SU TUNG - P’O

(1037 to 1101)

SU TUNG-P’O (Su Shih) was born into a common family from the lower reaches of the educated class but rose to become one of China’s greatest intellectuals, traditionally considered the Sung Dynasty’s greatest poet, and no less renowned for his calligraphy (which followed the same philosophical principles as his poetry). He was at times quite influential in government, but because he opposed Wang An-shih’s radical policies and never stopped voicing his criticisms, he spent most of his life in the provinces, including many years in especially arduous exile. He was also tried for treason (on the journey north to his trial, Su’s wife burned many of his poems on the deck of a boat, fearing they would be used to implicate him), jailed and beaten, and very nearly executed. It was said that great poetry grows out of hardship and exile, and indeed Su consolidated his mature poetics during his first exile. In fact, he took his literary name, Tung-p’o (East Slope), from the site where he lived during that exile as a subsistence farmer: East-Slope Su.

Su Tung-p’o’s work represents a striking extension of Mei Yao-ch’en’s p’ing-tan poetics (see here), for he added a subjective dimension to Mei’s realism. Su’s poems enact consciousness wandering like water—Lao Tzu’s operant metaphor for Tao—taking shape according to what it encounters. His mastery of this poetics derives in part from a lifelong devotion to Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism, for Ch’an no-mind allows a spontaneous and crystalline responsiveness to whatever experience one encounters. But as with water, there is an inner nature to the poet that endures through all the transformations. This enduring inner nature returns us to the concept of li, or inner pattern (see Key Terms), that was so important to Hsieh Ling-yün (see here). And the different roles li plays in the thought of these two poets summarize the transformation that had taken place in Chinese poetics.

For Hsieh Ling-yün, li is primarily manifested in the empirical world, and the goal of poetry is to render empty mind mirroring the vast dimensions of li in the rivers-and-mountains realm, thereby bringing its dynamic energy inside consciousness. But Su Tung-p’o’s poems weave together the empirical world and wandering thought, and for him both aspects are manifestations of li, the “inner pattern” of tzu-jan’s (see Key Terms) unfolding. In other words, wilderness is not simply out there in the mountains, it is always already here within us as well. Consciousness is itself already wild—so every gesture in a poem is wilderness, whether it is a philosophical insight, a whimsical metaphor, or an egret taking flight.

This poetics gives the poems a light and effortless feel. Rather than struggling with poetic material to extract an earnest poetic statement, concise and compelling, Su’s poems tend to move with a kind of easy spontaneity as their statement slowly emerges—a movement that renders consciousness in its true nature as a form of tzu-jan’s perennial movement and transformation. This happens not only in individual poems but also through the entire body of his work. He wrote easily and on most any topic (hence the large number of poems in his corpus: 2,400 surviving), each poem open to a new perspective, never sounding like the last word, and therefore feeling like part of that ongoing organic process from which emerges not just poetry but the entire cosmos. Su’s poetics in turn reflects a philosophical disposition that allowed him a profound emotional balance in the face of considerable hardship and disappointment. And that balance is something for which he is especially remembered in the Chinese cultural legend: a detached tranquillity, even lightheartedness, that grows out of an acceptance of both sorrow and joy as equally inevitable aspects of tzu-jan’s unfolding.