The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac [22]
“No, what’s that?”
“It’s a scholarly treatise on how to make tea utilizing all the knowledge of two thousand years about tea-brewing. Some of the descriptions of the effect of the first sip of tea, and the second, and the third, are really wild and ecstatic.”
“Those guys got high on nothing, hey?”
“Sip your tea and you’ll see; this is good green tea.” It was good and I immediately felt calm and warm. “Want me to read you parts of this Han Shan poem? Want me to tell you about Han Shan?”
“Yeah.”
“Han Shan you see was a Chinese scholar who got sick of the big city and the world and took off to hide in the mountains.”
“Say, that sounds like you.”
“In those days you could really do that. He stayed in caves not far from a Buddhist monastery in the T‘ang Hsing district of T‘ien Tai and his only human friend was the funny Zen Lunatic Shih-te who had a job sweeping out the monastery with a straw broom. Shih-te was a poet too but he never wrote much down. Every now and then Han Shan would come down from Cold Mountain in his bark clothing and come into the warm kitchen and wait for food, but none of the monks would ever feed him because he didn’t want to join the order and answer the meditation bell three times a day. You see why in some of his utterances, like—listen and I’ll look here and read from the Chinese,” and I bent over his shoulder and watched him read from big wild crowtracks of Chinese signs: “Climbing up Cold Mountain path, Cold Mountain path goes on and on, long gorge choked with scree and boulders, wide creek and mist-blurred grass, moss is slippery though there’s been no rain, pine sings but there’s no wind, who can leap the world’s ties and sit with me among white clouds?”
“Wow.”
“Course that’s my own translation into English, you see there are five signs for each line and I have to put in Western prepositions and articles and such.”
“Why don’t you just translate it as it is, five signs, five words? What’s those first five signs?”
“Sign for climbing, sign for up, sign for cold, sign for mountain, sign for path.”
“Well then, translate it ‘Climbing up Cold Mountain path.’”
“Yeah, but what do you do with the sign for long, sign for gorge, sign for choke, sign for avalanche, sign for boulders?”
“Where’s that?”
“That’s the third line, would have to read ‘Long gorge choke avalanche boulders.’”
“Well that’s even better!”
“Well yeah, I thought of that, but I have to have this pass the approval of Chinese scholars here at the university and have it clear in English.”
“Boy what a great thing this is,” I said looking around at the little shack, “and you sitting here so very quietly at this very quiet hour studying all alone with your glasses….”
“Ray what you got to do is go climb a mountain with me soon. How would you like to climb Matterhorn?”
“Great! Where’s that?”
“Up in the High Sierras. We can go there with Henry Morley in his car and bring our packs and take off from the lake. I could carry all the food and stuff we need in my rucksack and you could borrow Alvah’s small knapsack and carry extra socks and shoes and stuff.”
“What’s these signs mean?”
“These signs mean that Han Shan came down from the mountain after many years roaming around up there, to see his folks in town, says, ‘Till recently I stayed at Cold Mountain, et cetera, yesterday I called on friends and family, more than half had gone to the Yellow Springs,’ that means death, the Yellow Springs, ‘now morning I face my lone shadow, I can’t study with both eyes full of tears.’”
“That’s like you too, Japhy, studying with eyes full of tears.”
“My eyes aren’t full of tears!”
“Aren’t they going to be after a long, long time?”
“They certainly will, Ray…and look here, ‘In the mountains it’s cold, it’s always been cold not just this year,’ see, he’s real high, maybe twelve thousand or thirteen