Table Of ContentON
COLD
MOUNTAIN
A Buddhist Reading
of the Hanshan Poems
Paul RouzeR
A China Program Book
univeRsity of Washington PRess
Seattle and London
On Cold Mountain was made possible in part by a grant from the University
of Minnesota’s Imagine Fund, awarded through the College of Liberal Arts.
This book also was supported by the China Studies Program, a division of
the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of
Washington.
© 2016 by the University of Washington Press
Printed and bound in the United States of America
Design by Thomas Eykemans
Composed in Minion, typeface designed by Robert Slimbach
18 17 16 15 5 4 3 2 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
“Cold Mountain Poem #2” (two-line excerpt), “Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout,” and
“Kyoto: March” copyright © 1965 by Gary Snyder from Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems. “True Night”
copyright © 1983 by Gary Snyder from Axe Handles. “Really the Real” copyright © 2004 by Gary Snyder
from danger on peaks. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint.
“On the Beach,” “Bees,” and “The Adamantine Perfection of Desire” (three-line excerpt) copyright © 1997
by Jane Hirshfield from The Lives of the Heart. “Self-Portrait in a Borrowed Cabin” copyright © 2001 by
Jane Hirshfield from Given Sugar, Given Salt. “The Promise,” “Against Certainty” and “Seventeen Pebbles”
(six-line excerpt) copyright © 2006 by Jane Hirshfield from After: Poems. Reprinted by permission of
HarperCollins Publishers.
“Self-Portrait in a Borrowed Cabin,” “On the Beach,” “Bees,” “Light House” (from “Seventeen Pebbles”),
“Against Certainty,” and “The Adamantine Perfection of Desire” (three-line excerpt) were also published
in Jane Hirschfield, Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems (Hexham, UK: Bloodaxe Books,
2005). “The Promise” was published in Come, Thief (Hexham, UK: Bloodaxe Books, 2012).
univeRsity of Washington PRess
www.washington.edu/uwpress
libRaRy of CongRess Cataloging-in-PubliCation Data
Rouzer, Paul F.
On cold mountain : a Buddhist reading of the Hanshan poems / Paul Rouzer.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-295-99499-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Hanshan, active 627–649—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Chinese poetry—Tang dynasty, 618–907—
History and criticism. 3. Buddhism in literature. I. Title.
Pl2677.h3z83 2015
895.11′3—dc23 2015012274
The paper used in this publication is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ansi z39.48–1984. ∞
Spoken words and written text all are Marks of Liberation. Why is that?
Liberation is neither internal, external, nor in between. Written text is
also neither internal, external, nor in between. And so, Śāriputra, you may
speak of Liberation without transcending written text. Why is that? All
dharmas are Marks of Liberation.
—The Vimalakīrti Sutra
Now when people like us select a teacher, it’s no good to pick a Buddha
or a Zen patriarch—only Master Cold Mountain can serve as a teacher.
—Hakuin Ekaku
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CONTENTS
Preface and Acknowledgments ix
intRoDuCtion: Who Gets to Climb Cold Mountain? 3
Part One. The Poet
1 Who Was Hanshan? 19
2 Who Was Hanshan, Again? 41
Part Two. The Poems
3 Juxtapositions 69
4 At Home and Abroad 93
5 Tropes 117
6 Satire 146
Part Three. Reading Buddhists
7 Who Gets to Climb the Matterhorn? 173
afteRWoRD 221
Notes 223
Glossary 243
Bibliography 251
Index 259
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PREFACE AND
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I should mention from the first that the following does not purport to be a
biography of Hanshan (Cold Mountain), nor does it argue that the Hanshan
poems are meant to represent the personal experience of their author(s). Nor
is this a history of the reception of the Hanshan poems—worthy though
such a project would be. This is a work of literary criticism and close reading
from a Buddhist perspective, taking the Hanshan poems as its focus.
In recent decades, scholars in East Asia and in the West have immensely
expanded their understanding of East Asian literature, not only in terms of
basic literary history (broader knowledge of the tradition, greater familiarity
with minor works, and increased sensitivity to historical factors), but also in
terms of theoretical tools (literary and cultural theory most obviously). As a
result, interested readers in English-speaking countries now have available to
them an increasing number of translations and studies that can grant them
a more sophisticated sense of the Chinese tradition. And yet in that same
period, academic specialization has tended to demand more from its reader-
ship as well, making this scholarship inaccessible at times to anyone without
a considerable background in history and language. Certainly it would be
to the benefit of everyone if the scholars among us spent time demonstrat-
ing why East Asian literature is just as worth reading as anything produced
by the Western tradition, and that its worth is tied not to an antiquarian
historicism but rather to broader matters of aesthetic appreciation as well as
personal cultivation (whether one counts the latter as specifically Buddhist
or as more broadly “humanist”). This book tries to do just that, walking a
path between a specialist monograph on the one hand and a popular intro-
duction on the other, proposing what I hope are novel arguments about the
poems while also making them more accessible to a general reader. I have
ix
deliberately conceived of this book (especially its middle chapters) as a sort
of “appreciation” of Hanshan.
Another feature of this study is that it attempts to root its method in a
specifically Buddhist approach to poetry. This is not new, especially in Japa-
nese literary scholarship, where a Buddhist perspective has played a vital
role in textual close reading at least since William R. LaFleur’s The Karma of
Words (1983); this tendency has continued in the work of Rajyashree Pandey
and Stephen D. Miller, among others. However, this has been much less the
case in the Chinese field, particularly in the study of poetry. The Buddhist
“way of reading” I am interested in here does not include, for example, the
work of scholars who have analyzed the influence of Buddhist concepts on
mainstream Chinese poetics (as in Xiaofei Tian’s recent work on Chinese
early medieval culture), nor the explication of concrete Buddhist details as
they occur in verse specifically tailored to believers (as in Mary Anne Cartel-
li’s discussion of Wutai poetry from Dunhuang). Rather, I wish to consider
a way of interpreting and appreciating verse that is governed by Buddhist
beliefs. The difference should become clear in the course of my discussion.
I also argue for the radical “presentness” of the poems themselves in close
readings and interpretations of a number of modern texts by Jack Kerouac,
Gary Snyder, and Jane Hirshfield, who respond in their own ways to the
East Asian Buddhist tradition. This is not out of disregard for historical and
cultural difference, but rather to demonstrate how different writers have
responded to the same religious discourse over the centuries. Historical and
cultural difference is part of the story, but it operates against the awareness
in all of these writers of some basic Buddhist assumptions about the way the
world operates.
Special acknowledgements are due to Lorri Hagman, my editor at the
University of Washington Press, and the UWP manuscript reviewers; to my
production editor and copyeditor, Jacqueline Volin and Caroline Knapp; to
Tim Zimmermann, who provided invaluable help in obtaining permissions;
to Jane Hirshfield, who generously looked at my discussion of her poems;
and to my colleagues in the Department of Asian Languages and Literatures
at the University of Minnesota, especially Joseph Allen. I am also grateful
to the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota, which granted
me a sabbatical leave for Spring 2014, enabling me to complete the manu-
script, and which provided a subvention through the Imagine Fund to aid
in the publication. A very special thanks also to Jennifer Carpenter, who has
proved my most sympathetic and critical reader.
x PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Conventions
As readers will likely know, the legendary author of the Hanshan poems
named himself after his place of reclusion, Cold Mountain. This can cause
some confusion (sometimes intentional) in differentiating man from place.
For the sake of clarity I will use the Chinese Hanshan when talking about the
supposed author, and Cold Mountain when talking about the location. How-
ever, readers should keep in mind that in Chinese the terms are the same.
I have left a number of common Buddhist terms unitalicized and with-
out diacritical marks: Mahayana, Hinayana, samsara, nirvana, tripitaka,
Dharma, kalpa, sutra, sangha, satori, koan, roshi. I assume that my readers
will have a general knowledge of the basic principles of Buddhism, and so I
have not felt it necessary to explain the fundamental points of Buddhist doc-
trine. I have tried to explain any concepts that occur beyond that level, how-
ever. Occasionally I will capitalize English-language terms when I emphasize
their equivalent to a Buddhist doctrinal concept: Impermanence, Mind.
I have made some attempt to use the terms Chan and Zen in a consistent
manner. When I use Chan (the original Chinese designation), I refer specifi-
cally to the early development of the Chan movement in Tang dynasty China
(618–907) until its relative stabilization during the Song (960–1279). After
that, I use Zen (the Japanese designation) for any aspects of the movement,
no matter what country or tradition is being discussed. This is not meant to
suggest a preference for the Japanese form of the movement; it is merely the
term with which the average English-speaking reader is most familiar.
Citations to the Taishō Tripitaka (the standard edition of the East Asian
Buddhist canon, published in Japan from 1913 to 1921) follow this format:
volume number (T), text number (no.), page number, range (a, b, c), and line
number(s). For example: T. 40, no. 2012, 382, b11–27. A complete list of the
cited Taishō texts may be found in the bibliography.
I have used pinyin romanization for Chinese terms throughout; however,
I occasionally quote scholars who use the older Wade-Giles system. In such
cases, I have changed the Wade-Giles rendering to pinyin and have indicated
this in the notes.
Neither the Hanshan poems nor the poems attributed to Shide have titles.
Consequently, many scholars use numbers when identifying them. Unfor-
tunately, two factors lead to inconsistent numbering: there are two textual
traditions for the Hanshan collection, with somewhat different sequencing
of the poems, and there is some disagreement among scholars about whether
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi
certain groups of verse are one poem or more than one poem. In this study,
I number the poems based on the Xiang Chu edition, also used in the Com-
plete Tang Poems (Quan Tang shi). Xiang Chu uses the earliest Song dynasty
textual transmission line, whose earliest surviving text dates to the early
1100s. The other tradition, the so-called Guoqing Temple edition, dates from
the 1180s; this is followed, for example, by Red Pine’s English translation.
Xiang Chu also differs slightly from other editors in assigning numbers.
First, he holds that the poem elsewhere numbered hs 159, consisting of forty-
four lines, is actually two poems (consisting of lines 1–36 and lines 37–44).
He consequently numbers lines 37–44 of this poem as hs 160, and the num-
bers that follow are thus displaced. A similar case occurs in what other edi-
tions have as the forty-four-line poem hs 275, a lengthy satire on monastic
malfeasance. Xiang Chu assumes that this is two poems, lines 1–18 (hs 276 in
his system) and lines 19–44 (hs 277 in his system). In the end, he concludes
that there are 313 poems in the collection, as opposed to 311.
The texts in my discussion are based on the Sibu Congkan (SBCK) edi-
tion, a reprint of the early Song edition, which in turn serves as the basis of
Xiang’s edition. There are five or six variant readings that have been accepted
by all scholars working with Hanshan; I have accepted these as well without
making a note of it.
xii PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
