I like the cover color of the book "A Smoke and Rain Ren Pingsheng: Su Dongpo's Life Travels", a faint blue, supplemented by gray and white around, and there is a kind of elegant beauty as a whole.
It is written about Su Dongpo's life experience, but the angle chosen is more special, it is to write Su Dongpo's life "travelogue".
Although it is said to be a "travelogue" and there are also many places in the north of the South China Sea in the book, this book is not to write about which places Su Dongpo's life went to travel, but to write about which places Su Dongpo was forced to go to in his ups and downs.
When I was a student, I knew that Su Dongpo had been repeatedly belittled, but there was no specific concept of how many places he had been degraded.
In the book "A Smoke and Rain Ren Pingsheng: Su Dongpo's Biography", I saw Su Dongpo's amazing footprints.
"Meizhou -- Chengdu -- Kaifeng -- Fengxiang -- Hangzhou -- Mizhou -- Xuzhou -- Huzhou -- Huangzhou -- Dengzhou -- Yingzhou -- Yangzhou -- Dingzhou -- Huizhou -- Danzhou -- Changzhou, etc., from Meizhou in the west of the Northern Song Dynasty to Dengzhou in the east, from Dingzhou in the north to Danzhou in the south."
Su Dongpo really "traveled" all over the motherland's southeast, southwest, and northwest, although the trajectory was not his will. Just by looking at this long list of incomplete place names, you can feel how bumpy Su Dongpo's work experience is.
It is said that some people have calculated that Su Dongpo has traveled more than 30,000 kilometers in his lifetime. He spent nearly eight years on the road, accounting for one-eighth of his lifetime.
It was in many turbulent and displaced days that Su Dongpo left behind more than 2,700 poems, more than 300 words, more than 4,800 essays and a large number of calligraphy and painting works, ranking first among the famous artists of the Northern Song Dynasty.
In addition, he loved the people like a son, "leaving behind some famous water conservancy projects, some pharmacies for treating diseases, some health care methods, some cheap and delicious food, and some legendary stories that people talk about."
The book "A Cloud of Smoke and Rain: A Travelogue to the Life of Su Dongpo" takes Su Dongpo's footprints as a clue, and each chapter says a footprint.
But its catalogue name is quite elaborate, uniform and quite poetic. For example: "The youth is prosperous and the sun is thousands of miles - the first time to Kaifeng", "the southwest return road is far from depressed - a return to Meishan".
In the book, you can see a lot of Su Dongpo's deeds in various places, making the image of this celebrity more concrete.
For example, when he was in Huizhou, Su Dongpo contacted his cousin Cheng Zicai, so that the more than forty years of feud between the Su and Cheng families could be dissolved.
For example, at the Jinghui Temple in Guangzhou, the abbot implored Su Dongpo to leave the ink treasure. Inside the temple, there are bronze statues of The Six Patriarchs huineng, and there are six large banyan trees in front of the temple. Su Dongpo looked around at the six large banyan trees and wrote the word "six banyan trees" with a stroke of his pen. Since then, Jinghui Temple, which has existed for more than 600 years, has been called "Six Banyan Tree Temple". The Temple of the Six Banyan Trees is still a historic temple in Guangzhou, located on Liurong Road in Guangzhou.
For another example, "This peace of mind is my hometown" is a famous sentence in Su Dongpo's "Dingfengbo", but strictly speaking, it is not his original.
It was when Su Dongpo was washing the dust for his good friend Wang Gong in the middle of the dynasty, and he saw that Wang Gong and his concubine Rou Nu were all refreshed, and they did not become haggard because they were relegated to a remote place.
So Su Dongpo tentatively inquired about the mystery, and Rou Nu replied, "This place of peace of mind is my hometown." Such a weak woman said such an open-minded word, Su Dongpo was surprised, and immediately filled in the words "Ding Feng Bo".
We all know that Su Dongpo is a great poet, and we also know that Su Dongpo's career is bumpy, and we also know that Su Dongpo is positive and optimistic about life. However, looking at this book "A Smoke and Rain Ren Pingsheng: Su Dongpo's Life Travels", I have a more intuitive understanding of his achievements and attitude.
So you might as well follow this book and see the footprints of Su Dongpo throughout most of China, because there are many answers we need to face life along the way.
(In addition to the book cover picture, other pictures are from the Internet, please delete the joint)
Thursday, January 20, 2022