Haiku (9 page)

The branch of Buddhism that came to China from India was Mahayana, and all Mahayana Buddhist institutions are missionary institutions, in accordance with the vision of the historical Buddha, Gautama Shakyamuni. I believe that the high monks and abbots of Ch'an, as Zen was called in China, saw the poetry of Han Shan and Shih Te for one of the things it certainly was, an outstanding tool for teaching the basic principles of Buddhism. I suspect they intentionally brought the institutional power of their church to the cause of creating a book, a collection of the poems of the two poets, adding to it a few poems of generic Buddhist doctrine and dogma. This collection, with the force of Ch'an and of its ally Pure Land Buddhism behind it in every succeeding dynasty, survived the vicissitudes of time to provide a continuing source of solace and inspiration into the present era.

The tall tale of Han Shan and Shih Te disappearing into the cave is certainly a beguiling one. We are told that several hundred years after Han Shan first started writing his poems on trees and rocks, an imperial Confucian official named Lu-ch'iu Yin (whom
history has provided with two lifetimes, or sets of dates anyway, and maybe even one real official office, though not anywhere near the T'ien-t'ai Range) came along and wrote an account of his own short encounter with the two, by then transmogrified into the bodhisattvas Manjusri (known as Wen-shu in Chinese) and Samantabhadra (known as P'u-hsien). This is the story which has come down to us, in a couple of very similar versions, for more than a thousand years.

Lu-ch'iu Yin's memoir is a neat little essay that appears to tell us just about everything we need to know about both Han Shan and Shih Te. There are two very similar, popular versions. The shorter version comes from the introduction to Han Shan's poems in the
Ch'üan T'ang Shih
, the great collection of T'ang dynasty poems. There are several available in English, including Gary Snyder's from 1958. The following is mine:

Nobody knows where Master Han Shan came from. He lived at Cold Cliff, in the T'ien-t'ai mountains in T'ang-hsing County, sometimes coming in to visit Kuo-ch'ing Temple. He wore a fancy birch-bark hat, a ragged cotton coat, and worn-out sandals. Sometimes he'd sing, or chant verses in the temple porches. Other times he'd sit out at farmers' houses, singing and whistling. No one ever really got to know him.

Lu-ch'iu Yin had received a government appointment in Tan-ch'iu, and when he was just about to debark to take up his post, he happened to run into Feng Kan, who told him he'd just come from the T'ien-t'ai area. Lu-ch'iu Yin asked him if there were any sages there with whom he might study. “There's Han Shan, who is an incarnation of Wen-shu, and Shih Te, who is an incarnation of P'u-hsien. They tend the fires of the kitchens in the granary at Kuo-ch'ing Temple.”

The third day after he'd taken up his position, Lu-ch'iu Yin went in person to the temple and, seeing the two men, bowed in appropriate fashion. The two burst out laughing and said, “Oh that Feng Kan, what a tongue-flapping blabbermouth! Amitabha! [
Note the Buddha's name taken in vain as a light oath
.] We can't imagine what you'd be bowing to us for!” And with that they went straight out of the temple, back to Cold Cliff. Master Han Shan disappeared into a cave, and then the cave closed up behind him. It had been his habit to inscribe his poems on bamboo and trees and rocks and cliff faces. Those, along with the ones he wrote on the walls of farmers' homes, inside and out, came to 307. They are collected here in one volume.

There are more than just several problems with this tale, historically speaking. To begin with, the
quasi-narrator, the official Lu-ch'iu Yin, is a person who doesn't exist in any of the dynastic histories. Feng Kan, the Zen master and authority for the authenticity of Han Shan and Shih Te, has existence issues too. The only evidence he ever
was
is this story, and a couple like it in which he's a character. He is known to history solely as the man who told Lu-ch'iu Yin that two Buddhist holy men lived near the county office where he was about to take up his post. Feng Kan is enshrined in the modern biographical dictionary of Buddhist monks as a “tongue wagger” in language that was clearly taken from this story. To put it mildly, Feng Kan is the nearly perfect example of an almost living, breathing fictional character.

If we accept that both Lu-ch'iu Yin and Feng Kan are bogus—though excellent scholars who are brilliant men of goodwill have pursued their shadows in many interesting directions—we can surmise that they are certainly in the introduction for a reason. In history, historical characters sort of have to be included, but in fiction, the characters are created as tools of the narrative. The traditional introduction to the poetry of Han Shan and Shih Te is propaganda. There is enough real poetry attributed to the name Han Shan to substantiate the existence of a historical person (or more likely, persons) we can call Han Shan. The introduction, with its fictional account of Han Shan, tells the readers that Han Shan was a religious seeker, a man called to the life of the religious
hermit, and, finally, a boddhisattva, a person who has achieved supernatural powers rather like a saint in Roman Catholicism, capable of interceding on behalf of suffering humanity.

What can we surmise about the real poet, or poets? We are told that “he lived at Cold Cliff.” The search for an idea of what the real Han Shan was like can begin there. Cold Cliff, or Han Yen, is a real place, a cliff in the T'ien-t'ai mountains in southeast China where hermit seekers had lived for millennia. The earliest of these were Taoists. Then, as Buddhism arrived from the west after the year 100 or so, both Taoists and Buddhists sat there. They found and occupied places where they could weather the winter cold, maybe foraging a little firewood against the worst of it. They dug roots and dried herbs for medicine and for food. Maybe they even planted a few soybeans, though the Taoists generally excluded grains from their diets. And finally, and that was the purpose of it all, they sat in meditation. Every time the word “sit” appears in a poem by Han Shan or Shih Te, it means to sit, cross-legged on the ground or on a simple straw mat,
in meditation
. For the Taoist, it is the “sitting forgetting” that is intended to free him of the memory of words, the memory which separates him from the Tao, which, according to Lao Tzu, cannot be described in words. For the Buddhist, “sitting” refers to the deep mind meditation that is the eighth and final step in the Buddha's Eightfold Path, the
prescription for getting free of samsara, free of illusion, free of suffering. In Sanskrit, the Indian literary language that is the basis of Mahayana Buddhism, this sort of meditation is called
dhyana
, pronounced
ch'an
in Chinese and
zen
in Japanese. Emphasis on sitting meditation as the source of ultimate enlightenment is one feature of both Taoism and Buddhism that the poems of Han Shan, Shih Te, and Wang Fan-chih all share.

The Lu-ch'iu Yin introduction also tells us that Han Shan lived intentionally on the edges of society and that, like a lot of people who live on its edges (religious seekers, artists of all kinds, even literary translators), Han Shan had what amounts to a day job. The poems show us a man who'd rather be
sitting
or re-creating his insights and inspirations in poetry to share with friends, or, like a bodhisattva, with all sentient beings. But, being a human in a body, Han Shan came from time to time to Kuo-ch'ing Temple to pick up a little work. If you're going to spend time in the hills prospecting for something worth more than gold, you need a grubstake. You need to buy a few supplies, salt and oil, onions, a few pounds of rice. Though stories tell of hermits living on dew and sunlight, they also tell of hermits who pull their caves shut behind them. Those who tried the dew and sunlight diet most likely didn't thrive. So our outsider Han Shan came, when he ran out of grub, to a monastery. On the way in and the way out, except
when being pursued by gawking monks and pilgrims and meddling authorities, he visited with the local farmers. We'll see in the poems that he had a familiar and sympathetic relationship with farmers and farming. He left poems in repayment for their shelter and gifts.

So, despite the exaggerations, the tall tale gives us a pretty realistic picture of a hermit-poet. 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 T'ien-t'ai Range, was becoming famous well before anyone thought to pull all the poems together. The T'ien-t'ai 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 of the latter are the sources of the rubbings mentioned above. It's quite possible that
Shan Han Shih
(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 Shans) 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, are a few very fine poems of traditional Confucian rural retirement and a few that are modeled on the best of the Taoist epicurean poems. There are also a 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 Han 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. If the fractal and chaotic workings of human history (or pure accident, if you prefer) have been the only source of this great collection of poetry, I gratefully accept that miracle as well. My own selection was guided, frankly, almost entirely by my own taste. That is, I translated the poems I like the best, of Han Shan as well as of Shih Te and Wang Fan-chih. I did try to show examples of every type of poem that didn't bore
me or go beyond my personal knowledge of Buddhist philosophy. There aren't many of the last category, not because I'm an expert, but because, essentially, “deep” philosophy, of which there is much in other schools of Buddhism, just isn't a Zen thing, and it certainly is not Han Shan's thing.

Han Shan's name means “Cold Mountain,” and many of his poems really are about mountains. Some simply describe the beauty of mountain scenery, with just a hint of perhaps undiscoverable allegory. There are also poems about the hardship of living in the mountains, being almost always cold and almost never not hungry. These are convincing in their realism, and at the same time they suggest the real difficulty of the life of the spiritual seeker: Allegory lives between the lines. Then there are the arrogant challenges thrown in the faces of other climbers: “If your heart were like mine, you'd be here already,” an example of the rough rhetoric of the
ma-jen tajen
(curse people, smack people) style. These will remind you of certain koans—contemporary, most likely, to many of the Han Shan poems—that became the teaching and learning devices of some schools of modern Zen. That rough style, apparent in Han Shan's response to the official Lu-ch'iu Yin and the monk Feng Kan in the story, is an important feature of many of the poems of all three poets in this collection, but it begins in Han Shan and is certainly most obvious there. Finally, at the tip of Han Shan's
peak, there is the perfect mystical vision. You'll know these poems when you read them, even in my English, I deeply hope. I assure you that some of them would take your breath away if you could read the original Chinese. And, contrary to popular wisdom, it is never too late to learn.

What the best poems share—whether they're about a farmer's life, a poor man's struggles, or a sharp rebuke for anyone who strays from the path of Buddhist morality—what they really share is an attempt at sharpening the readers' awareness of their surroundings and at elevating their view: moral, ethical, political, and spiritual. The best poems are, themselves, mountains for us to climb, maybe to live on for a while, certainly to watch from at least one morning as the sun burns the mist away.

The story of Shih Te is simpler, both in the classical tale and in the poems themselves. In the story, when Han Shan goes into the cave and it closes behind him, Shih Te simply disappears—maybe not from the face of the earth itself like Han Shan, but from the little narrative. He doesn't go with Han Shan; he's just gone. (In his own
Ch'üan T'ang Shih
introduction, he does disappear a little more apparently.) In the longer version of the story, Feng Kan does a little shamanic healing, and Shih Te makes an appearance as a ten-year-old orphaned street urchin, who is discovered along the way to Kuo-ch'ing Temple by Feng
Kan. He grows to maturity as a kitchen worker there. The reference to Shih Te is at least slightly at odds with his description as Han Shan's mountain partner, but I hope I have already established that this narrative is designed as propaganda, and consistency isn't a necessary part of that process.

I believe that in fact Shih Te is the pseudonym of a group of later poets. A little voice tells me that many disciples of Han Shan, or admirers of his style, might have, out of respect for the master, written anonymous poems and left them, like Han Shan, on trees and on rocks among the T'ien-t'ai ridges and crags. Maybe they just added them to the manuscript as it passed through their hands, copying or having it copied to pass on to poetry-loving friends. During the entire T'ang dynasty, all written works were created, copied, and circulated in manuscript, in handwriting. Printing wasn't put into general use until after the year 1000. The reputation of Tu Fu, for example, for nearly a thousand years considered the greatest of the great among Chinese poets, took a couple of centuries to fully blossom. Han Shan's fame, like Tu Fu's, spread not so much by word of mouth as by word of hand.