Haiku (10 page)

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 in the rhyming positions in the poems as had Han Shan) with a poem for every single one of Han Shan's collected poems. They also wrote a harmony poem for each of Shih Te's, and even for the two extant poems by Feng Kan.

The poems attributed to Wang Fan-chih have a history that is different from those of the two mountain
masters. These poems were popular among urban folk of the late T'ang, a period when the dynasty was gasping itself away in paroxysms of famine, pestilence, and war. Fewer than a dozen of his poems survive, having been cited by mainstream poets in their own collections of favorites. Like Han Shan and Shih Te, the men themselves, the majority of Wang Fan-chih's poems were sealed away in a cave, in this case in the caverns of the great Buddhist-Taoist monastic library at Tun-huang, on the eastern end of the Silk Road, around the year 1000, when Chinese forces were clearly losing control of the region. The cavern was only reopened in the early years of the twentieth century, and Wang Fan-chih's poems weren't looked at closely by Westerners until after 1950.

The complete translation of the more than three scrolls attributed to Wang Fan-chih, into clear and unpretentious scholarly French by the great Sinologist Paul Demiéville, reveals that everything from radical political statements to Buddhist elementary school copybook morality verses had been stuck together under the Wang Fan-chih label. No more than ten poems by Wang Fan-chih have ever previously been translated into English. When I first looked at the originals of these poems, I was surprised. This poet is, like Han Shan and Shih Te, one who has been constructed from a group of anonymous poets, in Wang Fan-chih's case clearly mainly poets of the late T'ang. There is a lot of trash in the Wang Fan-chih
collection, but there are maybe fifty or sixty poems that were really exciting to discover. Digging through the collection for the good ones made me appreciate Han Shan's editors for the first time. Wang Fan-chih's themes include the familiar Buddhist-Taoist eclectic mix, and I don't doubt that Han Shan and Shih Te would have understood and appreciated the poet's motives, or his poems. Some few are brilliant, even though the poets whom this pseudonym gathers together were certainly poorly educated. Some of the best poems, indeed, appear to be almost what we'd call graffiti, and I can see guerilla artists splashing these short and combative poems on walls in the dead of night.

While Han Shan and Shih Te sometimes tell tales of poverty and suffering as well, Wang Fan-chih's life was lived in a time of true cultural fugue, and many of his poems reflect terrible human suffering, felt or observed, that goes far beyond anything we see in the work of the earlier poets. They had chosen something like voluntary poverty in the most beautiful of surroundings. Wang Fan-chih dwells with rats in the midst of pestilence and starvation.

Wang Fan-chih's name means simply, “Mr. Wang, a Buddhist layman.” While he may seem cynical, and he can certainly be cruelly witty, his motive is always a Buddhist's, namely to save sentient beings from suffering. His poems concentrate on proving the first of the Buddha's Four Noble Truths, that “life
is suffering,” and so the poetry is often morbid, even macabre. He's always ready to puncture hypocritical public displays of piety, and he's always ready to point at the absolute material truth of death and the pointlessness of pride or of the accumulation of material possessions. He seems an angry man, even a political rebel, and it is harder to see his displays of anger as rhetorical—made to make a moral point—than it is for similar outbursts in the poetry of Han Shan or Shih Te. Acceptance of the first of the Four Noble Truths is the absolutely necessary first step in the Buddha's Way, a way providing eight steps that are chosen solely for the purpose of releasing humankind from that suffering. Mr. Wang is happy to rub his readers' faces in the mud, and not afraid to add in a measure of shit and piss to the recipe in his effort to get self-satisfied, greedy folks like us to see his point. His voice sometimes seems like an Old Testament prophet's, though his solution to the suffering caused by the impermanence and injustice of human life in the world involves no deity. But he can also display the salving humor of a saint, mocking his own grinding poverty as he prepares for a guest by scraping together a “chair” from the dirt of an earthen floor.

I originally planned to add only a few of Wang Fan-chih's poems to this book, to help to broaden most readers' view of what Buddhism was in the T'ang and show what it is or can be in an urbanized world. The book has ended up with more of Wang Fan-chih's
poems than Shih Te's because, while Shih Te offers a valuable and enjoyable reprise of Han Shan's ideas, it seems to me the lay Buddhist Wang Fan-chih's poetry shows that the tradition of the outsider, the free agent and the free spirit, initiated by Han Shan and Shih Te, was alive and scuffling in the cruel streets of a failing society. It seems particularly ripe for reincarnation in this century.

Beneath the morning mist on the mountainside or the dust of the mundane activities of city streets, these poets have hidden some of the way they have found, some of the truth of the light. They may
appear
to have hidden these things simply because words can do no more than give a glimmer of the light of the spirit; but poets think, I think, that a poem can do more than “mere words” can. A well-made poem may give us aid when we are ready, or if,
if
we are willing to study,
if
we will work,
if
we move on to meditate. With the aid of the well-made poem, we may, finally, discover the light on the mountain, in, through, or behind the obscuring mist, or rising, far, far off, above the dust of the city streets, so that the sun and the moon of
their
enlightenment may become the light of
our own
revelations. The poems of these three poets are, if we choose to let them be, no more, and no less, than fingers pointing. The Way will be what is revealed, and the beauty of what is revealed may help to draw us, as seekers, on through arduous
meditation, on through the arduous and sometimes dangerous mountain climb. But as Shih Te says,

My poems are poems,

even if
some people
call them sermons.

Well, poems and sermons do share one thing;

when you read them you got to be careful.

Keep at it. Get into detail.

Don't just claim they're easy.

If you were to live your
life
like that,

a lot of funny things might happen.

I

Ranges, ridges, daunting cliffs, I chose this place with divination's aid.

The road's for the birds, no man tracks there.

And what is the yard? White clouds clothe

dark stone. I lived here years, watching

springs with The Great Change become winter.

Here's a word for the rich folks with cauldrons and bells:

Fame's empty, no good,
that's
for sure.

 

II

Cold Mountain Road's a joke,

no cart track, no horse trail.

Creeks like veins, but still it's hard to mark

the twists. Fields and fields of crags for crops,

it's hard to say how many.

Tears of dew upon a thousand kinds of grasses;

the wind sings best in one kind of pine.

And now I've lost my way again:

Body asking shadow, “Which way from here?”

 

III

If you're looking for a peaceful place,

Cold Mountain's always a refuge.

A little breeze, breath of the shaded pines,

and if you listen close, the music's even better.

Under the pines a graying man,

soft, soothingly, reading aloud from Lao Tzu.

 

IV

My mind's the autumn moon,

shining in the blue-green pool,

reflecting glistening, clear and pure . . .

There's nothing to compare it to,

what else can I say?

 

V

In the city, the moth-browed girl,

her jade pendants like tiny wind chimes chiming.

She is playing with a parrot in the flowers;

she is playing on her
p'i-p'a
in the moonlight.

Her songs will echo for three months;

a little dance will draw ten thousand watchers.

Nothing lasts as long as this:

beautiful face of the hibiscus,

can't bear the frost's caress.

 

VI

I always wanted to go to East Cliff,

more years than I can remember,

until today I just grabbed a vine

and started up. Halfway up

wind and a heavy mist closed in,

and the narrow path tugged at my shirt:

it was hard to get on. The slickery

mud under the moss on the rocks

gave way, and I couldn't keep going.

So here I stay, under this cinnamon tree,

white clouds for my pillow,

I'll just take a nap.

 

VII

I sit beneath the cliff, quiet and alone.

Round moon in the middle of the sky's a bird ablaze:

all things are seen mere shadows in its brilliance,

that single wheel of perfect light . . .

Alone, its spirit naturally comes clear.

Swallowed in emptiness in this cave of darkest mystery,

because of the finger pointing, I saw the moon.

That moon became the pivot of my heart.

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