(Chinese: "Poetics of the Blue Wave")
Written by the Chinese poet Yan Yu (c. 1180-1235), Canglang Shihua was heavily inspired by the prevailing spiritual trend in China at the time, Chan Buddhism (today more commonly known in its Japanese form, Zen Buddhism).
Yan Yu's poetics established formal requirements for the composition and evaluation of poetry, as opposed to the earlier forms of poetry (which were usually characterised by the saying that they "must not follow the paths of reason, must not stumble over the chains of words"). Opposed to this, Yan Yu demanded that a poem be "a perfect, intuitive work of art, which appears light and unburdened, as a sound wafting on the air, a moon reflected in water or an image in a mirror". A poem must thus express the same immediacy and spontaneous enlightenment which was the object of Chan Buddhism.