Tao Te Ching (Translated by Sam Hamill) - Lao Tzu [17]
So, despite the exaggerations, the tall tale gives us a pretty realistic picture of a hermit-poet. My personal guess about the real origin of the Han Shan poetry is this: The poetry of the many hermits who lived on Han Shan (Cold Mountain) and Han Yen (Cold Cliff), two real locations in the T’ien-t’ai Range, was becoming famous well before anyone thought to pull all the poems together. The T’ien-t’ai Range was home to many temples and places of pilgrimage, and even today, or again today, cliffs in the area are adorned with poems both brush written and stone incised. Some of the best of the latter are the sources of the rubbings mentioned above. It’s quite possible that Shan Han Shih (Han Shan’s Poems) originally meant the poems written or displayed at Han Shan, rather than poems by a poet named Han Shan. I doubt anyone will pin Han Shan down any further than he has been at this point, either through good scholarship (the scholars agree that there are at least two Han Shans) or through educated guessing like mine. But there is a little more to be said about the poetry of Han Shan as it has come down to us.
Among these poems are many that appear to come from the best poetry of mountain hermits of Taoist, Buddhist, and maybe even free-agent mystics, with a sprinkling of more orthodox Buddhist work and some poems on themes appropriate to all three Chinese religions. For, as the Chinese have liked to say for millennia, “The three Ways are one.” Among the works of Han Shan, along with the mountain poems, are a few very fine poems of traditional Confucian rural retirement and a few that are modeled on the best of the Taoist epicurean poems. There are also a few poems that fairly unconvincingly claim familiarity with or achievement in the cultural accomplishments of the Confucian, even of military men. Add a few bits of moral exhortation, some of which are very funny and clearly intended to be so, and some of which are not, and you have the Han Shan collection, 307 poems in the Chinese collection and 311 in the Japanese.
If there was something like a conspiracy to package these poems and present them as the work of a bodhisattva, I gratefully accept the gift. If the fractal and chaotic workings of human history (or pure accident, if you prefer) have been the only source of this great collection of poetry, I gratefully accept that miracle as well. My own selection was guided, frankly, almost entirely by my own taste. That is, I translated the poems I like the best, of Han Shan as well as of Shih Te and Wang Fan-chih. I did try to show examples of every type of poem that didn’t bore me or go beyond my personal knowledge of Buddhist philosophy. There aren’t many of the last category, not because I’m an expert, but because, essentially, “deep” philosophy, of which there is much in other schools of Buddhism, just isn’t a Zen thing, and it certainly is not Han Shan’s thing.
Han Shan’s name means “Cold Mountain,” and many of his poems really are about mountains. Some simply describe the beauty of mountain scenery, with just a hint of perhaps undiscoverable allegory. There are also poems about the hardship of living in the mountains, being almost always cold and almost never not hungry. These are convincing in their realism, and at the same time they suggest the real difficulty of the life of the spiritual seeker: Allegory lives between the lines. Then there are the arrogant challenges thrown in the faces of other climbers: “If your heart were like mine, you’d be here already,” an example of the rough rhetoric of the ma-jen tajen (curse people, smack people) style. These will remind you of certain koans—contemporary, most likely, to many of the Han Shan poems—that became the teaching and learning devices of some schools of modern Zen. That rough style, apparent in Han Shan’s response to the official Lu-ch’iu Yin and the monk Feng Kan in the story, is an important feature of many of the poems of all three poets in this collection, but it begins in Han Shan and is certainly most obvious there.