世事當如行雲流水 seji wa masa ni kōun ryūsui no gotoku su beshi The Affairs of the World Should Be Like Moving Clouds and Flowing Water

世事 seji is the affairs of the world, its ordinary business. 當 masa ni … beshi is should, and 如 gotoku is like. 行雲流水 kōun ryūsui, moving clouds and flowing water, is a figure for acting without attachment, calmly leaving things to take their natural course.

The saying given to Hu goes on: be at ease wherever one finds oneself. Our history of 行雲流水 kōun ryūsui tells that whole form and its life in China.

Issai's answer sets the heart against the world, and the moon and the wind against clouds and water. In the 1854 print, the article before it opens by pairing outer and inner the same way: the heart's body prizes emptiness; achievement in affairs prizes substance.

The frame of Issai's answer is older. The Ming scholar Xue Xuan wrote that what is in a true man's heart should be like the blue sky and the white sun, so that others may see it. Issai does not name him in the article that holds his answer, and nothing our history read says he took the frame from there.

Issai's image is an old one too. Li Bai wrote that the clear wind and the bright moon cost not a single coin; Issai puts the moon ahead of the wind.

The introduction to the modern facsimile of Wu Yubi's diary says it was probably excerpted from his collected works. Hayashi Jussai, the head of the Hayashi college who had taken Issai as his disciple, copied those works in 1796. Which book Issai read the saying in, he does not say.

The 1854 print, issued in Issai's lifetime, marks the line to be read gotoku su beshi, should be made like: something one does. Of the editions from 1935 read in their search windows, most print gotoku naru beshi, a state one comes to. The scholarly editions of 1980 and 1993 keep su.

In his lecture volume of 1941, Katō Totsudō ends by joining Hu's line and Issai's answer: it is, I think, with a heart like this bright moon and clear wind that one can stand aloof, like passing clouds and flowing water, among the changing affairs of the world. A complete modern Japanese translation of 1981 makes the line a rule for going through the world.

Our history reads the line as Issai's, though the words are Hu's. In that reading, the affairs of the world, which pass, are set against the heart, which should stay clear. Hung alone, as our history reads it, the line says to handle what happens without clinging to it.

A saying given to the Song scholar Hu Anguo 胡安國 (1074–1138), first found, in CBETA and Chinese Wikisource, in the diary of the Ming scholar Wu Yubi 吳與弼 (1391–1469), in a longer form. In Japan the eighty-year-old Satō Issai 佐藤一斎 quoted its first half in 言志耋録 (composed 1851, printed 1854) and answered it with his own, what is in the heart should be like a bright moon and a clear wind; a Meiji ethics teaching manual of 1894 printed the two as maxims under two names.