Tao Te Ching (Translated by Sam Hamill) - Lao Tzu [16]
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 religious hermit, 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. Then, as Buddhism arrived from the west after the year 100 or so, both Taoists and Buddhists sat there. They found and occupied places where they could weather the winter cold, maybe foraging a little firewood against the worst of it. They dug roots and dried herbs for medicine and for food. Maybe they even planted a few soybeans, though the Taoists generally excluded grains from their diets. And finally, and that was the purpose of it all, they sat in meditation. Every time the word “sit” appears in a poem by Han Shan or Shih Te, it means to sit, cross-legged on the ground or on a simple straw mat, in meditation. For the Taoist, it is the “sitting forgetting” that is intended to free him of the memory of words, the memory which separates him from the Tao, which, according to Lao Tzu, cannot be described in words. For the Buddhist, “sitting” refers to the deep mind meditation that is the eighth and final step in the Buddha’s Eightfold Path, the prescription for getting free of samsara, free of illusion, free of suffering. In Sanskrit, the Indian literary language that is the basis of Mahayana Buddhism, this sort of meditation is called dhyana, pronounced ch’an in Chinese and zen in Japanese. Emphasis on sitting meditation as the source of ultimate enlightenment is one feature of both Taoism and Buddhism that the poems of Han Shan, Shih Te, and Wang Fan-chih all share.
The Lu-ch’iu Yin introduction also tells us that Han Shan lived intentionally on the edges of society and that, like a lot of people who live on its edges (religious seekers, artists of all kinds, even literary translators), Han Shan had what amounts to a day job. The poems show us a man who’d rather be sitting or re-creating his insights and inspirations in poetry to share with friends, or, like a bodhisattva, with all sentient beings. But, being a human in a body, Han Shan came from time to time to Kuo-ch’ing Temple to pick up a little work. If you’re going to spend time in the hills prospecting for something worth more than gold, you need a grubstake. You need to buy a few supplies, salt and oil, onions, a few pounds of rice. Though stories tell of hermits living on dew and sunlight, they also tell of hermits who pull their caves shut behind them. Those who tried the dew and sunlight diet most likely didn’t thrive. So our outsider Han Shan came, when he ran out of grub, to a monastery. On the way in and the way out, except when being pursued by gawking monks and pilgrims and meddling authorities, he visited with the local farmers. We’ll see in the poems that he had a familiar and sympathetic relationship with farmers and farming. He left poems