Discover the Beauty of the
Rhymes and Vibes in the Song Dynasty
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Translator's Notes
(Oct. 1989)
The present work would not have happened if my graduate student, Min Xiaohong (Julia) had not brought
to my attention the poetry of Su Shi, the favorite classical author of her colleague at Huanggang Teachers'
College, Professor Huang Hai-peng. Min had had the pleasure of perusing Su's work at Dong-po Red Cliff
every day during her three years teaching in the college, and later, before writing her M.A. thesis on Su, had
climbed Mt E-Mei, paid a visit to the Three-Su Temple and called upon famous experts of the poet, who had
inspired Min. She in turn turned me on to the poetry of Su, the 11th Century politician and writer who
spent most of his career in exile in the countryside of China. Min first had the idea of translation and we
began putting Dong-po's poems into English on rainy Sunday afternoons in Hubei Province while I was
an exchange professor at Huazhong Normal University in Wuhan in 1986 and 1987. His salon sense of
composition in combination with his utterly human and personal frankness made him seem so alive and
intense. He seemed a bit of a Chinese Chaucer, if I may make the comparison. He truly seemed to step
out of the Medieval tapestry and walk a lonely garden at midnight, in the mind's eye, thinking of the past,
of lost love, of the timeless beauty of the common life, and above all, of good luck and bad luck that test
one's character in the world.
Professor Huang Hai-peng made from Su's hundreds of poems a selection of Su Shi's best-known and
loved pieces and developed a set of historical and cultural notes for each poem. Min Xiao-hong put all
these into broken English for my use. Huang and his wife together laid out each poem in original characters
and, pinyin. To amplify Huang's notes, Min wrote some comments for the Western readership. She made
suggestions about the tone, compared with American and British poets and poetry, so that I could sense the
subtleties between the lines and come nearer to Su's feelings and thoughts. I recomposed the poems in
English. Min suggested refinements here and there and thus created the primary manuscript. It truly was
an intensely collective effort.
We decided to represent the salon aspects of Su Shi's work with one English word or small phrase for
each Chinese character, in general. His poems' lines are four, five, six, or seven characters in length, usually.
I believe we had the opportunity to work in all the insinuations and much of the semantic action of the
original characters, though I felt obliged to recompose the rather taut and clipped non-syntactical flow of the
originals as English sentencing. In Chinese poetry, the characters are fitted together in readers' imagination
in the act of performing the poem to his or her own mind's pleasure, as if the poem were a text of musical
notations, the mind its instrument. Both the spirit of composition of Song Dynasty poetry and the openness
with which it addressed the worlds of experience outside courtly and intellectually fashionable matters are
remarkable. It was an era that saw expansions in subject matters and a sort of Romantic declaration of the
poet's self as the central matter of composition. And Su Shi is among the masters of the era. He knew well the
great poets of the past, Du Fu, Wen Ting-yun, Wang Wei, Bai Ju-yi, and of course Li Bai. He knew practically
by heart the writings of Laozi, and Kong Fu Zi, Confucius, and indeed passed government qualifying tests at
several levels on the great works of the past, for Song government appointment. He would already have
internalized the strictures and fashions in composition, the prescriptions, and conventions when he began
his career writing. He was a master of the Chu poem, which is a kind of freely constructed lyric. He composed
numerous Song ci, poems written to be performed with voice and instruments to the ancient and popular
melodies. He knew and admired the Lü-Shi, or tonally formulated couplet poems, of the T'ang era, eight or
twelve-line poems featuring end rhymes and lines of five or six characters, and the Jue-Ju, a quatrain made of
five to seven-character lines, that was often set to music, too, and, at its best, left the reader sus-
pended among several possible realizations. He knew many of the old Yue-Fu, or popular songs, words, and
tunes. He knew perfectly well the intellectual gravities of Confucian thought, with all its emphases on duties
and responsibilities to family, village, and state, of Daoist and Buddhist thought, with their emphases on the
illusory character of the world and the timelessness of the senses. And he knew, as did all scholar-artists, the
ancient model poems, the Shi Jing, compiled before the time of Confucius (5th Century B.C.), and the Chu-ci,
or Elegies of Chu, including his Nine Songs, composed rhapsodically and filled with rather sensuous imagery,
in five to seven character lines broken with a sort of suspended pause that amounts to a kind of inward sigh.
The subject matters of the Nine Songs are unusually personal. These poems date from the time of the Warring
Kingdoms, in the centuries following Confucius. I mean to suggest that Su Shi's originality includes thorough
and lively utilization of his very many sources and influences. He was, as were so many before him, a scholar-
poet as well as a would-be statesman. We hope certain flourishes of language and phrasing in English and
certain traditional tricks, such as internal and end rhymes, alliteration, and assonance will suggest strongly
the formality of the originals, in which balanced and counted tones, from line to 1ine, subtle effects of shorter
and longer syllables, and taut, continuous allusions to the mythological, literary, and historical past all furnish
dynamic aspects. Add to these matters the matter of Nature in Chinese literature, which tends to refer to a
fixed world of symbols, including not only phenomena in nature but also the accumulated values in every
character (language) and all the ancient wisdom and lore of the culture, which are considerable. For instance,
in classical Chinese writing, many expressions allude to former, beautiful expressions in the culture. The poet
must have studied all and believed that Nature and Chineseness existed complete in antiquity. His task is to
join the present to it.
We have taken compositional shortcuts to keep the poems from sprawling to include all their subtleties,
allusions to events in the historical and literary past, and mythological references. We have added notes and
appreciation to help the reader bridge from the poems' texts to thorough readings. The well-trained Chinese
reader would bring most of these matters with him/ her to the act of reading. Poetry, as has been said, is the
most compressed, cultural expression of all. We readers of poetry in English bring to our famous texts a very
similar body of lore and references. We hope we have presented you with readable poems after all these
calculations and recompositions.
And if our calculations and inspirations have not been enough, we have included on opposing pages the
texts of the originals. in Chinese characters and pinyin and broken English. These, with the historical notes
and the appreciation, should invite the reader to make up his/her own versions of Su Dong-po's poems.
Certainly, the whole package should show the reader what we have done with our sources. We are grateful to
Henan People's Publishing House for the opportunity to present such a comprehensive package of work. Also
I wish to thank Memphis State University for the opportunity to work as an exchange professor in China and
for a faculty development grant to return to China to work on this project.
by Gordon Osing
Su Shi and His Times
Ⅰ.
Su Shi ( Su Dong-po) was a native of Meishan, in what is now
Sichuan province, living in the second half of what we have come
to call the North China Song Dynasty (960-1126). The dynasty
had been founded by the famous General Zhao, who, after he
had saved the kingdom from the Khitan nomads from the
northeast, set himself on the throne and unified the nation once
again, after several generations of struggle and instability. But it
was not a soldier's empire that he founded; his kingdom enjoyed
a certain orderly rule, national unification of policies at several
levels, the emergence of a truly urban class of social managers,
and, above all, the development of a national civil service that re-
quired scholar/ artists to administer. Tests were given and a rela-
tively few applicants were passed to still more rigorous tests in the
capital, and still another at the palace. These tests were held every
three years,and fewer than ten per cent of the original applicants
finally became honored administrators. The examinations fea-
tured questions of distinctions between literary styles and aesthet-
ic bases for distinguishing the poets and artists of the past.
Examinees were asked about the histories of the usages of certain
key words and phrases. In brief, the imperial tests were examina-
tions of deep and thorough cultural savvy, which the candidate
would presumably bring to bear in his judgements and admini-
strative style. His word would be de facto legislation; after all.
China's tradition is the rule of men, not of abstract law.
At that time the Emperor's chief advisor and administrator,
something like a Prime Minister, was Wang Anshi (1021-1086),
“the bull-headed,”who achieved a particularly modern sounding
national administration, with advisory and regional administra-
tive bureaus arranged beneath the throne. There was a council of
ministers to advise the Emperor, and three supervisory bodies, a
secretariat that was very much like a cabinet,a privy council that
handled military matters, and a finance commission that man-
aged the budget. Policies were pursued to bring together the
needs of the landowners and the peasants, always at odds with
one-another, and the new urban classes that dealt in trade and
commerce.
Of course, Wang Anshi was criticised by the old Confucian con-
servatives, who considered these successes too much central gov-
ernment, and of course the old enmities between the small farm-
ers and peasants and the feudal landowners did not cease. But
there was order and national unity.
Su Shi was one of those scholar / administrator / advisors, whose
political career had several very severe ups and downs, his falls
generally related to the unpopularity of his positions with several
fashions in power.
Su Shi's Meishan was about forty li from Sichuan's scenic Mount
E-Mei. In his day the region already manifested an advanced,in
tegrated culture. It was a center for printing and the production
of painting and literature. He was born on January 8,1037, ac-
cording to the modern calendar,December 18,1036 according to
the Chinese lunar calendar. His parents were well-to-do and his
father,in particular,practiced learning and the arts and desired
that his two sons follow in his footsteps. Because only the two
sons survived the hardships of life in those days, the old man,Su
Xun,and his Lady Chen,wished both boys. Su Shi and Su Zhe,
to achieve learning and skills in arts, in calligraphy, formal essay
writing,painting, poetry, and music. Su Shi's elder brother also
achieved some renown as a Confucian scholar. The father did a
good job of passing on to his sons the feudal ethical codes of
Confucian culture. Honor, integrity, a correct social order, hones-
ty,suspicion of rapid or novel changes, service to family and vi1
lage: these were Confucian virtues. Above all, he taught them to
seek to become what are called in Chinese towns and villages“no-
tables,” people elevated above others by virtue of their having
achieved the truest realization of the Chinese ideal.
Already at the age of eight Su Shi entered Tian Qing Guan by the
North End,a famous elementary academy in Meishan. His teach-
er there was the Taoist scholar Zhang Yi-jian, who put Su Shi
through his lessons on The Chu Ci , the old poems of Li Bai,Du
Fu, Bai Ju-yi, Tao Yuan-ming, Du Mu, Li Shang-yin, Wang
Wei, Han Yu, Liu Zong-yuan, and the ancient classics, too. Su
Shi was also obliged to study the Zhuang Zi by Zhuang Zhou,
the great Daoist scholar of the Warring States, the Zhanguo peri-
od (403-221 B.C.). That great old classical author had written
against Confucian codes of behavior, social hierarchies,and the
formalizing of living. He valued closeness to nature, harmony of
being with the simple harmonies of water and land, animals and
plants, human acts and purposes. In brief, he wrote about what
Daoists called “The Way” which need not be socially formalized.
Neither the Confucian nor the Daoist influences of his education
were ever replaced in Su Shi's mind, though, in exile, frequently,
he preferred the Daoist consolations of nature and an art that
was to him his“way”.
Both Su Xun's sons did well on the imperial examinations, Su Shi
finishing second in all the empire. His elder brother Su Zhe ob-
tained high praise from the old examiner Ouyang Xiu for his
prose style.(One has to remember that prose writing, too, had to
obey certain Confucian models of progression and frequent allu-
sion to established classics. There was no objective logic; the craft
of writing was considered a skill in constant and subtle cross
referencing of sources and examples.)
The three, in fact, became known in Chinese scholarly folklore as
“The Three Su's.”On a second journey to the capital in 1059,af-
ter the Lady Chen's untimely death and the appropriate mourn-
ing period Su Shi wrote his first series of poems, on the scenery
along the Chang-jiang (The Yangzi River), a group of pieces that
came to be known as The Journey South.
He arrived in the capital somewhat more learned than experi-
enced in real political power. His ideas about national policies
were still too much influenced by the old ideas he had mastered,
and, when he became a court advisor,he soon found himself at
odds with the prevailing ideas about how to reform the country's
various old ways of doing things. Wang Anshi was willing to see a
stronger central government,at the cost of village and rural inde-
pendence, and he had found a way to bolster the unorganized ag-
ricultural situation with what was called“The New Law.”This
change of agricultural policy offered the farmers what would
seem to us quite modern, enlightened assistance, in return for na-
tional control of marketing products. The farmers could borrow
to plant seed, and money could be lent on the basis of the history
of each land parcel's history of productivity. The interest would
be 20%, ordinary in those days. In case of a bad harvest, each
farmer could hold-off repaying until a successful year. Also cal-
led“The Green Sprouts Act,”this law required only organized
marketing in return, with the national government, through its
business representatives, using the grain as an export and trading
commodity. It would seem all parties had something to gain in
the arrangement. The Confucians at court, though, believed it
was dangerous if not immoral for the national government to en-
ter into such distant control of local matters. Wang Anshi's gov-
ernment also offered loans to small businesses,set price controls
all over the land,transferred surplus grains from prosperous to
needy regions, invented tax differentials for high and low yielding
lands,encouraged local defense units under local gentry, and even
quartered state-owned horses on local farmers' lands, which the
farmers could use until the militia needed them. Su Shi was
among those learned ones who spoke against so much central-
izing of government. Both his Confucian and his Daoist lessons
had emphasized local,rural and village dimensions as best. In
fact, he spoke out pretty righteously about the Emperor's strate-
gies for unifying the country,and made several very powerful en-
emies,who soon accused him of something like treason,for which
he might, in fact, be exiled or worse. Clearly there was also some
dislike in the air,based on envy and suspicion of this exceptional-
ly learned beginner in politics.
After serving well as Assistant Magistrate at Fengxiang he was
invited to the Capital (Dec.,1064) to serve as secretary in the
Department of History, to lead in drafting edicts, in fact (A year
later his beloved first wife died.). The years 1064-1070 are riddled
with conflict between Su Shi and Wang Anshi. This is the time of
the famous“nine-thousand word letter”. That included the wis-
dom,“The emperor holds six fresh horses with worn-out reins.”
Su Shi spent the next eight years governing at Hang Zhou
. 15 .
(1071-1074), Mizhou (1074-1076), Suzhou (1077-1079) and
Huzhou (1079), until his positions and political satires annoyed
the throne too much and he was summoned to trial in the capital
and found guilty.
He was imprisoned and expected the death sentence, which was
commuted at a last monent, and exile to Huangang
Huangzhou) was offered instead. This was the first of several
failures at the capital that resulted in exile, sometimes to impor-
tant posts, sometimes to unimportant. Once he was sentenced to
become “ Inspector of Waterways,” a post with no duties and a
salary of one bag of wine per year, of course an insulting and
humiliating sentence. In 1079 he arrived in exile in Huangang,
where he purchased and opened a new farm on the East Hill,a
few li from the Red Cliff Pavilion, a Daoist meditation temple
over-looking, then, the Chang-jiang. He took his literary name
from that East Hill, Dong-po, and became thereafter Su
Dong-po.
It was out on his farm, Dong-po, and at the Red Cliff Pavilion
that he wrote so many of his famous ci. This exile lasted a little
over four years, from 1080 to 1084. He tilled and fished and made
his life with ordinary people, took Daoist pleasure in their daily
things,and quite often drank too much and wrote and toasted
the moon in the Yangzi from Red Cliff. Several of his best and
most famous pieces are from this life in exile in Huangzhou. His
poems are still carved in wood and stone in that wonderful old
pavilion. And how fresh and alive the old poet seems in those
characters now eight-hundred years old.
In 1085 he returned to the capital, now convinced the people had
benefited from the enlightened policies of Wang Anshi. But the
Emperor's old policies had succeeded just enough to be not so
much needed any longer, and besides, old oppositions had now
succeeded in changing the throne's mind and a revival of
Confucian piety now prevailed and the former new laws were
now in serious disfavor. So Su Shi was once again on the wrong
side, this time armed with serious quantities of peasant virtue and
democratic zeal. And here was Su Shi praising the reforms and,
worse, criticizing provincial administrators for corruption and
failures to have the people's best interests at heart. Again, he
seemed the radical, this time the over-zealous reformer. He spent
the rest of his career being assigned from post to post where he
was far from the concerns of those at court. Sometimes his posts
were ironic and humiliating. Finally he was sent as far as Hainan
Island,off the south China coast, about as far from the capital as
one could get.
He made his life from minor administrative post to post, finally in
old age, to desolate Hainan, and did not compromise his belief in
ordinary living and in the rights of people to decent government
administration, He also kept track of his own jnner life by writing
poems on a remarkable variety of matters. In fact, the variety of
his subjects became a strong influence in subsequent Chinese
literary art; so did his artful personality, his“Romantic temper-
ament,” as later, other lights would call it. At sixty-six, Su Shi
requested permission to retire, from his position on Hainan Is-
land,and was on his way back to the capital, weary, quite ex-
hausted, in fact, but not the least broken in his faith in the com-
mon life, when, half way to Changzhou, the old master-poet
died,in 1101.
In Europe, in the time of Su Shi's life, the highest houses still used
oiled linen for windows, Holy Rome was beginning its resurgence
from physical and moral ruins with the Gregorian Reforms,
Moslem invaders controlled all of Spain except the strongholds of
Navarre and Leon, France was a coalition of powerful nobles
who elected the weakest among them king; Germany was a col-
lection of duchies whose nobles were openly and successfully op-
posed to central authority (that is, until Henry IV stood in the ice
and snow three days waiting for Gregory's forgiveness at the cas-
tle of Canossa), the Scandinavian kingdoms were pirates' nests.
and, though the basic shapes of the countries of Europe were in
place, agriculture,commerce and trade,immigrations of surplus
peasant populations to new towns. and transformations of or-
deals and magical trial rituals into legal systems had only just be-
gun. In Su Shi's lifetime, Norman knights turned their con-
quering successes westward and Duke William defeated Harold
Godwinson at Hastings, on October 14, 1066, and changed the
cultures of the Anglo-Saxons, and Celts and Danes forever. In
November of 1095, Pope Urban, charged the French people with
the holiness and various usefulnesses of the cause of retaking the
Holy Land from the heathen Mohammedan, to which whole new
populations, somewhat in excess anyway of what home-lands
could stand, responded vigorously.
Only a few years earlier, in the Song capital of Kaifeng. newly ar-
rived Su Shi,intellectual, artist,and chosen advisor to the throne,
had pronounced without subtlety or caution, “Why is the great
Emperor demeaning himself by peddling coal and ice like any
greedy,ordinary merchant!” For this he was actually lucky mere-
1y to be sent into exile. though it turned out to be perennial. So-
cial ideals were formalized, too, to the point of mortal punish-
ments for those failing in agreement. The empire was already an-
cient, in its third or fourth millennium as tradition would have it ,
and even in competitions for power between court eunuchs and
advisors, some ultimate cultural Platonism was believed to reside
in every decision. “The Rule of Heaven”was a goal and a real
possibility to those struggling for power in The Middle Kingdom.
So Su Shi's fate had been pretty much permanently decided even
as Wang Anshi's political reforms came to be regarded as devia-
tions from “The Rule of Heaven. ”When the emperor's successor
Shen Zong died in 1085. all the reforms were abolished and the
Dragon Throne's interest in the management of the details of
peasants' lives became once again deeply unfashionable.
Ⅱ.
Scholars of Chinese literary history consider Su Shi as both the
consummate, all-around artist and something of an innovator,
too,especially in his poetry. He left behind splendid examples of
calligraphy,some 2700 known poems, and considerable social
and intellectual commentary, much of it written as Daoist satire
of developments in his time.
In one such satire he assaults the Confucian tendency to see
things in prescriptions and proscriptions, and asserts several
Daoist principles:
One blind man from birth has no conception of
the sun. If one day he questions someone about
the sun, he is told,“The sun is like a brass basin. ” Then
he knocks against a basin and hears it clang. and
later takes a bell for the sun. So another man tells
him,“The sunlight is like a candle. ”Then he feels
a candle to discover its shape, and later takes a
flute for the sun. The sun is very different from
bells and flutes,but a blind man does not know
this because he has never seen it he goes by hear-
say.
Now the Way is more difficult to discern than the
sun, and those who do not study are like blind
men. So when one who knows the way speaks of
it,even though he is skilled in making apt com-
parisons, he can think of nothing better than a
basin or a candle; though a basin may make his
hearer think of a bell, a candle of a flute, until the
hearer gets farther and farther from the truth.
Thus when men talk of the Way, they attempt to
describe it in terms of what they have seen. or
imagine it without having seen it, and in both
cases they deviate from the Way.
One sees in these remarks not only a presentation of Daoist prin-
ciples but also an ur-apology,defining the territories of figurative
thought, or poetic language, as strongest when 1east definitive,
when most allusive and suggestive without becoming
programatic.
Su Shi influenced literary developments in poetry in both the
matters of subjects and styles. His poems quite often present the
most accurate and intimate details of ordinary peasant living, add
those to the accumulated and almost exclusively courtly matters
taken as legitimate in times past. He writes of harassed peasant
women working their farms for primarily tax-collectors' gains, of
a famously crooked sherrif getting his just deserts, of old fishing
and drinking buddies in their straw capes cleaning their nets and
hanging them out to dry, of wonderful festivals in remote villages,
of pretty local girls and their lucky husbands.
The fashions in writing that prevailed in his day featured courtly
goings-on, sentimental romance, and something like the cliches
of Petrarchan art as essential to literary performance. Su Shi's
sympathies and pleasures directed at the poor and the common
people were as good as serious departures, even though they
were,in fact, returns to the earlier innovations of Li Po and Li
Bai, the great Tang Dynasty poets.
One of Su Shi's continuing themes is the loss of virtue in high
places, and the loss of the more basic and dramatic sense of old
times. “The snows and the roses of yesterday”stuff, to be sure.
but he also exercises against intellectual and artistic decadence.
The gulf between palace and remote rice paddies seemed more
than wrong to him; it was a betrayal and the palace pretense that
government was above all that humble stuff outraged him. More
than several of his poems speak against official indifference and
corruption.
So his works bring art and the life of his times together,are ulti-
mately anti-artifice in the strictest sense, though he was himself
exceedingly well-trained as an artist, and did create as an
innovator of technical and artistic traditions, which he knew quite
well. His one continuing theme was that honorable men must suf
fer the world a good deal.
He wrote many nature lyrics,in which he repeatedly described
moments of peace and satisfaction in that changeless world, for
all its simplicities and variety and availability. He was a master at
finding his inner life and struggles reflected and solved in mo-
ments of pure release and pleasure in scenery and actions in the
natural world,in a lonely swan-goose's coming to rest in win
tered sand by a river. in the reappearance of the first globe-fish
when the soul was all but wintered-out. In his emotional frank-
ness and directness, Su Shi reminds the Western reader of
Wordsworth and aspects of the other Romantics. His poem
about the purple plum tree blooming alone while it is still winter
is perhaps the best example of all, and his most famous. Of spe-
cial interest to us in this volume are the ci poems, usually and
historically written to existing tunes, mostly by courtiers in love,
and riddled with predictable attitudes and comparisons. General-
ly they were dedicated to a favorite“singsong” girl of the season.
Generally they were unmemorable. Su Shi took the occasion of
this form and expanded its subject matter to things far more im-
mediate and honest and truly personal and lively. “The Lady”in
his poems is most likely to be an isolated and grimly fated peasant
woman, or his own deceased beloved wife. Or else he will satirize
lost worlds by calling forth in his heart ancient beauties and
fairy-ladies,that abound in Chinese folklore and mythical histo-
ry. It is his own experience that he bares to his readers,and there-
by relegates more conventional works to a museum of sameness.
In some respects Su Shi strikes us as rather modern, especially in
consideration of his emotional frankness and sense of irony and
alienation. Add to these gestures his ability to fuse scholarly
reference with ordinary speech, and one begins to get the full
sense of his contribution to traditions. There is also the implied
suggestion in his work that the content of artistic expression, in-
definite as it must be, and tentative if not limited by time and lan-
guage and skill, is the praxis of culture and History. In his poem
about the qin, the Chinese musical instrument,he insists that the
music is neither in the strings nor in the hands that stroke them,
but, a la'Wallace Stevens, in the cultured mind that plays upon
the strings, in its passions.
Chinese critics generally credit Su Shi with declaring and proving
the subjective world as at least the equal of any presumed objec-
tive one. The Nature he finds his way back to is both an actual
natural world, and also an original world of Chinese-ness in the
humblest living,etc... The old poets he alludes to frequently
would chide latter-day decadences, he implies.
The over-all effect of Su Shi's poetry is a freshness and a vitality
that renewed poetry as a cultural force. He and his contemporary
Huang Ting-jian founded the “Jiangxi School,”sometimes called
the“Su-Huang School,”characterized by personal,immediate
and often colloquialized uses of received forms. Most critics con-
sider Su Shi to have been the greatest Song poet. The least one
can say is that his art took to itself the greatest possible breadth
and variety of influences.
Indeed,Su Shi's preference for dealing with ordinary lives and the
direct and realistic manner in which he depicts those lives,do
inevitably call to mind England's Chaucer,whose times live fully
in his work, too.
His contribution to the promotion of ci poems from palace dalli-
ances to literary substance, his democritizing of its contents and
transformation of its contents to realistic, satirical and lyric im-
pulses and lyrical values,and his infusing of it with actual,human
emotional expressions-these taken together, would ensure his
importance to the development of Chinese poetry.
Yes,he was a well-trained Confucian intellectual,and he was al-
so,when he needed to be, the Buddhist Chüsu(wandering mystic).
Finally,however,it would seem his early Daoist learning won out
as the center of gravity in his art. He could never have sided with
the legalistic Confucians, whose ancient scholar/ hero Mencius
could actually posit that it was ungentlemanly for a good man to
take the hand of a drowning maiden, who resolved the question
of meat-eating by declaring simply,“The wise man never goes in-
to his kitchen.” “Choose the lighter happinesses.” a saying goes,
to protect oneself from Zhefu, a word for inevitable decrease in
well-being that comes from excesses.
Su Shi once asked a colleague what he thought of his ci, and the
fellow replied, “Liu Yong's poems are suitable for girls of
seventeen or eighteen to sing softly with their talk of softest winds
and waning moons by the banks of willows,but your ci poems
need a burly chap to sing them in a loud voice, with copper pipa
and iron clapper.” On yet another occasion,the great master
asked his three concubines, after a grand dinner, what his belly
contained. The cleverest one, Zhaoyun, replied that he had “a bel-
ly-full of unseasonable thoughts.”(The Chinese image of deep
thinking is “ransacking the dry intestines” ). The response would
seem to explain as well as any the abiding reputation of the old
master and to summarize the spiritual vigour of his work.
by Gordon Osing and
Min Xiao-hong