On the Red Cliff

In the autumn of the year, at the full moon of the seventh month, I went with friends in a boat below the Red Cliff. A cool wind blew gently, and the water was unruffled. I raised my cup and drank to my companions, and we chanted the poem of the bright moon and sang the verse of the modest maiden. Soon the moon rose above the eastern hills and wandered between the Dipper and the Herdboy. A white dew settled across the river; the gleam of the water reached the sky. We let our little reed of a boat go where it would, drifting over the immeasurable fields of glittering water. Vast, vast we went, as if riding the wind through the void, not knowing where we should come to rest; light, light, as if we had left the world behind and stood alone, grown wings, and risen up among the immortals. A guest among us played the flute, answering the song. The notes were thin and mournful, like a complaint, like a longing, like weeping, like a confidence whispered; the lingering sound trailed on, fine as a thread, unbroken. It made the dragon coiled in his hidden cave dance, and drew tears from the widow in her lonely boat. I sat upright and asked him why his music was so sad. And then I said: do you understand the water and the moon? The one flows on and yet is never gone; the other waxes and wanes and yet in the end neither grows nor diminishes. For if you look at things through the lens of their changing, then heaven and earth cannot stand still for a single instant; but if you look at them through the lens of their not changing, then I and all things are alike inexhaustible — so what is there to envy? Between heaven and earth each thing has its master; if a thing is not mine, I will not take so much as a single hair of it. Only the clear breeze on the river and the bright moon between the hills — the ear receives the one and makes it sound, the eye meets the other and makes it color — these we may take without prohibition and use without ever using up. This is the inexhaustible treasury of the maker of things, and it is here for you and me to delight in together.