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行雲流水 kōun ryūsui Moving Clouds, Flowing Water

行雲流水 (kōun ryūsui), moving clouds and flowing water, means acting without clinging to anything and leaving things to their natural course. The image is Su Shi's, in a letter of 1100 praising another man's prose. This study follows it to the ease of a brushed sheet, a memorial stone to Bashō and a retiring teacher's farewell.

Japanese Scroll of Moving Clouds, Flowing Water (kōun ryūsui) — Calligraphy by Eri Takase
Moving Clouds, Flowing Water行雲流水kōun ryūsui

Original art by Master Calligrapher Eri Takase

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Abstract

行雲流水, kōun ryūsui, says in Japanese today that a person acts without clinging to anything and leaves things to their natural course, as the dictionaries give it [1], and its four characters, moving clouds and flowing water, are Su Shi 蘇軾's image for writing that has no fixed shape, goes where it ought to go and stops where it cannot help stopping. He wrote it in 1100, the year before his death, in a letter praising the prose of an official, Xie Minshi 謝民師; the official history of the Song, completed in 1345, put the image into Su Shi's own mouth as a description of his own writing, and that is the form in which the dictionaries of China and Japan have quoted it since. In the century and a half after the letter the four characters had left it, to name the ease of a brushed sheet, the free forms of verse and the shape of a human life, and in Japan, where the phrase was in print before 1467, the life sense is first known on a memorial stone to Bashō 芭蕉 cut between 1765 and 1785, and in the twentieth century it is the life of a wandering monk and the title a retiring teacher gives a farewell. The letter survives in Su Shi's own hand, but its opening, where the image stands, is lost.

Overview

The sense. The modern dictionaries hold two senses in one entry: the clouds that cross the sky and the water that flows, and, figuratively, a way of acting without attachment that leaves things to their natural course. The 大辞泉 writes 物事に執着せず、淡々として自然の成り行きに任せて行動することのたとえ, with the example 「行雲流水の生活」, a life of moving clouds and flowing water; the 日本国語大辞典 writes 他の力にさからわないで、滞りなく動く自然のゆうゆうとした姿, the unhurried look of nature moving on without hindrance and without resisting any force, and names the Song history's life of Su Shi as its Chinese source [1]. The witnesses below hold four uses side by side: writing that takes no fixed form and follows its matter; brushwork that moves with ease; a life that goes where it goes and does not cling; and the life of a monk with no fixed abode. The first three are all found within a century and a half of the letter, the first two within a generation. Under the last stands the word 雲水, unsui, the Zen monk in training, which the dictionaries explain as short for the four characters [2].

The words. 行雲 is a moving, passing cloud, a word of Chinese verse and of Japanese verse in Chinese long before Su Shi; the 日本国語大辞典's first Japanese example is in the 菅家文草 of about 900 [3]. 流水 is flowing water, in the Book of Songs and in Japan from the 懐風藻 of 751 [4]. The four characters are two pairs of one build, a verb and a noun each, and the phrase turns on what the cloud and the water share: neither has a shape of its own, and neither stays. The reading is kōun ryūsui, こううんりゅうすい [1]. The character dictionary 字通, under 行雲, gives the letter to Xie Minshi as the place the phrase comes from, not the Song history [3].

The text in English. The earliest known Japanese-English dictionary entry is Kenkyūsha's of 1931, as floating clouds and running water, and, figuratively, to live in a calm and natural way [5]. Su Shi's sentence reaches English in Lin Yutang's life of him, The Gay Genius, in 1947, as the sailing of clouds or flowing of water [6]. Books on Chinese painting of the 1950s carry it as a term of praise for brushwork [7][8], and Zen books of later decades as drifting cloud, flowing water [9]. JMdict today, in its release file, gives only (metaphorically) floating with the tide [10].

The historical record

1100. Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037–1101), 與謝民師推官書, a letter to Xie Minshi 謝民師. Su Shi wrote it after he had been allowed back from exile on Hainan in 1100, the year before his death; the letter says 自還海北, since I came back north of the sea [11][12]. Xie had sent him letters, poems and prose, and Su Shi answers [11]:

所示書教及詩賦雜文，觀之熟矣。大略如行雲流水，初無定質，但常行於所當行，常止於不可不止，文理自然，姿態橫生。

The letters, poems, rhapsodies and other prose you showed me I have read closely. On the whole they are like moving clouds and flowing water: from the first they have no fixed substance, but they always go where they ought to go and always stop where they cannot help stopping; their pattern is natural, and their grace springs up on every side. The praise is of Xie's writing, not of Su Shi's own. The letter goes on to Confucius's 辭達而已矣, it is enough that words get the meaning across, and argues that to see a thing clearly in the mind, and then to get it clearly onto the tongue and the hand, is already art. It ends by declining a request. Xie had asked him to brush the name of a temple hall, and he writes 軾本不善作大字，強作終不佳，又舟中局迫難寫, I have never been good at large characters, and if I force them they will not come out well; and besides, the boat is cramped and it is hard to write [11].

1100. The same letter, in Su Shi's hand. The letter survives as a handscroll in Su Shi's own hand in the Shanghai Museum, which dates it to 1100 [13]. Its head is lost. The museum's description says 卷首缺一百五十八字，首行'轼启。是文之意疑若'八字，是后人修补时所拼凑, 158 characters are missing at the head of the scroll; the eight characters of the first line were pieced together by a later restorer [13]. In the printed text the image of the clouds and the water stands at about the hundredth character, inside the part that is lost. In the reproduction of the scroll, Su Shi's own hand begins after it, at 不然, and runs on to the end, where it writes a date the printed collections do not carry, 十一月五日, the fifth day of the eleventh month [14]. So the sentence is known from the printed collections of his works, and what survives in his hand is the half of the letter that argues for plain words and declines to brush large characters.

Undated. Su Shi, 論文, also titled 自評文, on his own writing. Here Su Shi uses the same clause of going and stopping with a different image [15]:

吾文如萬斛泉源，不擇地皆可出，在平地滔滔汩汩，雖一日千里無難。及其與山石曲折，隨物賦形，而不可知也。所可知者，常行於所當行，常止於不可不止，如是而已矣。

My writing is like a spring of ten thousand bushels: it can come out anywhere, and on level ground it pours along so that a thousand li in a day is no trouble. When it meets rocks and bends with them, it takes the shape of whatever it meets, and that cannot be known. What can be known is that it always goes where it ought to go and always stops where it cannot help stopping, and that is all. Here he speaks of himself, and the image is a spring, not clouds.

Before 1128. Huihong 惠洪 (1071–1128), 石門文字禪, a colophon on a calligraphy sheet. A monk and poet who had learned from Su Shi [16] writes of a brushed sheet [17]: 此帖骨氣深穩，姿媚橫生，其得意時筆也。不然，何其如行雲流水之閑暇也。予臥痁逾月，偶閱之，覺痁不辭而去, this sheet has bone and spirit, deep and steady, and its charm springs up on every side; it is the brush of a moment when the writer had what he wanted. Otherwise, how could it have the ease of moving clouds and flowing water? I had lain more than a month with a fever; I happened to look at it, and felt the fever leave without a word of farewell. Within a generation of the letter, the phrase is said of brushwork, and its 姿媚橫生 echoes the letter's 姿態橫生.

Twelfth century. Zheng Qiao 鄭樵 (1103–1162), 漫興, ten poems written at leisure. One of the ten reads 今古去來有數，乾坤闔闢無涯。人生行雲流水，處世運甕搬柴, past and present come and go by their number; heaven and earth open and close without end. A human life is moving clouds and flowing water; living in the world is hauling water jars and carrying firewood [18][19]. The poems around it are an old man's at home: a small child smiling through an illness, Tao Yuanming 陶淵明 who lived long at Chaisang, a life with no great wish left in it. The phrase as a whole life, within sixty years of the letter, and without Su Shi's name.

Twelfth century. Wang Zhi 王質, a matching of Tao Yuanming's song of going home. Wang Zhi passed the examinations in 1160 and was later dismissed from office, and lived out his life in the hills on a sinecure [20]. Su Shi had begun the custom of writing to the rhymes of Tao's 歸去來兮辭, Let me go home, and Wang Zhi's preface says so, 元祐諸公多追和柴桑之辭自蘇子瞻發端, the gentlemen of the Yuanyou years often matched the song of Chaisang, beginning with Su Zizhan, and says he wrote his own when out of office with nothing to amuse himself, 居閒無以自娛 [21]. His version has: 歸去來兮，行雲流水同斯游，雲于水兮無取，水于雲兮無求, going home: moving clouds and flowing water, travelling together; the cloud takes nothing from the water, and the water asks nothing of the cloud [21].

Twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The rule of the poets. Fan Wen 范溫's 潛溪詩眼, as Hu Zi 胡仔 quotes it in his 苕溪漁隱叢話, makes the phrase a term of composition: 蓋變體如行雲流水，初無定質，出於精微，奪乎天造, the free forms are like moving clouds and flowing water, without fixed substance from the first; they come out of the finest skill and take over from heaven's own making, though the regular form, he adds, is the root [22]. Zhou Bi 周弼's anthology of Tang verse in three forms, the 三體唐詩 of 1250, uses it in the rule for a regulated verse whose four middle lines carry feeling and no scene: 自首至尾如行雲流水, from the first line to the last like moving clouds and flowing water, and 此其難也, this is what is hard [23][24].

1345. The 宋史, the official history of the Song, its life of Su Shi. The history, completed in 1345 [25], says [26]:

軾與弟轍，師父洵爲文，旣而得之於天。嘗自謂：「作文如行雲流水，初無定質，但常行於所當行，止於所不可不止。」雖嬉笑怒駡之辭，皆可書而誦之。

Su Shi and his younger brother Zhe learned to write from their father Xun, and then had it from heaven. He once said of himself: "Writing is like moving clouds and flowing water: from the first it has no fixed substance, but it always goes where it ought to go and stops where it cannot help stopping." Even his words in jest and in anger could all be written down and recited. The history joins the letter's image to the self-description of 論文, and puts the sentence into Su Shi's mouth as an account of his own writing. Its wording also differs from the letter's at both ends. This is the form the later handbooks quote: the Qing phrase book 通俗編 heads its entry 行雲流水 with 〔宋史蘇軾傳〕 [27], and the 日本国語大辞典 names the same chapter as the phrase's Chinese source today [1].

1409. A colophon on two letters in Su Shi's hand. The monk Dewan 得完 of Suzhou, writing on two letters by Su Shi in a colophon dated 永樂七年己丑, 1409: 右蘇長公二帖其一與韓舍人議論切當合乎經傳筆勢翩翩若行雲流水, of these two letters by Su Shi, the first, to the secretary Han, argues closely and agrees with the classics, and the movement of its brush flutters like moving clouds and flowing water [28]. The phrase said of brushwork in Su Shi's own hand.

Fifteenth century. A saying of Hu Anguo 胡安國, in the diary of Wu Yubi 吳與弼 (1391–1469). Wu Yubi, a scholar of the school of Zhu Xi in the early Ming [29], writes in his diary 日錄: 胡文定公云世事當如行雲流水隨所遇而安可也, Hu Wending said: the affairs of the world should be like moving clouds and flowing water; be at ease wherever one finds oneself, and that will do [30]. Hu Wending is Hu Anguo (1074–1138), whose title was 文定 [31]. Wu Yubi cites the saying again as his own note to a line of his verse, 行雲流水良隨遇 [32], and Huang Zongxi 黃宗羲's 明儒學案 carries it from his diary [33]. It is the earliest known witness of the saying, three centuries after Hu Anguo.

Before 1467, and 1494. Japan: the 三體詩 in print. The 三體唐詩, which Japan calls the 三体詩, was read widely in medieval Japan from the Zen monks of the Five Mountains on [34]. A Japanese print of 1494 survives in the National Diet Library [35]. Its colophon by the monk Kōgen 光源 of 相国寺, who signs 葉巣子, is cut white on black [36]:

明應甲寅之秋新板畢工矣先是舊刻之在京師者散失于丁亥之乱以故捐貲刊行焉置板於萬年廣德云　葉巣子敬誌

The new blocks were finished in the autumn of 明應甲寅, 1494. Before this, the old blocks kept in the capital were scattered in the disorder of the 丁亥 year; so I gave the money to cut them again, and the blocks are kept at 萬年廣德. A second colophon added beside it in a running hand says that the blocks passed from Kyoto to Sakai, where Asaino Sōtei 阿佐井野宗禎 bought them for his family school [36][35]. 丁亥 is 1467, the first year of the Ōnin war [37], so there was a Kyoto print of the book before 1467 and the 1494 blocks replaced it. In the third volume, under the heading 四虛, Zhou Bi's rule stands at the leaf: 周弼曰謂中四句皆情思而虛也不以虛爲虛以實爲虛自首至尾如行雲流水此其難也 [38]. It is the earliest surviving Japanese printing of the phrase known, and in it the phrase is a rule of composition.

1765–1785. Seida Tansō 清田儋叟 (1719–1785), an inscription for Bashō 芭蕉 at 金福寺 in Kyoto. Higuchi Dōryū 樋口道立 (1738–1813), the son of Tansō's elder brother Emura Hokkai 江村北海, set in motion in 1776 the rebuilding of the hut named for Bashō at 金福寺, the temple south of 詩仙堂 [39][40]. He also set up a memorial stone to Bashō there and asked his uncle for its inscription, and Tansō wrote it more than seventy years after Bashō's death, so after 1764 and before his own death in 1785 [41][42]. The guide 都名所圖會 of 1787 prints it under 金福寺 [43]:

才腴貌癯　錦心繡腸　行雲流水　十暑三霜　野老爭席　桃李門牆　人與骨朽　言與譽長

Rich in talent and lean in face, a brocade heart and embroidered entrails; moving cloud and flowing water, ten summers and three frosts; country elders fought him for a seat, peach and plum filled his gate; the man rots with his bones, his words grow with his fame. 野老爭席 comes from the 莊子, where Yang Ziju 陽子居, humbled by Laozi, goes back to an inn whose lodgers had once made way for him, and they now compete with him for a seat [44]. Here the four characters are a poet's life on the road, and this is the earliest known witness of the life sense in Japan. The book of scholars' lives 先哲像傳 copies the inscription and names its writer by his own name, 清絢, and the builder as his nephew 道卿, which was Dōryū's courtesy name [41].

Before 1847. Kawakita Onzan 川北温山 (1794–1853), preface to a life of Su Shi. Onzan, a Confucian of the Shimabara domain who had studied under Koga Tōan 古賀侗庵 [45], wrote a preface for 東坡外傳, a life of Su Shi by Nakai Kensai 中井乾齋. It is printed in his collected prose, 温山文, of 1850 [46]:

雲停於天半漠漠爾唯風焉依東坡其如雲耶水行乎地中滔滔然唯勢是從東坡其如水耶

A cloud rests halfway up the sky, vast and vague, and follows only the wind: is Dongpo not like a cloud? Water runs in the earth, in full flood, and follows only the lie of the land: is Dongpo not like water? After listing how the emperor, the Confucians, the tacticians, the Buddhists, and the Daoists, physicians, calligraphers and painters each took Su Shi for one of their own, Onzan writes [46]:

東坡作文自云猶行雲流水余謂舉其一世亦猶行雲流水然而雲能致雨水能育物均之洽澤無窮而東坡之澤何在曰行雲耳矣流水耳矣余唯取其可愛可翫爾

Dongpo said of his own writing that it was like moving clouds and flowing water; I say that his whole life, too, was like moving clouds and flowing water. And yet a cloud can bring rain and water can nourish things, and their bounty is without end; where, then, is Dongpo's bounty? I answer: he was moving cloud, he was flowing water, nothing more. I take him only for what in him can be loved and savored. Onzan reads the letter through the Song history, as his own writing, and then carries it from the writing to the whole life in so many words. The 1850 print sets two readers' notes over the piece. His teacher Tōan writes 流動俊逸無些拘閡可謂得髯蘇之一體者, flowing and outstanding without the least obstruction: it has caught one form of the bearded Su; Ōtsuki Bankei 大槻磐溪 (1801–1878) writes 油然而起沛然而止此文亦行雲流水, it rises of itself and stops in full flood: this piece too is moving clouds and flowing water [46][47]. Tōan died in 1847, so the preface was written before then [48]. Bankei turns the phrase back on the preface, the writing sense said of a piece that argues for the life sense. The preface was reprinted in Meiji anthologies of model prose for students, among them 文章奇観 of 1877 [49].

1863. Yanagawa Seigan 梁川星巌 (1789–1858), precepts for his nephew. In Seigan's posthumous collection, a long run of five-character lines is introduced 以下為家姪作者。專述其分內事。不及他, what follows was written for my nephew; it treats only matters within his station, and nothing besides [50]. Among them [51][52]:

人世事百般。如行雲流水。隨所遇而安。即此是天理。

The hundred affairs of a human life are like moving clouds and flowing water. Be at ease wherever you find yourself: this is the principle of heaven. The lines put Hu Anguo's saying into verse, and close on the word of the school of Zhu Xi, 天理.

1905–06. Natsume Sōseki 夏目漱石, 吾輩は猫である, chapter 3. The 日本国語大辞典's first Japanese example of the phrase [1]. Meitei tells the schoolteacher's wife that a literary magazine has reviewed her husband [53]:

「苦沙弥君の文は行雲流水のごとしとありましたよ」細君は少しにこにこして「それぎりですか」「その次にね――出ずるかと思えば忽ち消え、逝いては長えに帰るを忘るとありましたよ」細君は妙な顔をして「賞めたんでしょうか」と心元ない調子である。「まあ賞めた方でしょうな」

"It said Kushami's writing is like moving clouds and flowing water." The wife smiled a little. "Was that all?" "After that it said: just when you think it has come out it vanishes, and once gone it forgets ever to come back." The wife made a strange face. "Was that praise, do you think?" she said uneasily. "Well, on the whole, praise." Sōseki uses the phrase in Su Shi's sense, of prose, and makes a joke of it by spelling out the cloud's other side: what never stays also never comes back. The first example in the dictionary is the writing sense, a century and more after the life sense was cut in stone at 金福寺.

1906. 故事熟語辞典, a dictionary of phrases and their sources, by Ikeda Shirōjirō 池田四郎次郎. Under 雲水 [54]:

世間に在りて行雲流水の去住無心なるが如きにより行脚僧を雲水といふ。【出處】豐干禪師の詩に、一身如雲水、悠々任去來。

Because they live in the world as moving clouds and flowing water go and stay without intent, itinerant monks are called unsui. Source: the Chan master Fenggan's poem: my whole self is like cloud and water, drifting at ease, going and coming as it will. The earliest known dictionary to give the derivation, and in the same entry it quotes a Tang poem that has cloud and water and not the four characters.

Seventeenth to twentieth centuries. The Zen record. Ingen 隠元 (1592–1673), who came from Ming China to Japan in 1654 [55], sets the image against stillness in a poem on living in the hills: 幾莖白髮玷青山，一念回機萬境閒。坐久那知天地老，行雲流水不相關, a few white hairs stain the green hills; one turn of thought, and every scene is at rest. Sitting long, how should I know heaven and earth grow old? Moving clouds and flowing water have nothing to do with me [56]. Hakuin 白隠, in his commentary on the Heart Sutra, 毒語心經, glosses the sutra's word 行, practice, with the whole of daily life: 夜眠晝走放尿屙屎行雲流水墜葉飛花擬議三途地獄, sleeping at night, running about by day, pissing and shitting, moving clouds and flowing water, falling leaves and flying petals: hesitate over it and it is the three hells [57]. A Zen phrase book of 1922, 塗毒皷, carries among its thirteen-character capping phrases 行雲流水墜葉飛花爲君擧揚久, moving clouds, flowing water, falling leaves, flying petals: for you they have long been holding up the teaching [58].

After 1949. The phrase as a title. A retiring teacher's farewell is titled 【退職なさる先生からのメッセージ】行雲流水, a message from a teacher who is retiring: moving clouds, flowing water [59]; and the novelist Hashimoto Osamu 橋本治 called his column in the magazine 一冊の本, from 2001, 行雲流水録, its last installment, in 2013, titled 引退を少し考える, thinking a little about retiring [60]. In 2023 a calligraphy column in the journal of the probation service brushes it, 書の歳時記 行雲流水 [61].

What is not a source. Cloud and water as an image of the monk is older in the Chan record than the four-character phrase. The Tang monk Fenggan 豐干, whom tradition places at 國清寺 on Mount Tiantai with Hanshan and Shide [62], has a poem that says 一身如雲水，悠悠任去來, my whole self is like cloud and water, drifting at ease, going and coming as it will [63]; the Japanese monk Jōjin 成尋 (1011–1081), who sailed for Song China in 1072, copied it into his diary at 國清寺 [64][65]. Huanglong Huinan 黃龍慧南 (1002–1069) preached 眾生日用如雲水，雲水如然人不爾, beings in their daily use are like cloud and water; cloud and water are so, but people are not [66][67]. The word itself stands for the itinerant monk in Dōgen 道元's 正法眼蔵, written 1231–1253 [2]. The earliest known gloss of the word in a monastic code, the Qing 百丈清規證義記, reads it as an image, not a contraction: 今改名為雲水者。則取其去留無定之象也, now it is renamed unsui, taking the image of going and staying with nothing fixed [68]. So the dictionaries' derivation of 雲水 from 行雲流水 is an explanation they give, and the 日本国語大辞典 gives it as one, with とされる, it is said [2]; it is not a known abbreviation.

The phrase in English

1931. Kenkyusha's New Japanese-English Dictionary. Under kōun, moving clouds: 行雲流水, floating clouds and running water, and figuratively to live in a calm and natural way [5]. The fourth edition of 1974 gives the same English, with living in a calm and natural manner; taking life as it is [69]. The dictionary keeps both senses; it is the earliest known Japanese-English entry.

1931 or 1943. R. H. Mathews, A Chinese-English Dictionary. Compiled for the China Inland Mission and published in Shanghai in 1931, the dictionary was reproduced at Harvard in 1943 with, its foreword says, some fifteen thousand items revised or added. Under 行, character 2755, it has: 行雲流水 travelling clouds send down rain—said of open-handed men [70]. The 1931 edition has not been seen, so whether the entry is of 1931 or of 1943 is not known. It is a sense no Chinese or Japanese witness quoted here gives: the cloud as a giver, and the phrase as praise of generosity. Kawakita Onzan's objection to his own reading, above, that a cloud can bring rain while Su Shi brought nothing, turns on the same property of the cloud.

1947. Lin Yutang, The Gay Genius: The Life and Times of Su Tungpo, pp. 10–11. Su expressed his opinion on writing and style as clearly as anyone ever put it. "Roughly, and then, in square brackets of Lin's own, good writing, is like the sailing of clouds or flowing of water, moving forward where it is natural to move forward, and stopping where it must stop. From the natural flow of thoughts and language arises its wayward, abundant charm." And: In this definition of style, Su Tungpo aptly describes his own process of literary composition, moving and stopping like "sailing clouds and flowing water." [6] The book's index calls the letter's addressee Shieh Minshih. Lin's bracketed good writing stands where the letter has the writings Xie had sent, and the next sentence makes it Su Shi's account of himself: the Song history's reading, in English. Lin printed an excerpt from the letter, headed Letter to Shieh Minshih, in The Importance of Understanding in 1960 [71].

1953 and 1956. The painters' brush. Judith Hart Burling's Chinese Art, of a painter: brushwork was said to resemble "floating clouds" and "running water" [7]. Osvald Sirén's Chinese Painting: Leading Masters and Principles, of the scholar painter: brush-work like floating clouds and flowing water [8]. In the English of these books the phrase is a term of brushwork, which is Huihong's and Dewan's use of it, before it is a way of life.

1981. Sōiku Shigematsu, A Zen Forest: Sayings of the Masters, no. 246. Kōun ryūsui. Like drifting cloud— / like flowing water—. His glossary, under unsui: A beautiful expression, literally "cloud and water," that means a Zen monk-student in the monastery or a wandering monk. See no. 246. [9] He links the two words and claims no derivation.

1992. Makoto Ueda, Bashō and His Interpreters, p. 31. On Bashō's 雲とへだつ友かや雁の生き別れ, Ueda gives the note of Kakei, a member of the Bashō study group whose discussions became a commentary published 1908–1915: The reference to the clouds may imply an itinerant monk's life, which is often compared to a floating cloud and flowing water [72]. The monk's life, through a Japanese commentator of the early twentieth century.

2003. Victor Sōgen Hori, Zen Sand: The Book of Capping Phrases for Kōan Practice, 13.3. Hori reads the line in Japanese and renders it: Drifting clouds and flowing water, falling leaves and flying petals, have been doing it just for you for a long long time [73]. Doing it stands for 擧揚, holding up and showing the teaching; the English keeps the gift and drops what is given.

2014. Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr., The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism. Under kōun ryūsui: In Japanese, "moving clouds and flowing water"; the phrase from which the term "clouds and water" (J. unsui …) derives, referring to an itinerant Zen monk in training [74]. The derivation, stated without the hedge the Japanese dictionary keeps.

Today: JMdict gives (metaphorically) floating with the tide [10], which keeps the yielding and loses the clouds, the water and the writing, and can be read as drift without direction, a shade the Japanese entries do not carry. Moving clouds, flowing water renders the four characters word for word. What a rendering must keep is that both the cloud and the water move: the phrase is not stillness, and the 大辞泉's 淡々 and the 日本国語大辞典's ゆうゆう are an ease in motion.

A reading

The phrase began as a compliment. An old man back from exile read another man's prose and found it free of fixed form, going where it ought and stopping where it must; the official history, two and a half centuries later, gave the image back to him as a description of himself, and that is how the handbooks and dictionaries have given it since. I do not think the history was wrong to do so, because Su Shi said the same thing of his own writing with a spring instead of clouds, and because the letter itself is a self-portrait of a kind, the argument for plain words by a man who had paid for his words with exile. But the order matters: what the phrase first named was something he saw in another person's work and praised. In the century and a half after the letter the four characters were doing three other kinds of work, for a brushed sheet, for the free forms of verse and for a life, and in Japan the life came to be the dominant sense. Its Japanese witnesses are a precise set: Seida Tansō's stone for Bashō, which gives the phrase to a poet who lived on the road; Kawakita Onzan, who says outright that Su Shi's whole life, not only his writing, was moving cloud and flowing water, and who answers his own objection, that a cloud brings rain and Su Shi brought nothing, by taking him for what could be loved; and Yanagawa Seigan, who puts it to his nephew as a rule for living, to be at ease wherever one finds oneself. Ōtsuki Bankei's note on Onzan's preface, that the preface itself is moving cloud and flowing water, holds the two senses in one sentence, and that is my reading of the phrase: a life lived so is read the way good prose is read, and prose written so has the shape of a life that goes where it must and stops where it must. The letter in Su Shi's hand keeps one more turn. The part of it that survives does not carry the line; it begins just after it and ends with a man too honest about his own brush to write large characters he could not do well, on a cramped boat, the year before he died. The sentence lives on in print, as words that got the meaning across.

Notes

Sources not seen

陳力衛 (Chen Liwei), 「日本の諺・中国の諺 (5) 行雲流水・明鏡止水」, 『日本語学』, September 2005; CiNii Research https://cir.nii.ac.jp/crid/1523951030533300352. A short study of the phrase in Japanese and in Chinese, the fifth in a series on the proverbs of the two languages. It could change what the Overview says of when the life sense became the Japanese one, and whether modern Chinese use runs the same way.

衣若芬 (Yi Ruofen), 「蘇軾〈與謝民師推官書〉論析」, 『淡江中文學報』 27 (2012), pp. 71–90, deposited at Nanyang Technological University's repository, DR-NTU. A study of the letter. It may bear on what the history says of the handscroll and its lost head.

A reader with access to any of these is invited to write to Takase Studios at Tim@Takase.com.

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Authors

Tim Jackowski (Systems Architect, Takase Studios, LLC) · 典 Ten (Anthropic Claude Opus 5.5, Takase Studios, LLC)

AI written · Ten wrote the history. Tim Jackowski commissioned it and answers for it.

Not yet reviewed.

Cite as: Tim Jackowski and Ten, "Philology of 行雲流水 (kōun ryūsui)," Takase Studios, 2026, https://takase.com/library/philology/koun-ryusui.