Cold Moountain

Zen Monk Blogger

The eighth-century hermit poet Cold Mountain, or Han-shan, looked like a tramp. He wore a birch bark hat, his clothes were ragged and worn out, and his shoes were wood. Jack Kerouac dedicated The Dharma Bums to him in 1958. I’ve been reading the translations of Cold Mountain’s poetry by Red Pine [Bill Porter],  one of the preeminent, if not the preeminent, scholar and translator of Buddhist texts.Han Shan as depicted by Soga Sho-hakuImage courtesy of the Boston Museum of Fine ArtsThe poet Cold Mountain’s identity is still a mystery, He called himself Han-shan, or Cold Mountain, after the cave he lived in, in the Chekiang province of China. There were many such hermits in the stunning, rugged mountains of China for many, many years before the revolution drove most of them out. This hermit, as may have been true of most, was probably about as isolated as Thoreau was at Walden Pond. Thoreau had his family down the road for a good meal when he wanted one, and for Cold Mountain, there would have been a monastery nearby where he could go chat with friends and get a nice hot meal, a little rice wine, now and then, or get medicine, lamp-oil, paper and ink, and such things. Even so, hermits like him lived in brush-wood lean-tos with a bed of heaped-up pine needles, and ate mostly whatever he could find or grow. Cold Mountain’s poems give evidence of good schooling; he was probably born to privilege. He was most likely over 100 years old when he died.His poems are simple, the tone of a plain man just talking. Because of that, I assume, he wasn’t until recently considered one of China’s canonical poets. If you read a number of these poems—and there are hundreds—you begin to feel his voice and his presence. I don’t know what sort of music these poems might have had in Chinese, but here are three in English.Towering cliffs where the home I chosebird trails beyond human trackswhat does my yard containwhite clouds clinging to dark rocksevery year I’ve lived hereI’ve seen the seasons changeall you owners of tripods and bellswhat good are empty namesAnd here is another:When water is so clear it sparklesyou can see the bottom without effortwhen your mind doesn’t have a goalno circumstances can distract youonce your mind doesn’t chase illusionseven a kalpa holds no changes                    [kalpa = eon, or long period of time]if you can be so awarefrom such awareness nothing hidesAnd one more:Cold Cliff’s remoteness is what I likeno one travels this waya great peak penetrates the cloudsa lone gibbon howls on the ridgewhat could please me moremy heart content I enjoy old agethe seasons change my appearancebut the pearl of my mind stays safePoetry and solitude. Was it Denise Levertov who said that what we need is the “illusion” of having infinite time to write? We know we don’t have infinite time, but to do the work, we need to feel that time is stretching out before us, that we’re going to be able to sink into ourselves and just watch and wait to see what emerges. That watching and waiting may involve a lot of active writing, but it’s exploratory, not driven.What does one do, in this driven age, when we are asked to promote our own books, set up our own readings, blog (ahem) on our websites—all the things that mitigate against solitude, silence, and time?We could be like Albert Goldbarth and a few other Luddites who don’t have computers, who keep their lives pretty simple. Frankly, you can do that IF THE WORLD IS  ALREADY BEATING A PATH TO YOUR DOOR. What if you are pretty sure you need to get out the steam-roller and beat the path yourself? Or at least put up a neon sign that flashes “Poet, next right.”I have had to push upstream against my tendency to hide out, to be a hermit. I like being a hermit. Writing a blog is being a hermit, actually. I am sitting here and thinking out loud and you are there, reading. I’m here, you’re there. I am like Cold Mountain. Do you think he wrote all those poems to amuse himself? Those were his blog. Or, as Emily Dickinson would have called them, his "letter to the world."(Speaking of blogs, ahem, there’s a short blog interview with me that just came out this week,  if you’re interested. The link is http://goo.gl/hxwMK.)