Hanshan

Han-Shan (寒山，translated into English as "Cold Mountain", Japanese "Kanzan") (8th or 9th century CE) is a mythological figure associated with a collection of poems from the Chinese Tang Dynasty in the Taoist/Zen tradition. He is honored as a Bodhisattva -figure in Zen-mythology and is a well known motif in Japanese and Chinese paintings together with his sidekick Shih-Te and with Fenggan. The collection of poems attributed to the "Han-shan-poet" may span the entire Tang Dynasty (618-905) as Edwin G. Pulleyblank asserts in his study "Linguistic evidence for the date of Han-shan" [1]. Some may even be dated to early Song. Wu Chi-yu's "A study of Han-shan" [2] identifies him as the monk Chih-yen (577-654), but that has been disputed by Paul Demiéville among others. Jia Jinhua came to the conclusion, after a study of Ch'an-phrases in some 50 of the poems, that this particular group of poems may be attributable to the Ch'an-monk Caoshan Benji (840-901) ("A study of the Authentic Author of the Chan Poems in the Collected Poems of Hanshan", 2003). The poems have often been translated, by Arthur Waley (1954) and Gary Snyder (1958) among others. The first complete translation to a western language was into French by Patrik Carré in 1985. There are two full English translations, by Robert G. Henricks (1990), and Bill Porter (2000). Little is known of his work, since his poems were written all around, and on, the mountains he called home, and little is sure about his life, apparently because he was a fugitive. Of the 600 poems he is known to have written at some point before his death, less than around 307 were collected and have survived. Our authority for this is a poem he wrote: My five-word poems number five hundred, My seven-word poems seventy-nine, My three-word poems twenty-one. Altogether, six hundred rhymes. (The words refer to how many words in each line of the verse. All poems are Red Pine's (also known as Bill Porter) translation, except where noted.) area code: 565