Read The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry Online
Authors: Tony Barnstone
Han Shan, who may or may not have existed, is the name given to the putative author of a collection of fascinating Tang dynasty poems, more than three hundred in number. The poems tell the story of the author's retreat to Cold Mountain to live a life of hermetic simplicity, seeking Daoist and Chan (Zen) enlightenment in nature. They are proselytizing poems, but in their vernacular speech, their clarity of focus, and their celebration of simplicity, they embody what they seek to teach, and in this they achieve their greatest success.
Strangely enough, Han Shan is not considered a major poet in China. The Chinese complain that his work is too vernacular, full of good ideas but lacking in elegance and polish. And yet he has become a favorite poet in English translation, in part because he has had marvelous translators, among them Red Pine, Burton Watson, and Gary Snyder. Perhaps he is a poet who, to echo Robert Frost's famous snub about Carl Sandburg, “can only be improved in translation.” The politics of literary reputation aside, though, there is an undeniably remarkable voice that emerges from the poems of Han Shan, one that is quite rare in Chinese poetry. Like Meng Jiao, Han Shan was a cynic and an ironist, and the two poets' bitterness seems to have damaged their reputation among readers in China. Han Shan was also a strange mixture of dogmatist and freethinker, and one senses a personality behind the poems that is harsh and yet humorously irrepressible. Whatever the craft value of his poetry in Chinese, there is much to appreciate in its riddling Buddhist thought and in the way it captures the personality of a writer who may never have lived.
My heart
1
is the autumn moon
clear and white in a green pool.
No, nothing else is like it.
How can I make you understand?
Pigs eat dead men's flesh.
Men eat dead pigs' guts.
Pigs are not put off by men's stink.
Men say pigs really smell good.
Pigs are thrown in water when dead.
Holes are dug to bury dead men.
If the two don't eat each other,
lotus flowers will bloom from boiling soup.
Greedy men love to store wealth
like owls love their babies,
but small owls eat their mother when grown,
and the self is hurt by too much wealth.
Give away your wealth and you are blessed;
gathering it makes disasters rise.
With no wealth and no disasters,
you can glide on wings in blue clouds.
Heaven is endlessly high,
Earth so thick it has no poles,
and in between live creatures
supported by the Maker's strength;
fighting head-to-head for food and heat,
they scheme to eat each other,
never understanding cause or effect,
blind babies asking, “What color is milk?”
The life and death metaphor
can be found in ice and water.
Water solidifies into ice;
ice dissolves into water.
The dead are going to be born;
once born they'll be dead again.
Ice and water do not hurt each other.
Life and death are perfect complements.
New rice not yet ripe in the field,
old rice all gone,
I went to borrow a sack
and hesitated outside the door.
The husband came out, said talk to his wife,
his wife came out, said consult her husband.
So closefisted, they don't help the needy.
More wealth loads them with stupidity.
An elegant, poised, and handsome young man,
well versed in canons and histories,
everyone calls him a teacher,
or addresses him as a scholar,
but he fails to obtain an official position,
and he does not know how to farm.
He wears only a shabby gown in winter,
totally ruined by books.
During thirty years since my birth
I've hiked thousands of miles,
seen green grass converging with a river
and red dust rising at the frontiers,
searched in vain for immortals and elixirs,
studying books and histories.
Today I've returned to Cold Mountain.
I lie back in a stream, washing out my ears.
When Mr. Deng was in his youth
he traveled in and out of the capital
with clothes a tender yellow,
handsome as if in a painting.
He rode a horse with snow-white hooves,
stirring up waves of red dust.
Onlookers filled the roadsides
wondering: who was this young man?
Who was this young man?
A man hated deeply,
his idiotic mind often angry,
his vulgar eyes often drunk and blurry.
He did not show respect to Buddhas.
He did not give alms to monks.
He only knew how to eat fat slices of meat.
Otherwise, he was totally useless.
My way passed ancient tombs,
tears and sighs long dispersed.
Yellow intestines poked from sunken graves.
Shattered coffins showed white bones
and there were leaning urns.
I found no hairpins when I stirred the ash
but wind came swirling
and spilled a mess of dust into the air.
There's a tree that existed before the woods,
in age twice as old.
Its roots suffered as the valley changed,
its leaves deformed by wind and frost.
People all laugh at its withered aspect,
caring nothing about the core's beauty.
When the bark is all stripped off,
only essence remains.
In idleness I go to visit a prominent monk
in mountain mist and a thousand thousand peaks.
The master himself points out the road
and the moon hangs its lantern out for me.
A crowd of stars lines up bright in the deep night.
Lone lamp on the cliff, the moon is not yet sunk,
full and bright without being ground or polished.
Hanging in the black sky is my mind.
I gaze on myself in the stream's emerald flow
or sit on a boulder by a cliff.
My mind, a lonely cloud, leans on nothing,
needs nothing from the world and its endless events.
Talking about food won't fill your stomach.
Talk about clothing won't keep out cold.
To be full, eat rice.
To stay warm, wear clothes.
Those who don't understand
complain it's hard to get help from Buddha.
Look inside your heart. That's where Buddha is.
Don't look for him outside.
When people meet Han Shan,
They all say he's crazy.
His look doesn't attract the gaze,
and he is wrapped up in a cloth gown.
He speaks and they don't understand,
when they speak he keeps silent.
So he tells people,
“Come and visit me on Cold Mountain.”
The ocean stretches endlessly
with millions of fish and dragons.
They bite and eat each other up,
such foolish slabs of meat.
If the mind is not purged,
illusions rise like mist.
Our nature is bright like the moon.
It can shine without limit.
This life is lost in dust.
Like bugs in a bowl
we all day circle, circle
unable to get out.
We're nothing like immortals.
Our sorrows never end,
years and months flow off like water
and in an instant we're old men.
In this world people live then die.
Yesterday morning I was sixteen,
healthy with a strong life force.
Now I'm over seventy,
strength gone, body withered.
A flower in spring
blossoms at dawn. At night it dies.
The hermit escapes the human world
and likes to sleep on mountains
among green widely spaced vines
where clear torrents sing harmonies.
He steams with joy,
swinging at ease through freedom,
not stained with worldly affairs,
heart clean as a white lotus.
A word to meat eaters:
you eat without pause,
but this life is planted in the past
and the future's shaped by today.
If you live for great flavors
fearless of the next life's bill,
you're like a rat in a rice steamer,
so full you can't get out.
Keep Han Shan's poems in your home.
They are better than sutras.
You can place the book on top of a screen
and read it through every now and then.
1
The words “heart” and “mind” are the same in Chinese, but since in China one is supposed to think with the heart, we opted to use this term.
Du Qiuniang was born in Jinling in the first half of the ninth century and was married young to the poet Li Chi. After Li Chi died, Du Qiuniang served a prince as a lady-in-waiting, retiring to her hometown once the prince lost his status as heir apparent. Little is known of her after that, except that the Tang poet Du Mu wrote a poem to her in her old age. She was the only woman poet included in the famous anthology
300 Poems of the Tang Dynasty.
I tell you, don't adore your coat of gold brocade.
I tell you, adore the short spell of youth.
When the bloom is ready it must be plucked.
Don't wait till flowers drop and break the empty twig.
Tang poet, calligrapher, painter, and essayist Du Mu was born in the Tang dynasty capital, Changan (present-day Xian), to an illustrious family. After the death of his father and grandfather when he was still young, the family fell on lean times and was forced to give up servants and sell off property to survive. Du Mu nevertheless managed to receive a classical education and passed the imperial exam at twenty-five. He had a number of minor positions, but not enough to satisfy his ambition. He made a habit of writing to those in high places, praising his own credentials and critiquing civil and military policies, but he achieved a post he was happy with only a few months before his death in 852. Five hundred twenty-four of his poems survive.
Mist touches cold water and moon embraces the sand.
I'm moored for the night near a tavern on the Qinhuai.
The singing girl doesn't know the empire is in bitter ruin.
Across the river I hear her singing “Blossom of the Inner Court.”
Dying sun hovers two bamboo sticks high above the stream's bridge.
Half a wisp of mist flows in the blurry willows.
Countless green lotuses lean together and commiserate.
I can't face it, and for a moment turn my back to the west wind.
Autumn sounds always stir my traveler's mind.
Rain is deep in the reeds of the Yunmeng marsh in the state of Chu.
By the steps, rain keeps dripping on its own from the parasol tree's
big leaves. Why does it tangle my thoughts and make me improvise sad poems?
Purebright Season comes with fine fast drizzle
and travelers on the road feel their souls sliced off.
Please tell me where I can find a wine shop?
A cowherd boy points to distant Apricot Blooming Village.
White gulls fly over the broad, rippling river.
Its pure water in deep spring can dye your clothes green.
Navigating north and south will make a man age.
Late sun stays a long time seeing a fishing boat home.
Open space like an ocean where a lonely bird drowns.
Ten thousand years are eroded and buried in this field.
What are the achievements of the Han dynasty?
Five Tombs, all treeless, and rising autumn wind.
*
Purebright Day,
qingming
, is the fifth solar term (out of twenty-four divisions) of the Chinese astrological calendar, which is a combination of lunar months and solar terms. Each term starts with the particular day that gives the term its name—e.g., Purebright Day begins the Purebright Solar Term.
†
Leyou Park, located in today's southern suburb of Xianan City, was originally a spring park in the Qin dynasty, named Qinyi Chunyuan. It was renamed Leyou Park by Emperor Xun in the Han dynasty. In the Tang dynasty, Princess Taiping added many pavilions to it, and it became a popular scenic spot. People often go to Leyou Park on the last day of each lunar month. The third day of the third month and the ninth day of the ninth month are the most popular times to visit.
If you look northward from Leyou Park, you can see the famous Five Tombs. Until the time of Emperor Yuan of the Han dynasty, each Han emperor had a tomb built for him, with an abutting county named for each tomb. Thus “Wuling” or “Five Tombs” refers both to the tombs themselves and to the five counties.
Wen Tingyun was a native of Taiyuan, in Shanxi province. Known for his wit, intelligence, and handsome looks, he was a failure as an official (he failed the exams many times) and lived the dissolute life of a drunkard and frequenter of brothels. He was a friend of the important late Tang dynasty poet Li Shangyin, and the two of them were poetic innovators and among the first important writers in the lyric (
ci)
form, in which poetry is written to the meter of popular songs. Lyric poetry has a variable number of words per line, and so is called “long and short” poetry. It is rhymed and has a strict pattern of verse and tones and thus requires a quick imagination and exceptional skill for it to be used effectively. Like the sonnet in the European tradition, the poems were exhilaratingly complex and difficult. Although lyric poems were originally written to music that came from Western China, or from beyond, the scores have now been lost.
In contrast to the pure and deceptively simple poetry of the high Tang, Wen Tingyun's poetry is ornate, allusive, and typically concerned with love, loss, and sensuality. As Wen Tingyun was known for consorting with courtesans, his work is often set in the boudoir of a lady, in the entertainment world, or in the glamour of the court. Like the work of other important early lyric poets, his poems anticipated the overwhelming importance of the lyric form in the Song dynasty.