Trauma, Transience, and Traversal: Philosophizing on Time Through Su Shi’s Huangzhou-Period Literary Works

Abstract Su Shi’s literary works duing exile in Huangzhou explore temporal experience. To heal the trauma inflicted by the Crow Terrace Poetry Trial, he must understand the temporality of trauma. Trauma is a dialectic of transience. A traumatic event must involve a sudden, unforeseen deprivation while leaving the victim unable to dispel it. The past is gone, yet it refuses to fade into the past, thus giving rise to a dialectical structure of intertwined contradictions of temporal experience. The young Su Shi was already sensitive to transience. In Huangzhou, he emphasized the relativity of temporal experience, the moment of serendipity, and the sense of déjà vu at those moments of encounter between self and others, wherein the distances between past, present, and future are instantaneously traversed. His “First Poetic Exposition on Red Cliff” was probably influenced by the Surangama Sutra , while his “Second Poetic Exposition” further discusses on transience and eternity, and indicates that transience is the repercussion of traversal. This idea can be articulated via the notion of the interpenetration between past, present, and future from the Huayan school, which Su Shi knew well. The significance of his “flying crane dream” can be compared with that in Zhuangzi’s “butterfly dream.”