position; his conclusions were intuitive rather than formal. This eclecticism is probably the reason why he has never been accorded a conspicuous place in Chinese intellectual history, and why so few literary historians and critics have tried to place his works in their contemporary intellectual context. On the whole, when we look at the concepts of ch'i and li and the principle of generation (sheng-sheng) of the Yi ching, which informed his method (fa) of literary creation and art criticism, it is apparent that he was more a disciple of contemporary Neo-Confucian thinkers like Shao Yung (1011-77), Chang Tsai (1020-77), Ch'eng Yi (1033-1108), and Ch'eng Hao (1032-85) than of the T'ang ku-wen masters. Therefore, his ku-wen theory and practice must be understood not primarily in terms of what he had in common with his mentor Ou-yang Hsiu or his much-admired predecessors Han Yü and Liu Tsung-yüan but in terms of what was current, volatile, and revolutionary in the intellectual trends of his own time. Only then can we begin to appreciate the complexity of the process in the ku-wen movement that transformed T'ang classicism into Sung Neo-Confucianism.