This stone rubbing is from an engraved stone stele in the Han Shan Temple in Suzhou.
from Gary Snyder’s translation:
“White clouds gather and billow.
Thin grass does for a mattress,
The blue sky makes a good quilt.
Happy with a stone under head
Let heaven and earth go about their changes.”
Snyder, Gary, Gary Snyder, and Hanshan. Riprap & Cold Mountain Poems. San Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation, 1965. Print.
One of my all time favorite poets is thought to have lived more than 1000 years ago in Tang Dynasty China. No one knows what Han Shan’s real name was nor where he was from, but the cave called Cold Mountain, where he is said to have lived, is in the province of Zhejiang, about a day’s foot journey from the sacred range of mountains called Tian Tai (天台).
One commonly held story is that an official by the name of Lu Jiuyin 閭丘胤 Lǘqiū yìn went to Mount Tiantai in order to meet Han Shan. He was told that there were actually two Bodhisattvas living there, Han Shan 寒山 and Shi De 拾得. Asked how he might know them, he was told, “If you see them, you won’t recognize them; if you recognize them, you won’t see them.” He didn’t see them, but they saw him. And when they did, they laughed out loud and ran away, obviously having no desire to meet him.
When I first read Gary Snyder’s translation of 24 of Han Shan’s 300 poems, the translations and interpretations – by the young 24 year old budding poet – of the words and antics of Han Shan, spoke to me, and now, nearly 50 years later, I’m still listening.
Patrick Murphy noted in his preface of Snyder’s book, Riprap & Cold Mountain Poems: “These poems are something more than translations precisely because Snyder renders them as a melding of Han Shan’s Chinese Ch’an Buddhist mountain spirit trickster mentality and Snyder’s own mountain wilderness meditation and labor activities. The suite of 24 poems was published in the 1958 issue of The Evergreen Review, and the career of one of America’s greatest poets was launched.”
It was partly the sacrilege of Han Shan’s poetry that appealed to me. I loved that I never knew whether Han Shan and Shi De were Zen (Ch’an) Buddhists or Daoists or neither or both. Neither did religion own them, nor did they necessarily embrace a religion. I loved that they worked hard at menial tasks and were true to their own natures. They knew then that the answers were not to be found in the gadgets and the glitz and the glamour that so defined success in the eyes of so many. In years past, they may have been “boomers” who worked the buck rakes and beaver slides on the large cattle ranches in Montana, or the “old uncles” in American Chinatowns sipping Po-lay and reading the China Times, after the Chinese exclusion act insured that these men would remain bachelors until the act was repealed in 1943. Today, these old people might be homeless street sleepers in any large metropolitan area in the world. These men and women lived and live largely solitary lives where they had/have a fair amount of down time to contemplate the secrets of the universe. If you see them, you won’t recognize them; if you recognize them, you won’t see them.
To learn more about Han Shan, check out: https://terebess.hu/zen/chang/hshan.html#a
Chinese Odyssey 32
Once again there were pictures
emblazoned on sails;
not Han Zi, not words.
More like fish without scales
swimming into the night.
Through menacing clouds
the mountains were yellow.
There were no more crowds.
The Panda in the Room PD 