Su Shi goes on a journey he always wanted to take. Or is he writing about the essence of Buddhist enlightenment?
廬山煙雨浙江潮
廬山煙雨浙江潮，
未至千般恨不消。
到得還來別無事，
廬山煙雨浙江潮。
Mount Lu’s Misty Rain And The Tides In Zhejiang
Mount Lu’s misty rain and the tides in Zhejiang,
Before getting there, my countless regrets wouldn’t relent.
I went, I came back, it was nothing special,
Mount Lu’s misty rain and the tides in Zhejiang.
Translation notes
Sometimes the shortest poems are the most difficult to translate. This one was the most challenging poem to date. Let’s take it line by line. The title, first line, and last line are the same. At the beginning of the poem, you might be tempted to read the first line in the grandest of voices: a vision of a beautiful, picturesque sight that is almost unattainable. Mount Lu was a traditional pilgrimage destination, and the ‘tide’ referred to is that of the Qiantang 钱塘 River, which runs through the mountains and into the sea. It was originally called the Zhe River (zhe jiang 浙江), which is where the modern name of Zhejiang province comes from. So far, so good.
The middle lines are fiendishly complicated, because the Chinese language can pull some tricks that the English language can’t. But first, a quick note on Chan Buddhism. Chan 禪 is a Chinese school of Buddhism that was popular during the Tang and Song dynasties. It is also the originating tradition of Zen Buddhism in Japan. We know from his writings that Su Shi, one of the major public intellectuals of the Song Dynasty, was a Chan Buddhism enthusiast.
To simplify massively, what made Chan Buddhism different was that rather than relying on countless idols, images and writings in the quest for authoritative Buddhist teachings, Chan Buddhists believed that learning was experiential. That is to say, rather than reading about and studying the process of enlightenment and seeking the right circumstances (being in the right place or adopting the right posture) to attain it, you could simply experience enlightenment at any time, anywhere. Enlightenment is something that happens rather than something that is learned: in a way, this liberating realisation is the nature of enlightenment in itself.
With this context in mind, the middle two lines describe two things: Su Shi’s long-awaited pilgrimage to Mount Lu, and also his reflections on the nature of enlightenment itself. The two characters at the beginning of the second line do a lot of heavy lifting here: weizhi 未至. Wei 未 refers to something that has not yet happened, and zhi 至 means ‘to reach [somewhere]’ or ‘or attain [something]’. In English, we must reach a place or attain something. In Chinese, these verbs can be used in an intransitive sense: they don’t require an object. You can simply attain, without anything to show for it. You can reach (in the sense of arriving) without a destination.
We could therefore technically translate the second line as ‘before attainment, I had many unrelenting regrets’. This would perhaps be more accurate, and more obviously about the experience of enlightenment. However, it wouldn’t have much to do with the tides in Zhejiang and the misty rains at Mount Lu, unless we wish to think of Su Shi as someone who was into a form of Song Dynasty geocaching: someone who went on a journey to a mountain to ‘attain’ the view. The closest double meaning I could come up with in English is ‘getting there’ - ‘there’ could refer to Mount Lu but could also refer to a place in his own mind.
So what does the third line refer to? Perhaps not to an underwhelming journey, or a disappointing experience. Maybe it refers to something a little deeper.
If we were to place ourselves in the shoes of a Chinese Buddhist scholar before the advent of Chan Buddhism, we might assume there is a special method to achieve something like enlightenment (such as undertaking a pilgrimage to a sacred mountain). However, a Chan Buddhist might say that by undertaking this pilgrimage and going through the motions, the pilgrimage itself ceases to be interesting: there is no element of surprise. You go through the necessary steps, you reach the mountain’s peak, and you don’t feel much because the element of surprise has gone - the essence of life has disappeared. Like a joke: if you know the punchline you’re unlikely to laugh because the laughter lies in the element of surprise.
This could be what Su Shi is relaying in this poem’s last line: Mount Lu’s misty rain and the tides in Zhejiang are just that - nothing more and nothing less. Enlightenment cannot be found through a pre-determined pilgrimage and shouldn’t be fuelled by a sense of anxiety to do something for the sake of doing it. Rather, the Chan realisation that spontaneity in the experience itself is what allows for the most direct form of meaning to be attained. Once you realise that, you can attain enlightenment far more easily. And, once you get back, you can tell everyone else that there really isn’t that much more to it.