In the autumn of the year Renxu, on the sixteenth night of the seventh month, I, Su Shi, took a boat with my guests to visit the Red Cliff. A gentle breeze came, and the water was calm. We raised our cups and toasted each other, reciting the poem of the bright moon and singing the chapter of graceful beauty. Before long, the moon rose from the eastern mountains and lingered between the Dipper and the Herdboy. White dew spread across the river, and the water met the sky. We let our tiny boat drift where it would, over the vast expanse.

Then we drank deeply and rejoiced, striking the side of the boat and singing. A guest played the flute, and the sound was mournful, like resentment and longing, like weeping and complaining, lingering like a thread that would not break. It made the hidden dragons dance in the deep, and the widow weep in her lonely boat.

I said to my guest: Do you know the water and the moon? What flows away is like this, yet it never truly goes; what waxes and wanes is like that, yet it never truly increases or decreases. If we look at it from the perspective of change, then heaven and earth cannot last even a single moment; if we look at it from the perspective of constancy, then all things—and we ourselves—are endless. What is there to envy?

Only the clear wind on the river and the bright moon in the mountains are things that the ear receives as sound and the eye meets as color, inexhaustible and free to all. They are the endless treasury of the Creator, and what you and I may share together.