Tao Te Ching (Translated by Sam Hamill) - Lao Tzu [14]
In 1958, only a decade after D. T. Suzuki introduced Zen to enthusiastic crowds of American artists and intellectuals in a series of lectures at Columbia University, Gary Snyder, one of the most influential poets of the Beat Generation, published the first translations of Han Shan’s poems into American English. The Beat’s great novelist Jack Kerouac embodied Han Shan in a character based on Snyder himself and further embedded the image of Han Shan in young Americans’ hearts and souls, quoting Snyder’s translation of Han Shan in his hugely successful novel The Dharma Bums. Shih Te, always a sidekick, has tagged along through the centuries.
Wang Fan-chih, the third Zen poet in this selection, created his mordant and sometimes truly funny poetry a couple of centuries after Han Shan, in the outsider tradition founded in China by the mountain sage. Then, as the T’ang dynasty collapsed around them, Wang Fan-chih’s complete works, along with a batch of unrelated work labeled with his name, were hidden carefully in a monastic library around the year 1000. They rested there until the beginning of the twentieth century, almost as if they were waiting for another age of urban ghettos and seemingly hopeless poverty, of collapsing empires and visions of apocalyptic change. As these approach, Wang Fan-chih is ready to join his fellow Zen masters in the titanic struggle to save us all from suffering.
In their poems and in the pictures that are so much a part of their tradition, we see Han Shan and Shih Te: always the pair, ragged, yes, but always laughing too—sometimes with pure joy—maybe because they know something wonderful? Sometimes pointedly 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