廬山記 3.12

3.12

Zhou Xuzhi, styled Daozu, was a man of Guangwu in Yanmen, who later moved to Jianchang in Yuzhang. At the age of twelve, he went to Fan Ning to receive instruction. He mastered the Five Classics and the Five Apocrypha, and was called 'Ten Classics'. His fellow students regarded him as a Yan Hui. Liu Yi appointed him an aide, and he was also summoned as a Erudite and a clerk to the Grand Commander, none of which he accepted. Later he entered Lushan and took part in Master Yuan's Pure Society. Along with Liu Yimin and Tao Yuanming, he was called one of the Three Recluses of Xunyang. Xuzhi did not value severe aloofness; whenever the regional inspector of Jiangzhou invited him, he would also go and follow him. Emperor Wu opened a lodge outside the eastern outskirts to receive him. The imperial carriage descended, and [the emperor] asked Xuzhi about ritual propriety; his discriminations were refined and extraordinary, and people of the time called him the 'Pervasive Recluse'. Someone asked Xuzhi: 'Why do you sometimes set foot in the royal court?' Xuzhi laughed and said: 'Those whose minds race to the imperial palace find rivers and lakes to be fetters; those who have forgotten both feelings and attachments find the marketplace and court to be no different from rocky caves.' In the first year of Shengping, the year guihai, he died at Mount Zhong at the age of sixty-seven.