May 12 Workshop Information
Moderator: Richard Johnson		 Poetry form: Han-Shun Poetry List of all workshops

 

They dress like tramps

and act like madmen.

 

From Gary Snyder’s Cold Mountain Poems.  Four Seasons Foundation, 1969:

 

Han-Shan, “Cold Mountain,” takes his name from where he lived. He is a mountain madman in an old Chinese line of ragged hermits. When he talks about Cold Mountain, he means himself, his home, his state of mind. He lived in the T’ang dynasty—traditionally A.D. 627 – 650, although Hu Shih dates him 700 – 780.This makes him roughly contemporary with Tu Fu, Li Po, Wang Wei, and Po Chu-i. His poems, of which three hundred survive, are written in T’ang colloquial: rough and fresh. The ideas are Taoist, Buddhist, Zen. He and his sidekick Shih-te became great favorites with Zen painters of later days—the scroll, the broom, the wild hair and laughter. They became Immortals, and you sometimes run onto them today in the skid rows, orchards, hobo jungles, and logging camps of America.

 

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.

 

From Preface to the Poems of Han-Shan by Lu Ch’iu-Yin, Governor of T’as Prefecture:

 

No one knows just what sort of man Han-Shan was. There are old people who knew him; they say he was a poor man, a crazy character. He lived alone seventy li west of the T’ang-hsing district of T’ien-t’ai at a place called Cold Mountain. He often went down to the Ku-ch’ing temple. At the temple lived Shih-te, who ran the dining hall. He sometimes saved leftovers for Han-Shan, hiding them in a bamboo tube. Han-Shan would come and carry it away, walking the long veranda, calling and shouting happily, talking and laughing to himself.

 

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 only you thought of it deeply. Everything he said 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.

 

When men see Han-Shan

They all say he’s crazy

And not much to look at

Dressed in rags and hides.

They don’t get what I say

& I don’t talk their language.

All I can say to those I meet:

“Try and make it to Cold Mountain.”

 

In short, a bum. And he insisted on being one. Chinese society of his day was governed by a hereditary emperor supported by an aristocracy not of blood but of learning, that tightly controlled the administration. In a system unique in world history, examinations were open to men of nearly all classes (slaves and actors were excluded). The examinations, highly literary, formed virtually the only road to advancement. The scholars-officials who triumphed in the highest round of examinations ran the country and lived like royalty. Han-Shan, who scant evidence indicates was from a noble family, rejected this system completely.

 

Lu Ch’iu-Yin records that when he received a position as an official in the district of the Kuo-ch’ingTemple, he asked a Buddhist Master from there if there were any wise men in the area he could look on as Master. He was told that there were two bodhisattvas there who looked like poor fellows and acted like madmen—Han-Shan and Shih-te—and that if he wanted to see them, he couldn’t rely on appearances. When he tried to pay his respects to them in the dining hall they laughed and ran away. Pursued to the mountains, Han-Shan yelled, “You’d better get to work!” and disappeared into a cave that closed behind him, while Shih-te’s tracks vanished completely.

 

If I hide out at Cold Mountain

Living off mountain plants and berries

All of my lifetime, why worry?

One follows his karma through.

Days and months slip by like water,

Time is like sparks knocked off flint,

Go ahead and let the world change—

I’m happy to sit among these cliffs.

 

Today this mountain madman is honored as one of the greatest poets in Chinese history. His statue stands in temples and shrines next to those of bodhisattvas; he is revered in Japan and Korea as well as in China; in the west, Jack Kerouac dedicated The Dharma Bums to his memory.

 

Because he unified the categories. He achieved the Zen realization. He stripped away inessentials and lived entirely as himself. The wisdom traditions say that in the end, this is what we all want to do. So why don’t we try it, just for fun? Write a poem in the Han-Shan style. Write a poem that is nothing but yourself.