Haiku by Stephen Addiss Read Free Book Online

laughing at themselves, and, more daringly,sometimes pointedly laughing at the readers’ follies, that’s mine, and yours too. They wrote their poems on trees, on rocks, on the walls of farmers’ homes, and on the walls of the monasteries they sometimes visited, taking menial work, as they did in the kitchen at Kuo-ch’ing Temple, a famous pilgrimage site in the T’ien-t’ai mountains in southeast China. But they didn’t observe the monastic discipline, and they were never dependable servants, being drawn to hike off toward a cave on Cold Mountain’s side, their true home. There, according to the traditional story, finally cornered by temple officials, Han Shan went into the cave at Cold Cliff and
pulled it shut behind him
, leaving his admirers to collect and hand down more than 350 poems by the two poets.
    In fact, though I’ll follow the convention of treating them as two individuals, Han Shan and Shih Te are pseudonyms given to several poets who wrote poetry and lived the lives of mountain mystics during the two or three centuries (sixth through eigth) when Zen itself was breaking free of the institutionalized Buddhist churches of T’ang dynasty China and establishing itself as the most Chinese of Buddhisms. Zen did this by emphasizing meditation over scriptural study (“Zen” literally means “meditation”) and, maybe even more importantly, by incorporating the wisdom and the humor of the great Taoist sages Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu. Han Shan became one of Zen’s foremost popular representatives, its central,independent, layman saint. Though he used the simplest time-honored verse forms, he spoke in a voice with an almost completely new tone. His poetry became the voice of ordinary people, liberating the common sense of the people, and though it was largely ignored by critics and bibliographers, it remains popular among poets and poetry lovers.
    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 (whomhistory 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