Haiku by Stephen Addiss Read Free Book Online Page A

Snyder’s from 1958. The following is mine:
    Nobody knows where Master Han Shan came from. He lived at Cold Cliff, in the T’ien-t’ai mountains in T’ang-hsing County, sometimes coming in to visit Kuo-ch’ing Temple. He wore a fancy birch-bark hat, a ragged cotton coat, and worn-out sandals. Sometimes he’d sing, or chant verses in the temple porches. Other times he’d sit out at farmers’ houses, singing and whistling. No one ever really got to know him.
    Lu-ch’iu Yin had received a government appointment in Tan-ch’iu, and when he was just about to debark to take up his post, he happened to run into Feng Kan, who told him he’d just come from the T’ien-t’ai area. Lu-ch’iu Yin asked him if there were any sages there with whom he might study. “There’s Han Shan, who is an incarnation of Wen-shu, and Shih Te, who is an incarnation of P’u-hsien. They tend the fires of the kitchens in the granary at Kuo-ch’ing Temple.”
    The third day after he’d taken up his position, Lu-ch’iu Yin went in person to the temple and, seeing the two men, bowed in appropriate fashion. The two burst out laughing and said, “Oh that Feng Kan, what a tongue-flapping blabbermouth! Amitabha! [
Note the Buddha’s name taken in vain as a light oath
.] We can’t imagine what you’d be bowing to us for!” And with that they went straight out of the temple, back to Cold Cliff. Master Han Shan disappeared into a cave, and then the cave closed up behind him. It had been his habit to inscribe his poems on bamboo and trees and rocks and cliff faces. Those, along with the ones he wrote on the walls of farmers’ homes, inside and out, came to 307. They are collected here in one volume.
    There are more than just several problems with this tale, historically speaking. To begin with, thequasi-narrator, the official Lu-ch’iu Yin, is a person who doesn’t exist in any of the dynastic histories. Feng Kan, the Zen master and authority for the authenticity of Han Shan and Shih Te, has existence issues too. The only evidence he ever
was
is this story, and a couple like it in which he’s a character. He is known to history solely as the man who told Lu-ch’iu Yin that two Buddhist holy men lived near the county office where he was about to take up his post. Feng Kan is enshrined in the modern biographical dictionary of Buddhist monks as a “tongue wagger” in language that was clearly taken from this story. To put it mildly, Feng Kan is the nearly perfect example of an almost living, breathing fictional character.
    If we accept that both Lu-ch’iu Yin and Feng Kan are bogus—though excellent scholars who are brilliant men of goodwill have pursued their shadows in many interesting directions—we can surmise that they are certainly in the introduction for a reason. In history, historical characters sort of have to be included, but in fiction, the characters are created as tools of the narrative. The traditional introduction to the poetry of Han Shan and Shih Te is propaganda. There is enough real poetry attributed to the name Han Shan to substantiate the existence of a historical person (or more likely, persons) we can call Han Shan. The introduction, with its fictional account of Han Shan, tells the readers that Han Shan was a religious seeker, a man called to the life of the religioushermit, and, finally, a boddhisattva, a person who has achieved supernatural powers rather like a saint in Roman Catholicism, capable of interceding on behalf of suffering humanity.
    What can we surmise about the real poet, or poets? We are told that “he lived at Cold Cliff.” The search for an idea of what the real Han Shan was like can begin there. Cold Cliff, or Han Yen, is a real place, a cliff in the T’ien-t’ai mountains in southeast China where hermit seekers had lived for millennia. The earliest of these were Taoists.