In the view of China culture, Su Shi is a bright star. After Li Bai and Du Fu, he had a far-reaching influence on China's literary world. His poems, words, essays, books and paintings shine brilliantly in the art world of Song Dynasty. With his intelligent talent, comprehensive artistic accomplishment, bumpy life path and detached attitude towards life, he has exerted an important influence on later literati and traditional ideology and culture. This is a valuable spiritual wealth, which deserves our constant understanding and thinking, and helps us grasp ourselves and realize life.
Su Shi not only has rich artistic creation practice, but also has his own unique views and thoughts on the essence of art, forming his unique artistic view. The core of Su Shi's artistic view is freehand brushwork. Of course, freehand brushwork is the traditional theory of China's art and an important ideological resource in China's traditional philosophy and aesthetic discourse. The attitude towards life reflected by Su Shi's artistic concept has profound cultural significance and has become the life principle generally chosen by all upright literati when the feudal era is about to collapse.
In Su Shi's era, due to various social, political and ideological reasons, Zen became the spiritual destination that literati deeply yearned for. Su Shi has a soft spot for Buddhism and Zen. Life and Zen have an indissoluble bond. He has close contacts with Zen monks.
In the traditional culture of China, the positive enterprising spirit of Confucianism is the mainstream form. Although Zhuangzi and Laozi's metaphysics and Wei-Jin demeanor both advocate the pursuit of emptiness and immortality, the Tao that runs through heaven and earth cannot be lost. Even in Buddhism, there is a Buddha, Muny, who is merciful and devoted himself to all beings for the suffering of the world. But Zen has emptied everything, and the self-nature is pure, empty and devoid of good and evil. This shore is the other shore, the pure land is the earth, knowing each other, forming its own Buddhism, cutting wood and painting water is afraid of enlightenment, and people's liberation is mindless, and mindless is prajna.
We are by no means demanding of Su Shi. No matter what kind of genius, it is impossible to surpass the times and be unconstrained. The spirit of China's poetry reached its peak in the Tang Dynasty, was promoted in Du Li's creation, and then declined in the low tide. Su Shi's poems show this process truly and comprehensively, and there is no other poet in China after Su Shi. Social life lacks poetry, and the rest are ordinary feelings and trivial anecdotes. The literary form of "telling stories" came into being. Therefore, Su Shi is a great writer and a symbol of the development and collapse of China's poetic spirit. His greatness is not because he has a large number of poems handed down from generation to generation, but because his shortcomings and deficiencies were conceived in this era and nurtured by the milk of politics, economy and culture at that time. Everything about him is a holographic image of the spirit of that era, which truly records the thoughts, emotions, depression and helplessness of that era. He also found a way for people of that era to settle down and get rid of it. Su Shi clearly saw the turbidity of society and the corruption of officialdom. He can quit officialdom, but he can't quit society. Therefore, Zhuang Chan's thought made him transcend the tragedy of life spiritually. "I'm not happy, but I'm good at traveling outside." It can be said that this kind of wisdom choice, which is empty and independent, comforted his dreamlike fantasy of life. From the cultural point of view, Su Shi's life choice is a principle of life and an attitude towards life, which may be the reason why many people admire and love him later.
The German philosopher Heidegger used a poem he liked very much to ask, "What is a poet in an era of greed and poverty?" This is not only a question that a poet should think about, but also a question that each of us should pay attention to.