In this special issue devoted to Song Dynasty literature and culture, it hardly comes as a surprise that three of the eight articles take the indomitable Su Shi as their subject. To say that Su Shi is a towering figure of the age seems almost an understatement. That three of our authors chose to write about him was not, incidentally, something arranged by this guest editor, or even anticipated. It is simply something that happened. But that it “just happened” without prior arrangement points nicely to Su's special place in Song literature and culture as we now think of it.Yet the three articles on Su Shi are not ordinary contributions to the vast field of Su Shi studies. They may also be thought of in a different way. To begin with, none of them addresses the most obvious topics in that field, which are Su Shi's literary works in several different genres. Nor are they contributions to scholarship on the circumstances of Su Shi's life. So we know immediately that these three articles stand apart from the large number of Su Shi studies in recent decades. Two of the three concern Su Shi's involvement with calligraphy. Neither of these articles is a stylistic analysis of his calligraphy itself. One of them, by Xiaoshan Yang, concerns not Su Shi's calligraphic art but rather the meaning and implications of calligraphy scrolls that Su Shi produced during his Lingnan exile (to Huizhou and Hainan Island) and presented as gifts to men who had traveled hundreds of miles to visit him there. (A detail of one of these, Su's gift to Zhuo Qishun, is reproduced on the cover of this volume.) What was the significance of the texts that Su Shi chose to write out as parting gifts to these devoted admirers, and indeed, what was the significance of calligraphy as a gift at all? Professor Yang delves into such questions and comes up with answers that will surprise most readers. The second article, by I Lo-fen, focuses on a single calligraphy scroll by Su Shi held today in the Jilin Provincial Museum. This is an unusual scroll, one in which Su Shi copied out two different fu “rhapsodies” he had composed in recent years. It too was presented to a friend, and it too has a connection to his distant southern exile because it was produced when Su Shi was on his way to that exile. This scroll has a long and complicated history of ownership, through the centuries, before it came into the Qianlong emperor's collection in the eighteenth century. Professor I traces that history and analyzes the several colophons that the scroll inspired through the centuries for what they tell us about the scroll's reception history. But before that long history began, the scroll already had a peculiar identity and provenance. The article explores the special meaning that the very act of copying out earlier compositions implicitly conveyed (in this case, it was his own works that Su Shi wrote out, rather than canonical texts from a distant time), without the author/calligrapher ever explaining what he was doing or why.We know that Su Shi was an important calligrapher of his time, but what can we do with that knowledge, beyond viewing and appreciating the relatively few surviving works of his that are probably authentic productions of his hand? These two articles by Xiaoshan Yang and I Lo-fen help us to move past aesthetic appreciation, to see something of the role the art form played in Su Shi's life as an act that could be deeply embedded in tumultuous circumstances of his career and the ways he reacted to them. Previously, we may have supposed that such a use of calligraphy in Su Shi's life was probably limited to rare occasions when brilliant literary composition by the great poet and calligraphic production coincided (e.g., the famous Cold Food Festival poems scroll, or the Red Cliff Rhapsody scroll). But these articles show that calligraphy could be a highly significant act of self-expression even when Su Shi was writing out someone else's text from centuries earlier or recopying a text of his own that he had already inscribed on scrolls many times before.And what can be said about those who lived in the great man's shadow and sought to take advantage of their proximity to him? The monk Huihong (Juefan Huihong), who seems to have been a close friend of Huang Tingjian but not of Su Shi, claims in several of his writings to be privy to conversations, jottings, and stories involving Su Shi, his brother Su Zhe, and other acquaintances. In their article, Zhu Gang and Zhao Huijun untangle a messy knot of textual references to a prior life of Su Shi, in which Su is said to have been the Buddhist monk Wuzu Shijie, a prominent member of the Yunmen school and dharma lineage. Zhu and Zhao trace the earliest iterations of this remarkable claim (that Su Shi was a reincarnation of a prominent Yunmen monk of the generation before his own) to a range of biji (miscellaneous notes) and Buddhist writings (including biographies and anecdote collections), all of which have a common thread: they date from just after Su Shi's death and were all composed by the eccentric and controversial Yunmen monk Huihong, who is best known outside Buddhist circles today as the author of the miscellany Lengzhai yehua (Nighttime Chats in the Cold Studio). Zhu and Zhao go on to identify a likely motivation Huihong had for working so hard to spread this story about Su Shi, retelling it with various inconsistences in several of his writings. By claiming that the great Su Shi was a reincarnation of Wuzu Shijie, Huihong sought to reinvigorate the prestige and legitimacy of his Yunmen lineage, in which Wuzu Shijie was a dharma master, repairing the damage that had been done to it by the defection of Huanglong Huinan to the Linji lineage. As the authors point out, this claim did not involve intricate doctrinal differences between the rival lineages in which Su Shi had any stake. It was simply an opportunistic assertion, in which Su Shi's unparalleled stature was seized upon and exploited for what it was worth in the competition between rival religious sects. The article provides a rare glimpse of how sectarian monastic disputes could manifest themselves in the ways that monastic belief and affiliation intersected with lay Buddhist literati. The notion that Su Shi was indeed a monk reincarnated became widely if not universally accepted in later Southern Song biji writings.The article by Zhu and Zhao moves from there to a still later “reincarnation” of the rebirth story, showing how it was transformed and elaborated in Ming- and Qing-period vernacular fiction and drama, in which a “romantic” and even scandalous element attached itself to the reincarnation tale: in an earlier life, Su Shi had been the monk Wujie (not Shijie), and he was a licentious monk who had allowed himself to be seduced by the beauty Honglian (“Red Lotus”). Many versions of this narrative are found in later vernacular literature. In some of them, the lovers, Shijie and Honglian, are both reincarnated, as Su Shi and another beautiful woman, and meet again in their later lives. This article may not be a contribution to Su Shi biographical scholarship, but it is something arguably as important and perhaps of greater interest: a contribution to our understanding of images of Su Shi as they were transmitted, elaborated, and manipulated from his own time down through later dynasties. It requires an unusual combination of expertise in Buddhist literature, sectarian history, and literary history in both literary and vernacular language materials of the Song and later periods to produce such a study.Articles by Anna Shields and Hsiao-wen Cheng take up key issues in Northern Song cultural history concerned with approaches to writing, its relation to moral values, and how these would be connected to the cultural past. As the new dynastic order established itself, bringing an end to a period of political disunity, a rethinking of these issues was needed to adjust to social and institutional changes that were taking place. The aristocratic clans of Tang society had largely disappeared. The Song court would rely more heavily than ever before on merit-based examinations to staff its huge official and bureaucratic class. But intense competition among young men trying to impress their examiners and win a place for themselves in the imperial bureaucracy brought to the fore questions about what manner of writing should be rewarded, and what, after all, the relationship was between examination writing and the moral worth of the examinee that was considered desirable for official appointment. The answers to such questions were not obvious and had to be worked out through a process that lasted for decades and was pursued through various approaches.Professor Shields's article looks at one of the early attempts to influence thinking about these matters, which took the form of an anthology of Tang writing titled Wen cui (Literature's Finest), compiled in 1011 by a scholar working on his own rather than by imperial commission. This anthology, which would later come to be known as Tang wen cui (Finest Literature of the Tang), sought to mold conceptions of writing by selecting a portion of what had been produced by the preceding dynasty and unabashedly promoting it as a model for the new era. Naturally, the compiler, Yao Xuan, had his own agenda in this project, and his selection of the “finest” was highly subjective. In making his choices, Yao Xuan eschewed certain genres and styles of poetry and prose in which Tang writers had taken great pride. He avoided regulated verse, for example, and prose written in the euphuistic, parallel style. His anthology thus came to be known for championing genres and styles of writing associated with guwen values, and he explicitly endorsed such values in his preface. This anthology thus was both prescient and influential in preparing the way for the guwen “ancient-style writing” advocacy associated with leading writers of the mid-eleventh century. Shields discusses other features of the anthology that contributed to its appeal. Owing to several of these, Yao Xuan's anthology became the largest anthology of Tang writing that circulated widely throughout the Song, eclipsing in this regard the far larger and more inclusive imperial anthology Wenyuan yinghua (Blossoms from the Garden of Literature). Wen cui thus occupies an important place in Song representations of earlier literature and literary preferences, although Tang literati themselves would have found it strangely biased.The mid-eleventh-century ancient-style writing advocacy and the divide between it and the early daoxue associated with Cheng Yi is taken up in Professor Cheng's article. Adopting a fresh approach to the division between guwen and daoxue (learning of the way), this article likewise traces both viewpoints to Northern Song political culture and anxiousness over approaches to writing inspired by the civil-service examinations. These are topics that have been discussed at length in previous scholarship. What is new in this article is the insistence on so much common ground between what are normally thought of as rival ways of thinking. The author points out, for example, that if we attend to the connection that was perceived between the aesthetic qualities of writing and the moral character of its author, any opposition between wen and dao largely disappears. At the same time, Cheng calls attention to the essential role that the classics played in both programs of learning, and this leads to the following insight about the divergence between the two schools: that guwen values were fundamentally concerned with learning how to write well by steeping oneself in the classics composed by ancient sages (i.e., their wen), while the primary goal of daoxue was cultivating the self through reading the classics. This is a formulation that is immensely helpful and should become part of future accounts of the intellectual history of the period.A different aspect of Confucian values, filial piety, is the subject of Cong Ellen Zhang's article. She looks at the ways that the family of the celebrated Bao Zheng (Judge Bao of later vernacular fiction and drama) met the expectations of filial devotion, care, and reverence for older parents and other older clan members. Using tomb epitaphs as her primary source, supplemented by other records, Professor Zhang examines the ways members of the Bao family fulfilled or went beyond the conventions of filial conduct. Of particular interest in this study is to see how people behave when the realities of domestic life produce situations that are far more complicated than ritual guidelines and prescriptions describe. Early death, remarriage, concubinage, foster parents and children, husbands marrying “into” their wife's family, all of these greatly complicated the ritual expectations about sons caring for their parents and daughters devotedly serving their parents-in-law through their old age and beyond. There were individuals in the Bao clan who acknowledged three “mothers” (legal, birth, and surrogate); how was one to prioritize and carry out filial obligations in such a case? Also of interest in Zhang's study are the instances in which tensions surface between the filial impulse and practical considerations that bulk large in the minds of either the filial offspring or other members of the clan. It may be admirable, for example, to fulfill the three years of ritual mourning for a parent, or even in extreme cases to extend that mourning period, but the disadvantages of such a long absence from the path of career advancement may weigh on the minds of other family members who rely on the mourner for their support. Another classic conflict is that between the widow who is committed to fulfill her filial duties toward her parents-in-law and her own parents (or others) who pressure her to remarry. It turns out that filial conduct may be fraught with conflicts and contradictions. This study is valuable for illustrating how creative the members of the Bao family were in finding ways to actualize the filial ideal despite the sacrifices that it often entailed.The final grouping among the articles contains two articles on poetry. Here again we find topics and approaches that lie outside those of conventional literary scholarship. We are familiar with the occasion of parting between friends as one that regularly gave rise to poetic expression. Scholar-officials were frequently on the move in medieval and middle-period China, and parting poems given to the friend about to set off to a new post or to return home are a staple of poetry collections. But what happens when both the writer and the recipient are Buddhist monks, whose commitment to the expression of emotional attachment, not to mention their understanding of place, space, and temporality, runs counter to that of ordinary literati outside the monastery? Jason Protass discusses dozens of parting poems written close to the end of the Southern Song, in 1267 and 1268, sending off the Japanese pilgrim-monk Nanpo Jōmin as he set sail to return to Japan. The poems were composed by Chinese monks Nanpo had befriended during his years in the Southern Song. Unified by the occasion and the identity of the recipient, the poems are also linked by ways they treat Nanpo's departure that would be odd, if not unthinkable, in non-Buddhist parting poems. As Professor Protass explains, the monks wrote parting poems with their own experiences and doctrines in mind. The Buddhist tradition of itinerant practice (xingjiao) and the doctrines of emptiness and universality of Buddha-nature are fundamental to the poems given to Nanpo, as is the famous Chan delight in irony, humor, and nonsense. All of this makes for treatment of a friend's departure that is utterly different from the conventions of mainstream parting poetry, and we thus gain insight into how contingent those conventions are upon social roles and practices that themselves turn out to be less than universal.My article is not so much a look at anything distinctive about Song-period poetry as it is about the contexts we can situate it in, thanks to the abundance of sources that survive for the period. The unprecedented wealth of ancillary contemporary documentation often provides a kind of framing for particular poems that purports to explain their origins and meanings. My article examines cases in which such framing is duplicate and contradictory, reminding us how susceptible poems are to attracting more than one origin story, which, in turn, may produce widely divergent ways of reading the same poem.Most of the articles in this volume point to new directions in the study of Song literature and cultural history. Of particular interest is to see new lines of inquiry concerning familiar topics, for example, the role that the practice of calligraphy played in Su Shi's life (rather than his calligraphy style), and a new interpretation of the relationship between writing and moral values among Northern Song thinkers. Other articles take up topics that have been overlooked in previous scholarship because they stand outside conventional ideas of what constitutes a viable topic in a certain field (e.g., in poetry, Buddhist farewell poems; in literary history, a peculiar anthologized representation of Tang writing), span fields that are usually kept separate (e.g., Su Shi's biography, Buddhist lineage rivalries, and late imperial vernacular literature), or explore normative virtues (e.g., filial piety) not as part of a philosophical system but as grappled with in lived experience. Collectively, the articles suggest the range of new approaches and topics that still await exploration in this source-rich dynastic period.As guest editor for this issue, I wish to thank the general editors, Yuan Xingpei and Zong-qi Cai, for giving me the chance to put this volume together.