Cursive · sōsho 草書 · VC5J
Cursive or sōsho (草書) styles are the most simplified styles and Master Takase's favorite. While very beautiful, these styles are often difficult to read even by specialists.
行雲流水
kōun ryūsui
Moving Clouds, Flowing Water
Acting without clinging to anything, calmly leaving things to their natural course, like moving clouds and flowing water.
by Master Eri Takase
Born and raised in Osaka, Japan, Eri Takase received the rank of Shihan, master, from two calligraphy societies, the Bokuteki-kai and Bunka-shodō, and won best-of-category awards in all-Japan national competitions. She has created calligraphy for people around the world for more than thirty years, and with your order she will be creating calligraphy for you.
In a ritual as old as calligraphy itself, Master Takase prepares the ink, meditatively rubbing the ink stick against the stone until it reaches the perfect consistency for the paper. Then, properly loading the brush with ink, she brushes your scroll. And only when the scroll is just right and meets her approval, she signs it and affixes her seal, completing your original scroll.
12 1/4" × 43" (31 × 109 cm) Japanese Scrolls
The scrolls have woven damask borders and special layered Japanese paper (washi), designed to last generations by a scroll maker in Gifu, Japan, with whom we have worked for over two decades.
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Your scroll arrives boxed, with a printed insert describing the words in detail.
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Ships in 1-3 days from Washington State
Your scroll is brushed when you order it and completed within 1 to 3 business days.
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Every order is covered by our 30-day money-back guarantee. If your scroll arrives damaged, or we made an error, we replace it or refund you in full, including shipping.
Explanation
行雲流水 (kōun ryūsui): acting without clinging to anything, calmly leaving things to their natural course, like the clouds that cross the sky and the water that flows.
Neither the cloud nor the water has a shape of its own, and neither stays, yet both keep moving. The phrase is an ease in motion. The デジタル大辞泉 gives as its example a life of moving clouds and flowing water.
A farewell message from a retiring teacher is titled 行雲流水. The novelist Hashimoto Osamu called his magazine column 行雲流水録, and its last installment, in 2013, was titled thinking a little about retiring.
Before 1128 the monk and poet Huihong wrote that a brushed sheet had the ease of moving clouds and flowing water. He had lain more than a month with a fever; he looked at the sheet, and felt the fever leave without a word of farewell.
Seida Tansō's inscription for a memorial stone to Bashō at 金福寺 in Kyoto, written between 1765 and 1785, includes the line moving cloud and flowing water, ten summers and three frosts. Here the words name a poet's life on the road. Yanagawa Seigan's lines for his nephew, printed in 1863, make the phrase a rule for living: the hundred affairs of a human life are like moving clouds and flowing water. Be at ease wherever you find yourself.
In Natsume Sōseki's 吾輩は猫である, Meitei tells a schoolteacher's wife that a literary magazine said her husband's writing was like moving clouds and flowing water. He adds that it went on: just when you think it has come out it vanishes, and once gone it forgets ever to come back. She asks whether that was praise.
The image is Su Shi's, in a letter of 1100 praising the prose of an official, Xie Minshi, as moving clouds and flowing water, without fixed form, going where it ought and stopping where it must; the official history of the Song, completed in 1345, recast the sentence as Su Shi's description of his own writing, which is the form in which it has been quoted since.
Learn More About These Words
We want you to be as happy with the meaning as you are with Master Takase's art. To learn more, visit Philology of 行雲流水.
