free among clear waters

I'm currently reading a translation of Journey to the West, the 16th-century Chinese novel which is known in Britain mostly because of the TV adaptation that was made in Japan and shown here in the early 1980s under the title, Monkey. It's a massive work, very digressive with all kinds of material branching out from the central story of Xuanzang's journey to bring the Buddhist scriptures back from India. Right now I'm in the middle of a section in which a fisherman and a gatherer of firewood discuss their lives, each arguing for the superiority of his own way of living. It has what you might call a 'set piece' quality and this has got me wondering whether it is, in fact, a frequently occurring trope in Chinese literature.

Timothy Wai Keung Chan's book, Considering The End, deals with questions of mortality in the work of four Chinese poets active between the 1st and 5th centuries AD. In it Chan discusses this body of poetry with reference to the traditional figure of the fisherman, 'an iconic, archetypal persona,' who - like the firewood gatherer - mediated in the text between 'the pursuit of, and retreat from, official life'. It is important to understand that:

These figures were no ordinary peasants or uneducated people, but represented a sub-class that dissented from central political power. These two contrasting sub-classes (reclusive and non-reclusive) comprised the class of scholars (shi).

Chan's book looks in some detail at the idea of reclusion as a response to the politics of a particular period and explores the place of the fisherman in figuring that response.

Journey to the West is, of course, a much later text - around one thousand years later than the poems Chan examines. And so the figure of the fisherman and wood-gatherer are highly traditionalised by this period. In this text, the former is called Zhang Shao and the latter Li Din. Both are 'advanced scholars who had never taken the official examination [to enter the civil service], lettered men of the mountains'. And they do articulate the values of reclusion in the traditional way:

'Brother Li,' said Zhang Shao, 'it seems to me that people who struggle for fame kill themselves for it; those who compete for profit die for it; those who receive imperial favours walk around with snakes in their sleeves. Taking all in all, we are much better off living free among our clear waters and blue hills: we delight in our poverty and and follow our destinies.'

Specific descriptions of their respective callings illustrate the 'pleasures of this reclusive life':

In my little boat I can stay where I like, 
Having no fear of the many misty waves.
Drop the hook, cast wide the net, to catch fresh fish:
Even without fat or sauce,
They taste delicious.

And again:

Big fish swim into the net in shoals; little ones swallow the hooks in swarms;
Boiled or fried they taste wonderful -
I laugh at the roaring river and lake.

And finally:

How well I like the swollen stream under the bridge in spring ...
Dragon-sized fresh carp cooked at any time;
A full array of hooks and nets to support my old age;
Lying back in a tiny boat watching the flying geese;
I have no stall in the marketplace of tongues.

The fisherman of Journey to the West interests me because he is not someone who is born to fishing. He is someone who could have been an influential government officer but has turned his back on the compromises that such a way of life involves. He has chosen to fish as a deliberate rejection of politics, power, and ambition. This 'could have been different' quality to the fisherman's life reminds me a little of the point about 'the day well spent'. In quite a lot of texts, it is important that fishing is an alternative to something else - it is the rejection of something that others prioritise as well as the embrace of something that is in itself worthwhile.

The Chinese character shì - scholar