On Cold Mountain

A Buddhist Reading of the Hanshan Poems

Paul Rouzer

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780295806136
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In this first serious study of Hanshan ("Cold Mountain"), Paul Rouzer discusses some seventy poems of the iconic Chinese poet who lived sometime during the Tang dynasty (618–907). Hanshan's poems gained a large readership in English-speaking countries following the publication of Jack Kerouac's novel The Dharma Bums (1958) and Gary Snyder's translations (which began to appear that same year), and they have been translated into English more than any other body of Chinese verse. Rouzer investigates how Buddhism defined the way that believers may have read Hanshan in premodern times. He proposes a Buddhist poetics as a counter-model to the Confucian assumptions of Chinese literary thought and examines how texts by Kerouac, Snyder, and Jane Hirshfield respond to the East Asian Buddhist tradition.

PART ONE

The Poet

CHAPTER 1

WHO WAS HANSHAN?

THE vague scholarly consensus concerning Hanshan’s identity is that he was a recluse who lived in the seventh, eighth, or ninth centuries, during the Tang dynasty (618–907). He dwelled alone on a place called Cold Mountain (Hanshan) or Cold Cliff (Hanyan), near the Guoqing Buddhist monastery at the famous religious center of Tiantai, in Zhejiang. We have only this location for his name; his personal name is not recorded in any source. He was by most accounts a Buddhist, though some have cited an anecdote to claim that he was predominantly Daoist in his attitude. He was an eccentric loner and may never have lived as a monk in an organized religious community, though he may have made friends with two monks from the Guoqing monastery, Fenggan and Shide. He may or may not have been connected with the developing Chan meditation school of Tang China, and he may or may not have had contact with significant early Chan teachers. One account claims (as do two of the poems attributed to him) that he wrote his poems on any available surface—on walls of houses and temples, on cliffs, on trees. We are told that a Buddhist follower (or, in the only other significant account concerning him, a Daoist follower) collected these poems after Hanshan’s death or disappearance, and that they were circulated in manuscript form along with a few poems attributed to Fenggan and about sixty attributed to Shide. We don’t have any conclusive testimony as to when his poems became popular; an increasing number of allusions to them and to the poet appear starting in the ninth century,¹ but the earliest surviving printed copy of the poems probably dates from the mid-twelfth century, coinciding with the rise of inexpensive commercial printing.

The poems won a following among Buddhist monks and lay believers following the eleventh century. No one read them as canonical literary texts that belonged to the mainstream of Chinese poetic production; they were, it seems, always seen as examples of religious literature. As a result, Hanshan himself became a Chan saint of sorts, and popular representations of him and his friends Fenggan and Shide became part of Buddhist iconography. The poems traveled to Japan and Korea with the Chan movement, where they circulated among medieval monks and were frequently imitated. In recent decades, his influence has become global: since the Snyder translations of the 1950s, Hanshan has come to have significant impact on Buddhist-inspired American poets.

Even this brief account should tell us how complicated it is to read Hanshan’s poems today. Their very history is intimately entwined with that of East Asian religion. Their meaning and significance shift as beliefs change and as each generation of believers sees something new in them. Moreover, we cannot know what it was like to read or hear Hanshan’s poems at their time of composition—even our earliest surviving edition of the text was printed three to five hundred years after they were written. In fact, we might say that even if we are working with the original texts rather than translations, which are inevitably limited interpretations, we are not so much reading as we are “reading.” I mean this not as a facile postmodern gesture (every reading is a misreading; no act of reading arrives at a stable meaning that conveys knowledge to the reading subject), nor as an equally facile pop-Zen gesture (reading is an illusion—why are you immersed in illusory texts when the only true knowledge is acquired through direct experience?). I refer to a “reading” that bears no similarity to anything we remotely consider reading in everyday life.

Scholars at present are likely to read Hanshan in the best edition currently available: Xiang Chu’s Hanshan’s Poems Annotated (Hanshan shi zhu, 2000), which contains more than one thousand pages of commentary, variant readings, and supplementary material. General data about the texts is available in Chen Yaodong’s Research on the Editions of Hanshan’s Poetry (Hanshan shi ji banben yanjiu, 2007). The scholar can turn to the massive Comprehensive Dictionary of the Chinese Language (Hanyu da cidian), the Chinese equivalent of the OED, to check meanings, or to the Buddha’s Light Comprehensive Dictionary (Fo guang da cidian), an eight-volume dictionary of Buddhist usage, for specialized religious usages. Sutra quotations can be checked online at the website of the Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association (cbeta.org) and in their electronic edition of the Taishō Tripitaka (the standard edition of Chinese Buddhist texts, compiled in Japan from 1913 to 1921). To check how other English-language poets and scholars have translated (and interpreted) a given poem, a reader might consult Gary Snyder’s renderings in Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems (1965); Burton Watson’s selection of about a third of the corpus (1962), heavily dependent on modern Japanese commentaries; or Robert Henricks’s scholarly, annotated translation of the entire collection (1990); or Red Pine’s more creative rendering (second edition, 2000), not to mention the scattering of other poets who have put their hands to translating them. This double-checking and consultation of disparate sources is not so much an act of reading as a scholar’s attempt to think through what each poem means in as thorough and as historically thoughtful a way as possible.

But what sort of “meaning” can be discovered? Can we reconstitute the intentions of the poet (whoever he was—a problematic issue in itself)? Or is the meaning what some sort of ideal reader would derive from the poem? And how likely is the existence of such an ideal reader? Would a monk know more than an educated layperson? How erudite would a tenth-century reader of Hanshan’s poetry be? Would a tenth-century reader be any different from a twelfth-century reader? A seventeenth-century reader? A reader in nineteenth-century Japan? A graduate student in a religious studies program at a North American university? A Beat-inspired poet?

Imagine for a moment an interested reader from the twelfth century, that is, the Song dynasty (960–1279) (I will call her Ms. Chen), purchasing a copy of an early printed edition of Hanshan’s poems. Ms. Chen comes from an educated gentry family, and she has received a basic mainstream education: she knows the Confucian classics, the classic literary anthologies, the major poets. Her family has strong sympathies with Buddhism and a good relationship with the local Chan monastery: they have given substantial gifts for the monastery’s upkeep, and her father is close friends with the abbot, who prides himself on his own poetic abilities. She visits the monastery fairly often on festivals and has heard sermons on major aspects of Buddhist and Chan doctrine. She recognizes a substantial amount of Buddhist terminology and knows the content of the most famous of the sutras. What sort of reading experience can she expect upon opening her new purchase?

Reading the Preface

Before she even arrives at the poems, Ms. Chen sees a preface to the collection, written by an official named Lüqiu Yin. Ms. Chen may not recognize the name, though if she consults the official history of the Tang dynasty she will find listed a moderately prominent bureaucrat by that name active in the 630s and 640s. The preface’s existence would be unlikely to surprise her: by the time the Hanshan collection was circulated in print form, prefaces to collected literary works were commonplace and acted as guarantees of literary worth. Literary men wrote them for the collected works of their friends and acquaintances or sometimes were commissioned to write them by the author’s next of kin. Prefaces could contain literary criticism, evaluations of what made the author interesting or distinctive, or biographical reminiscences. In the twelfth century it was not unusual for Chan monks to publish their literary works as well, and in such cases, it was typical for their secular literati associates to write the preface. For example, in 1043 the prominent writer and statesman Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072) composed a preface for the monk Miyan’s collection. The resulting work is one of Ouyang’s most famous, and it also tells us about how laypeople (especially Confucian gentry) might evaluate monk-poets.²

Ouyang begins his preface by positing the existence of recluses, men who do not participate in the world of officialdom because they find no use for their talents there. Instead, they form a mysterious, semi-invisible class of men, men who have turned to hermit life and to occupations well beneath their class and breeding. Of course, the trope of the recluse had been a convention of traditional Chinese culture for at least a millennium, as many members of the elite in the post-Han era chose self-consciously to refuse a role in society or government. By literary convention, the mark of such men is their deep frustration: unable to fulfill their very reason for existence, they express themselves in other ways, most typically through drinking and composing poetry. Ouyang comes to realize this through his friendship with Shi Yannian (courtesy name Manqing), who is just such a frustrated poet-recluse. Like many Confucian writers, Ouyang portrays himself as a sort of connoisseur of friendship: on the lookout for extraordinary men and hoping to benefit intangibly through associating with them. He sees Manqing as his entrée into the secret society of recluses. Having befriended Manqing, he meets the monk Miyan, whom Ouyang understands as Manqing’s fellow recluse and close friend:

The Buddhist monk Miyan was Manqing’s oldest associate. He too was able to transcend the vulgar customs around him and had a natural eminence that resulted from the strength of his personality. The two of them delighted in each other and nothing could come between them. Manqing hid himself in his drinking, while Miyan hid himself in his Buddhism; and both of them were amazing men. They also delighted in entertaining themselves with poetry. When they reached the height of their drinking, they would sing, chant, laugh, and shout, and so they would experience all of the pleasures of the world—how vigorous they were! All of the worthy men of the age wished to befriend them, and I too from time to time would visit them at their homes. . . . Miyan was also manly and imposing of aspect, overflowing with noble aspirations; and yet because he was a practitioner of Buddhism, these qualities had no use. Only his poems could circulate in the world, and yet he was negligent in preserving them.

It may seem to be trivializing Buddhism to compare it to drinking—and indeed Ouyang may be deliberately blasphemous here, poking fun at Buddhist injunctions against intoxication. However, that is not his main point. Heavy drinking had been acknowledged at least since the times of the bucolic poet Tao Qian (365–427) as a sanctioned way for hermits to act. Drinking could provide a vital way of relea...