一身如雲水、悠悠任去来 isshin unsui no gotoku, yūyū to shite kyorai ni makasu Like Cloud and Water, I Come and Go at Ease

一身 isshin is one body, or oneself, oneself alone. 雲水 unsui is cloud and water; the Daijisen dictionary leads the word with a free person who stays in no one place. 悠悠 yūyū to shite is calm and at ease, and 任去来 kyorai ni makasu leaves the going and coming to go as they will.

In the record of Fenggan in a Kyoto print of 1647, he cuts his hair level with his brows. Asked anything, he answers it depends; he husks rice for the monks and rides in on a tiger by the pine path. Then he hides himself and appears, transformed, in eastern Ou. His dates are unknown, and the scholar Iriya Yoshitaka took him for a double the Hanshan legend added as it grew.

The poem given to Fenggan opens: since I came to Tiantai, I have been through some ten thousand turns. Our two lines follow; by its rhyme words, our history reads the poem's opening rhyme as closing with them. It goes on to a free life without clamor, Hanshan coming to call, and talk of the mind and the bright moon.

In 1907 the Meiji editor Shaku Seitan printed the poem whole, as one. The Japanese editions, he wrote, had cut the piece into four poems. He does not say where they cut it, and the Kyoto print of 1647 runs the poem on without a break.

Dōgen used 雲水 unsui for the monk who travels from teacher to teacher. His rule for the monks' hall, read whole in the Taishō canon, has that word once and not the line. In four annotated editions of the rule, from 1882 to 1887, the line stands in the head-notes beside his word. The Nihon Kokugo Daijiten cites the poem under another sense of the word: wandering as one pleases, or one who does.

In the National Diet Library's full-text search, 1982 to 2000, the line turns up in a tea magazine and a phrase book for calligraphers. The search shows where it appears, not how often. The magazine reports a gathering whose alcove scroll bore the line's opening words, brushed jointly by the grand master Hōunsai and the monk Itsugai. A stone beside a teacher's grave carries the couplet in the teacher's own hand.

In English, Red Pine in 2000 gives the couplet as like a cloud or river / drifting back and forth. Paul Rouzer in 2017 has My single form is like cloud and water, / And through the vastness I go where I please. The Japanese readings make the ease the manner of the going, and our title follows them.

Our history reads the couplet as a man speaking of himself, and signs that as a reading. He does not say that he is a monk, but that he, one body, is like cloud and water. At ease, he leaves his going and coming to go as it will. On the scroll, as our history reads it, the line is not a rule for anyone.

The third and fourth lines of a twenty-line poem given to Fenggan 豐干 (Japanese Bukan), the monk the legend of Hanshan places at 國清寺 on Mount Tiantai; in the telling printed with the Hanshan poems it stood written on the wall of his room. The oldest dated witness found is the Japanese monk 成尋's diary of 1072, which copies the first four lines at 國清寺; 交易's commentary of 1672 ends a gāthā there, and commentators on Dōgen, in prints from 1878, quoted the line to gloss the word 雲水 in his texts.