Tao Te Ching (Translated by Sam Hamill) - Lao Tzu [18]
What the best poems share—whether they’re about a farmer’s life, a poor man’s struggles, or a sharp rebuke for anyone who strays from the path of Buddhist morality—what they really share is an attempt at sharpening the readers’ awareness of their surroundings and at elevating their view: moral, ethical, political, and spiritual. The best poems are, themselves, mountains for us to climb, maybe to live on for a while, certainly to watch from at least one morning as the sun burns the mist away.
The story of Shih Te is simpler, both in the classical tale and in the poems themselves. In the story, when Han Shan goes into the cave and it closes behind him, Shih Te simply disappears—maybe not from the face of the earth itself like Han Shan, but from the little narrative. He doesn’t go with Han Shan; he’s just gone. (In his own Ch’üan T’ang Shih introduction, he does disappear a little more apparently.) In the longer version of the story, Feng Kan does a little shamanic healing, and Shih Te makes an appearance as a ten-year-old orphaned street urchin, who is discovered along the way to Kuo-ch’ing Temple by Feng Kan. He grows to maturity as a kitchen worker there. The reference to Shih Te is at least slightly at odds with his description as Han Shan’s mountain partner, but I hope I have already established that this narrative is designed as propaganda, and consistency isn’t a necessary part of that process.
I believe that in fact Shih Te is the pseudonym of a group of later poets. A little voice tells me that many disciples of Han Shan, or admirers of his style, might have, out of respect for the master, written anonymous poems and left them, like Han Shan, on trees and on rocks among the T’ien-t’ai ridges and crags. Maybe they just added them to the manuscript as it passed through their hands, copying or having it copied to pass on to poetry-loving friends. During the entire T’ang dynasty, all written works were created, copied, and circulated in manuscript, in handwriting. Printing wasn’t put into general use until after the year 1000. The reputation of Tu Fu, for example, for nearly a thousand years considered the greatest of the great among Chinese poets, took a couple of centuries to fully blossom. Han Shan’s fame, like Tu Fu’s, spread not so much by word of mouth as by word of hand.
After “Han Shan” began to be recognized as the name of a person, I’m supposing that the same sort of admirers who would previously have simply added a poem while copying the manuscript to pass on, now wrote poems using the more humble pseudonym of Shih Te (which simply means something like “the Orphan”). I think that these later poets might have identified themselves not as the master himself, but as his spiritual adopted children. Only one Shih Te poem mentions Han Shan directly, but many are clearly imitations of specific Han Shan poems. Quite a few, like the later poems in the Han Shan collection, fall into the category I’d call propagandistic filler. The Shih Te poets don’t appear to have included any mystics, but several of the poems are as funny and as imaginative as anything of Han Shan’s, and I think you’ll find them fun to read. By the usual count, there are only forty-nine extant poems by Shih Te, and I’ve chosen to translate just twenty.
After the T’ang many well-known poets wrote poems in the manner of Han Shan, signing them with their own names but attributing the inspiration to Han Shan. I don’t know of anyone who so honored the humble orphan poet except two Zen masters, the famous and powerful Ch’an abbot Ch’u Shih of the Yuan dynasty and an anonymous Ming master who called himself for this purpose Shih Shu (“Rocks and Trees”). Both of these poets wrote lockstep harmony poems (poems written using the same words