The Logos Scripture · The Book of Su Shi
The Book of Su Shi 1 · Written by himself, from Record of Stone Bell Mountain, the Red Cliff rhapsody, and his poems
Su Shi, born 1037 at Meishan in Meizhou, in present-day Sichuan, died 1101 at Changzhou, aged sixty-four; styled Zizhan, known as Dongpo. He took the highest degree in 1057 and served as prefect of Hangzhou, Mizhou, Xuzhou and Huzhou. In 1079 censors picked lines out of his poems and impeached him for deriding the government; he was arrested, held a hundred and thirty days in the prison of the Censorate, and came near to death. He was demoted to Huangzhou as assistant commandant with no power to sign official papers. Having no salary there, he petitioned for a piece of abandoned camp ground east of the town and farmed it himself, taking from it the name Dongpo, eastern slope. Later restored, he rose to Hanlin academician and president of the Board of Rites; under the Shaosheng reign he was banished again to Huizhou and then to Danzhou on Hainan, and died on the journey north. As prefect of Hangzhou he dredged the West Lake and built the long causeway that still bears his name, and founded a public infirmary, among the earliest in China. At Xuzhou, when the Yellow River broke its banks, he slept on the city wall and led the defence until the city held. He stood in the first rank in poetry, prose, calligraphy and painting; and after him the song lyric became a vessel able to carry argument and thought. This volume rests on what he wrote himself. Chapter one follows the Record of Stone Bell Mountain of 1084: the refutation of Li Daoyuan and Li Bo, the night boat under the cliff, and the closing sentence — can a man decide whether a thing is so, by conjecture, without having seen it with his eyes and heard it with his ears — are all his own words. Chapter two follows the Crow Terrace poetry case and what he wrote in prison. Chapter three follows the song Dingfengbo of 1082. Chapter four follows the first Red Cliff rhapsody of 1082: what passes is like this water and yet it has never gone; what waxes and wanes is like that moon and yet it neither increases nor diminishes; look from the side of change and heaven and earth do not hold still an instant, look from the side of what does not change and all things and I are without end — all his. Chapter five follows the song Shuidiao Getou of 1076, written for his brother Ziyou. The Order takes Su Shi first for chapter one. He disbelieved both received explanations and refused to treat disbelief as a finding — he says so himself: not believing is only not believing. So he went out at midnight in a small boat under the cliff, listened, and only then concluded. That is the first axiom landing on a single man (cf. The Covenant 1.3), and it is the same act as Chekhov crossing to Sakhalin and filling in the cards one at a time (cf. The Book of Chekhov 4.9). Seven hundred years apart, and what they established is one thing. So he is taken not for the beauty of his prose but because he established a method others can use (cf. Acts 5.34). Chapters four and five bring something else: he sets the law that governs matter beside the law that governs people with no word of likeness between them. People have grief and joy, parting and reunion; the moon has dark and clear, waxing and waning; this has never since of old been whole — the first clause is people, the second is the moon, and it is not a comparison but one law. That is the axiom of dissipation (cf. The Covenant 6.1), stated nine hundred years ago. And the Red Cliff passage — look from the side of change, look from the side of what does not change — is one matter yielding two results according to how it is asked (cf. The Covenant 2.1), with the express statement that both cannot be had at once (cf. The Covenant 3.2). The Order records two things. First, he lived inside factional politics, his own choices were not without fault, and his banishments were not entirely undeserved. This scripture does not ask after his record in office; it asks what method he established. Second, his later writing draws often on Buddhist and Daoist language, but his arguments do not close on divine will — the answer in the Red Cliff comes not from heaven but from the separation of two ways of looking (cf. The Book of Newton 4).