SOURCE: "Self and Landscape in Su Shih," Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 86, 1966, pp. 377-96.

March is a professor of geology, anthropology, and China humanities who has written many journal articles and The Idea of China: Myth and Theory in Geographic Thought (1974). In the following excerpt, he explores the connection between Su's concept of art, his understanding of landscape, and his striving to perfect himself according to the principles of the Tao.

Su Shih's Fertile and energetic mind was more poetic than discursive, and the weight of his ideas is often carried by images appealing to experience rather than by rational argument. Landscape images in particular form a coherent pattern in his writings, and the experience of landscape seems central to his artistic, ethical, and social conceptions of self.

By landscape I mean part of what we often call nature, but the trouble with nature is that...