The View from Inside the Mountain: Su Shi and the Case Against a Fixed Self

Seen from the side, Mount Lu is a single ridge. Seen head-on, it becomes a row of peaks. Near and far, high and low, each vantage point gives a different mountain. In 1084, on his way to a new posting, Su Shi wrote four lines on the wall of the Xilin Temple at its foot, 《题西林壁》, and ended them with the couplet that has been quoted ever since:

I cannot discern the true face of Mount Lu, Only because I am standing deep within it. （不识庐山真面目，只缘身在此山中。）

Written on the Wall at Xilin Temple reads, at first, like a remark about scenery. It is better read as a remark about self-knowledge, and at this stage a modest one. The mountain has a real shape; it simply cannot be seen whole from inside. A traveler can walk around a mountain and assemble its outline from many sides. No one can walk around himself.

Su Shi’s poetry goes further than this. In other poems the difficulty is not that the self is hard to see but that there may be no fixed, freestanding self there to see.

He approaches that stronger claim through a musical instrument. In 《琴诗》, On the Zither, he asks where a note comes from:

If the music truly resided within the zither, Why does it stay silent resting in its case? If the sound truly came from the fingertips, Why can we not hear it straight from your hand?（若言琴上有琴声，放在匣中何不鸣？若言声在指头上，何不于君指上听？）

Neither the instrument nor the player holds the music alone. The sound exists only when the two meet. Read as Su Shi seems to have intended, the poem is about experience generally: it arises from a relation, and there need be no fixed subject waiting on one side of it.

Nine centuries later, Derek Parfit reached a neighboring conclusion by a very different road, through thought experiments about teleporters and divided brains. In Reasons and Persons (1984) he argued that there is no “further fact” about personal identity beyond the physical and psychological connections that make up a life. A person is not a thing that has experiences; “person” is the name for the pattern the experiences form. Parfit then argued that this should be a relief. If identity was never an extra entity, losing the belief in one costs nothing that matters, because memory, character and psychological continuity all survive the discovery.

At first the two seem to be making one claim from opposite ends of history. They are not quite. Parfit removes identity as a further fact, but he leaves the stream of experience standing. There is still someone having this experience now, even if that someone is not strictly the same as the person who will remember it in ten years.

Su Shi, reading through Chan Buddhism and the Vimalakirti Sutra he admired, questions even that. In 《临江仙》, Immortal by the River, written during his exile at Huangzhou, he writes:

I forever lament that this body belongs not to me, When shall I forget this ceaseless striving?（长恨此身非我有，何时忘却营营。）

The line can be read as weariness with an official’s life, and it is that. It is also a refusal to grant ownership of the present: this body, now, is not his. Parfit dissolves the self across time. Su Shi’s Chan reading dissolves the boundary between the one who experiences and what is experienced, in the moment itself.

For Su Shi this was not a seminar question. He lived it through a series of exiles that took his rank, his house and his reputation, and the poems trace a progression in how he answered them.

The first answer is to reframe. Sent to Huizhou in Lingnan in 1094, a posting meant to finish him, he wrote the quatrain usually called 《食荔枝》, Eating Lychees:

Beneath Mount Luofu it is spring in every season, loquats and plums ripening one after another. If eating three hundred lychees a day is the price, I would not mind being a man of Lingnan forever. （罗浮山下四时春，卢橘杨梅次第新。日啖荔枝三百颗，不辞长作岭南人。）

If the self was never anchored to a place, exile cannot remove anything essential from it.

The second answer goes past reframing. 《定风波》, Calming the Waves, written at Huangzhou after he and his companions were caught in a rainstorm without rain gear, ends:

Looking back at the bleak path I just traversed, As I return, there is neither storm nor sunshine.（回首向来萧瑟处，归去，也无风雨也无晴。）

Storm and sunshine, the ordinary vocabulary of bad and good fortune, stop being opposites. This is not stoic endurance, which grits through hardship while privately keeping score. The score itself has lapsed, because no fixed self is left standing in the position of winner or loser.

The third answer does not wait for his own misfortune at all. 《西江月·平山堂》, written as he passed Pingshan Hall, the hall built by his late teacher Ouyang Xiu, mourns a man rather than a career:

Say not that all things turn to void when we turn our heads; Even before we turn around, life is already a dream.（休言万事转头空，未转头时皆梦。）

The insight is not reserved for the moment after loss, when things have already “turned to void.” It holds before the turn as well, while life is still going on as usual.

The progression ends in 《观潮》, Watching the Tide, about traveling to see two famous sights:

Mount Lu in misty rain, the Qiantang River tide. Before reaching them, a thousand regrets never fade. Having journeyed there and returned, nothing special remains: Mount Lu in misty rain, the Qiantang River tide.（庐山烟雨浙江潮，未至千般恨不消。到得还来别无事，庐山烟雨浙江潮。）

The first and last lines are identical; the person reading them is not. The shape is the one attributed to the Song-dynasty Chan master Qingyuan Weixin: first mountains are mountains, then mountains are not mountains, then mountains are once again mountains. The return does not bring back a naive certainty. What comes back is the same mountain, seen by someone whose craving for a defended self has been worn away rather than merely argued away.

Here the two thinkers part. Parfit offers an argument, built step by step, that strict personal identity is not what matters and that what does matter survives. An argument, however sound, is not the same thing as no longer minding. Parfit leaves his reader with a coherent theory. Su Shi leaves a record of what living by such a view looked like over decades, ending with the mountain again, without the thousand regrets.

The question that remains is whether an argument alone can produce the equanimity it justifies, or whether living without a fixed self takes exiles, reframings and repeated returns. If it takes the second, then the distance between knowing there is no fixed self and living as though there were none is not a distance philosophy can close by itself. Readers who have been persuaded by Parfit may ask whether they mind any less.

Editor’s note: the zither’s point, that meaning arises from a relationship rather than sitting fixed on one side of it, has a visual cousin. The Cube That Won’t Sit Still is an interactive Necker cube whose interpretation your own visual system has to supply.