UCLA

This thesis examines how bodily restoration mediates spiritual self-healing in the medicinal herb cultivation poetry by Su Shi and Su Zhe during their political exile. Exile disrupted these two Northern Song literati’s self-identification on both spatial and temporal levels, severing connections to familiar places and interrupting the continuity of their established identities. When material impoverishment intensified bodily suffering through hunger and illness, their fractured senses of selves further deepened. Through close reading informed by pharmacological knowledge, this project demonstrates that cultivated herbs function as both emblems and agents in the Su brothers self-healing processes. Herb cultivation reconstructs everyday bodily nourishment routines around growing and ingestion, providing bodily nourishment that grounds spiritual transcendence. Su Shi’s Five Odes of the Small Nursery employs “transplantation” as a poetic device that restores his fractured identities as northern sojourner and banished official, ultimately allowing him to inhabit Huizhou as a southerner dwelling in the present. Su Zhe’s Two Poems on Cultivating Herbal Seedlings reveals a different dynamic. On the one hand, the agricultural routine of herb cultivation establishes temporal and spatial continuity and produces a poetic food abundance. This contributes to the poet’s sense of lodging as a sojourner. On the other hand, the failure of herbal remedies to cure his failing eyesight exposes the limitations of external solutions, compelling him toward Buddhist meditation as the true path to self-healing. For both poets, the body operates not as an obstacle but as a mediator, with sustained bodily nourishment forming the corporeal foundation upon which spiritual transcendence unfolds.