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-haku Image courtesy of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts The poet Cold Mountain’s identity is still a mystery, He called himself Han-shan, or Cold Mountain,...
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