Tao Te Ching (Translated by Sam Hamill) - Lao Tzu [15]
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 (whom history 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 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, the quasi-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