A Scholar Washing his Feet in a Mountain Stream

This scene depicts unfathomably tall mountains rising upward to the sky. At the bottom of the painting, a man sits on a rock by the river, washing his feet. Above him, within the mist near the middle of the painting on the right side, a small scholar gazes out from where he stands upon a cliff. The mountain peaks beyond him rise further upward. The painter's inscription in the upper right of this landscape is the final couplet of poem No. 5 from the important poem series Yong Shi, written by Zuo Si (c. 253–c. 307). It reads: …Wearing burlap clothes, I'll leave the royal gateways stepping proudly, and follow in the footsteps of hermit Xu You! I'll shake the dust from my robe on thousand-foot ridges, and wash my feet in streams that flow a thousand miles. The scholar Xu You famously washed his ears with pure mountain stream water after being offered an important government post. This couplet is one of the earliest statements of the formative dichotomy in Chinese culture between the Confucian pursuit of status and the Daoist desire to find spiritual purity and serenity in nature.