Zen Master Dan-Gui Shih is one of the great masters who advocated the “Abandoning Zen” movement in the transitional period of the late Ming Dynasty and early Qing Dynasty. His Savoring the Mountains from a Boat in Yangshuo is a poetry collection comprised of ten poems, whose subjects are placed on the depiction of scenarios of mountains, waters, and everything within them. The motif of his poems is a highlight of the inability when facing the vicissitudes of life and the acknowledgment of letting things develop in their own way. Dan-Gui finished Savoring the Mountains from a Boat in Yangshuo in middle age and therefore, the collection was not incorporated in his other two publications called Bian xing tang ji Hall and Sequel. Savoring the Mountains from a Boat in Yangshuo was written during the time he was set up and framed, which is the reason why the poems are “depressed and melancholy” to the core. It took 370 years for the poetry collection to be known by the public again. All in all, the style of Dan-Gui’s poems entails combining mountains, waters, and space. He illustrated mountains, waters, skies, and clouds in a way that unveiled his thoughts and feelings. Dan-Gui’s mountains were always accompanied by waters and vice versa; albeit their differences in men’s eyes, the author still managed to unite them and sent out the morality of life with his tranquil motif.
