Hanshan

He looked like a tramp. His body and face were old and beat. Yet in every word he breathed was a meaning in line with the subtle principles of things, if you only thought of
it deeply. Everything he did had a feeling of the Tao in it, profound and arcane secrets.
His hat was made of birch bark, his clothes were ragged and worn out, and his shoes were wood. Thus men who have made it hide their tracks: unifying categories and interpenetrating things. On that long veranda calling and singing, in his words of reply– Ha Ha!–the three worlds revolve. Sometimes at the villages and farms he laughed and sang with cowherds. Sometimes intractable, sometimes agreeable, his nature was happy of itself. But how could a person without wisdom recognize him?  

Hanshan – J.P. Seaton
My personal guess about the real origin of the Han Shan poetry is this: The poetry of the many hermits who lived on Han Shan (Cold Mountain) and Han Yen (Cold Cliff), two real locations in the Tien-tai Range, was becoming famous well before anyone thought to pull all the poems together. The Tien-tai Range was home to many temples and places of pilgrimage, and even today, or again today, cliffs in the area are adorned with poems both brush written and stone incised. Some of the best or the latter are the sources of the rubbings mentioned above. Its quite possible that Shan Han Shan (Han Shan’s Poems) originally meant the poems written or displayed at Han Shan. rather than poems by a poet named Han Shan. I doubt anyone will pin Han Shan down any further than he has been at this point, either through good scholarship (the scholars agree that there are at least two Han Shuns) or through educated guessing like mine. But there is a little more to be said about the poetry of Han Shan as it has come down to us.

Among these poems are many that appear to come from the best poetry of mountain hermits of Taoist. Buddhist, and maybe even free-agent mystics, with a sprinkling of more orthodox Buddhist work and some poems on themes appropriate to all three Chinese religions. For, as the Chinese have liked to say for millennia, The three Ways are one.” Among the works of Han Shan, along with the mountain poems, arc a few very fne poems of traditional Confucian rural retirement and a few that are modeled on the best of the Taoist epicurean poems. There are also few poems that fairly unconvincingly claim familiarity with or achievement in the cultural accomplishments of the Confucian, even of military men. Add a few bits of moral exhortation, some of which are very funny and clearly intended to be so, and some of which are not, and you have the IHan Shan collection, 307 poems in the Chinese collection and 311 in the Japanese. If there was something like a conspiracy to package these poems and present them as the work of a bodhisattva, I gratefully accept the gift. “Cold Mountain Poems: Zen Poems of Han Shan, Shih Te, and Wang Fan-chih (Shambhala, 2009)”]

She laughs that I’ve fallen behind.
I laugh that she’s gotten ahead.
Both of us laughing, no stopping us.

Hanshan

 

Hanshan – Tony Barnstone
Han Shan, who may or may not have existed, is the name given to the putative author of a collection of fascinating Tang dynasty poems, more than three hundred in number. The poems tell the story of the author’s retreat to Cold Mountain to live a life of hermetic simplicity, seeking Daoist and Chan (Zen) enlightenment in nature. They are proselytizing poems, but in their vernacular speech, their clarity of focus, and their celebration of simplicity, they embody what they seek to teach, and in this they achieve their greatest success.

Strangely enough, Han Shan is not considered a major poet in China. The Chinese complain that his work is too vernacular, full of good ideas but lacking in elegance and polish. And yet he has become a favorite poet in English translation, in part because he has had marvelous translators, among them Red Pine, Burton Watson, and Gary Snyder. Perhaps he is a poet who, to echo Robert Frost’s famous snub about Carl Sandburg, “can only be improved in translation.” The politics of literary reputation aside though, there is an undeniably remarkable voice that emerges from the poems of Han Shan, one that is quite rare in Chinese poetry. Like Meng Jiao, Han Shan was a cynic and an ironist, and the two poets’ bitterness seems to have damaged their reputation among readers in China. Han Shan was also a strange mixture of dogmatist and freethinker, and one senses a personality behind the poems that is harsh and yet humorously irrepressible. Whatever the craft value of his poetry in Chinese, there is much to appreciate in its fiddling Buddhist thought and in the way it captures the personality of a writer who may never have lived.
“Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry, Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping (Anchor, 2005)

“So ha-ha-ho-ha-ha” – The nature of the Tao of Hanshan and the mountain men >>>

 

 ~

Human beings live in the dirt,
like bugs in a filthy bowl.
All day long crawling around and around,
never getting over the edge.
Even spiritual masters can’t make it,
wracking their brains for schemes and plans.
The months and the years, a  running river:
then there’s the day you wake up old.

J.P. Seaton

~

Clambering up the Cold Mountain path,
The Cold Mountain trail goes on and on:
The long gorge choked with scree and boulders,
The wide creek, the mist-blurred grass.
The moss is slippery, though there’s been no rain
The pine sings, but there’s no wind.
Who can leap the world’s ties
And sit with me among the white clouds?

Gary Snyder

Do I have a body or not?
Am I my body or not?
Brooding on this,
I let things pass, sitting against a cliff
till green grass spills between my feet,
red dust cakes my head,
and common men, thinking me dead,
leave wine and fruit by my bed.

Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping

~

ult with my poems.
He says I don’t follow the “regulations”,
and don’t use the “right” techniques.
He says I don’t use the four tones correctly,
and just stick in words any which way.
I laugh at what he calls poetry:  a blind man’s
rhymes: lukewarm praise of the sun.

J.P. Seaton

 

Above Cold Mountain the moon shines alone
in a clear sky it illuminates nothing at all
precious heavenly priceless jewel
buried in the skandhas submerged in the body

Red Pine

 

Men ask the way to Cold Mountain
Cold Mountain: there’s no through trail.
In summer, ice doesn’t melt
The rising sun blurs in swirling fog.
How did I make it?
My heart’s not the same as yours.
If your heart was like mine
You’d get it and be right here.

Gary Snyder

 

 

My heart is like the autumn moon
perfectly bright in the deep green pool
nothing can compare with it
you tell me how it can be explained

James Sanford

Blue-green spring water,
white moonlit mountain.

Quiet wisdom of the spirit:
empty gaze beyond silence.

Doug Westendorp

 

The gorge is long, rocks, and rocks and rocks, jut up,
The torrent’s wide, reeds almost hide the other side.
The moss is slippery even without rain.
The pines sing: the wind is real enough.
Who’s ready to leap free of the world’s traces:
come sit with me among white clouds?

J.P. Seaton

 

You have seen the blossoms among the leaves;
tell me, how long will they stay?
Today they tremble before the hand that picks them;
tomorrow they wait someone’s garden broom.

Wonderful is the bright heart of youth,
but with the years it grows old.
Is the world not like these flowers?
Ruddy faces, how can they last?

Burton Watson

~

My old landlady
got rich three or four years ago.
Used to be poorer than me,
now she laughs that I don’t have money.
She laughs that I’ve fallen behind.
I laugh that she’s gotten ahead.
Both of us laughing, no stopping us.
Landlady,  and Lord of the West.

J.P. Seaton

~

Beneath high cliffs I live alone
swirling clouds swirl all day
inside my hut it might be dim
but in my mind I hear no noise
I passed through a golden gate in a dream
my spirit returned when I crossed a stone bridgre
I left behind what weighed me down
my dipper on a branch click clack

Red Pine

 

Once at Cold Mountain
troubles cease,
No more tangled
hung-up mind.
I idly scribble poems on the rock cliff,
Taking whatever comes
like a drifting boat.

Gary Snyder

 

Sitting alone in peace before these cliffs
the full moon is heaven’s beacon
the ten thousand things are all reflections
the moon originally has no light
wide open the spirit of itself is pure
hold fast to the void realize its subtle mystery
look at the moon like this
this moon that is the heart’s pivot

Arthur Tobias, James Sanford and J.P. Seaton

 

Cold Mountain is full of weird sights;
people who try to climb it always get scared.
When the moon shines the water glints and sparkles;
when the wind blows the grasses rustle and sigh.
Snowflakes make blossoms for the bare plum,
clouds in place of leaves for the naked trees.
At a touch of rain the whole mountain shimmers ~
but only in good weather can you make the climb.

Burton Watson

 

The place where I spend my days
is farther away than I can tell.
Without a wind the wild vines stir;
no fog, yet the bamboos are always dark.
Who do the valley streams sob for?
Why do the mists huddle together?
At noon, sitting in my hut,
I realize for the first time that the sun has risen.

Burton Watson

Bird-song drowns me in feeling.
Back to my shack of straw to-sleep.
Cherry-branches burn with crimson flower,
Willow-boughs delicately trail.
Morning sun flares between blue peaks,
Bright clouds soak in green ponds.
Who guessed l’d leave that dusty world,
Climbing the south slope of Cold Mountain

A.S. Kline

The Way to Hanshan is a queer one;
No ruts or hoof prints are seen.
Valley winds into valley,
Peak rises above peak; `
Grasses are bright with dew,
And pine trees sough in the breeze.
Even now you do not know?
The reality is asking the shadow the way.

R.H. Blyth

The place where I spend my days
is farther away than I can tell.
Without a wind the wild vines stir;
no fog, yet the bamboos are always dark.
Who do the valley streams sob for?
Why do the mists huddle together?
At noon, sitting in my hut,
I realize for the first time that the sun has risen.

Burton Watson

 

People ask about the Cold Mountain way:
plain roads don’t get through to Cold Mountain.
Middle of the summer, and the ice still hasn’t rocked.
Sunrise, and the mist would blind a hidden dragon.
So, how could a man like me get here?
My heart is not the same as yours, dear sir. . .
If your heart were like mine.
you’d be here already.

J.P. Seaton

The Shih Ching , usually translated as either The Book of Songs or the Classic of Poetry, is the first great collection of Chinese poetry. Tradition says that it was edited into its present form by the Sage of Sages, Confucius himself. In fact the book was assembled before, during, and after the life of Confucius. Its more than three hundred poems include fragments of works as old as the Shang Dynasty (traditional; dates 1766-1154 BCE) as well as “contemporary” poems from the Chou feudal states written or spoken by both aristocratic court figures and just plain “folks”. A great deal has been said about the origin of many, if not the majority of the poems as oral “folk” art, but it is clear from the artistry of the written language in which they have been handed down that, like the scribes who improved upon the originally oral poetry attributed to “Homer” in the West to create the Iliad and the Odyssey, the people who converted Chou folk songs and court verses into poetry in written Chinese characters clearly thought of themselves as (and were) artists. So the characters used to render simple and direct lyrical utterances of the illiterate peasant folk often honor them with carefully chosen written vocabulary: the heart and soul of folk art remains clearly present, but literary subtleties are introduced. The scribes who created the Shih Ching were poets, not tape recorders. They chose the best of what existed, and they honored it with their own art.

In its present form, the Shih Ching consists of three major sections, the Kuo Feng, or Odes of the States, comprising 160 of the 300 are generally but not always folk songs. The Ya (Elegant Verses) subdivided with no obvious criteria into greater and lesser, include poems 161-265, and the Sung or Temple Odes high ritual songs and bits of dynastic myth, include poems 266-305. The present selection is comes, all but a single longer poem on drinking and its positive and negative consequences from the “Lesser Elegants”, all come from the Kuo Feng Sections.

Knowledge of the Shih Ching poems was a necessity of diplomatic practice around the time of Confucius, when it was a common practice to deliver or at least support the delivery of diplomatic messages among the feudal domains (the “States or Guo of the Guo Feng) by oral presentation of relevant lines from the Classic. From the Han on many of the poems where imbued with very specific allegorical interpretations, but it is clear that later poets, who memorized the book word for word, used it as allusive material in their own poems at least as often for its plain “folk” messages as for its orthodoxly approved allegorical ones.