From The Shu Pu

Because he writes at a certain time, the circumstances either provide harmony or provide discord. The mottled grey pigeon touching down on the tarmac the early sun paints at a slant on the sidewalk either fills the space left for it, or it flies in the seam between what could and what should. When harmony is, writing flowers like a fountain of possible liquid in the park of what is and what has been. When discord is, it leaks away.

There are five reasons for this: Harmony of the first order is the writer’s happiness and freedom from other duties; of the next order, a sense which is responsive and quick to apprehend; he is a micro-climate, a partially sheltered bay of the greater ocean, and so fine weather with a fine admixture of moisture and air is the third order; well-matched paper and ink is the fourth order; and a sudden, unbidden desire to write, a natural spring well-hoped for, is the highest order of harmony the circumstances can offer.

But a restless, impatient mind, and a sluggish impudent body discord to the first degree; an oppositional will and constricted energies, the second; dry wind and a hot sun, because his body is a permeable boundary between portions of the same atmosphere, is the third discordance; poorly-matched ink and paper, the fourth; exhausted emotions and a tired hand are the fifth.

The page written upon is not an artifact, but a physical stand-in for the gestures which created it. To catch the right moment is less vital than to have the right tools; the right tools, less vital than the right mental posture. When the five discords concur, the mind is stoppered and the hand is checked; when the five harmonies coincide, the bottle of the body is uncorked and the brush moves with ease. When the brush eases across fields, nothing can it not achieve; when the hand is checked, it cannot go anywhere.

Consider the forms of facing danger and of holding on to rotting wood, shapes which are occasionally heavy like clouds gathering in threat, and sometimes light like cicada wings; consider the moving brush— water as it fountains from a spring; the stopped brush— a mountain when it stands firm; and what is very, very light, the young moon ascending at the sky’s edge, and what is very, very clear, like the numberless stars splayed in the Silver River— the same as the subtle wonders of nature—

The calligraphy of Wang Xizhi can well serve as a model to help students find their own way. Those who copy it and make rubbings of it increase daily. Where most of the works of other famous calligraphers before and after Wang have been dispersed, his works remain.