About Cold Mountain
Han Shan was an iconoclastic poet who spent time separately in solitude and at monasteries. His poems were found and compiled as always a testament to the uncanny wisdom and music they contained. As in the tradition of Chinese Poesy, the poems were sung out in the Cold Mountain era, all the way to now.
Following the way of Crazy Wisdom, Han Shan stood neither in the trenches of Taoism nor Buddhism, his Dharma loose-and-free, no different from his many verses of poetry. It is conjectured that some of the tales of Cold Mountain are myths—whether this is or is not the case, one thing is sure—The Poet is Gone.
About the Translator
Bill Porter assumes the pen name Red Pine for his translation work. He was born in Los Angeles in 1943, grew up in the Idaho Panhandle, served a tour of duty in the US Army, graduated from the University of California with a degree in anthropology, and attended graduate school at Columbia University.
Uninspired by the prospect of an academic career, he dropped out of Columbia and moved to a Buddhist monastery in Taiwan. He struck out on his own after four years with the monks and nuns. Eventually, he found work at English-language radio stations in Taiwan and Hong Kong, where he interviewed local dignitaries and produced more than a thousand programs about his travels in China.
His translations have been honored with a number of awards, including two NEA translation fellowships, a PEN Translation Prize, and the inaugural Asian Literature Award of the American Literary Translators Association. His Kind and His Way are honored in the movie===Dancing with the Dead (which one wonders sounds eerily similar to a long, strange trip…). He lives in Port Townsend, Washington.
How Does One Know Tao?
Who, precisely, is a poet? How do we find the gone ones? If my life were a bestseller, I probably would’ve opened the Collected Songs with such questions weighing on me, heavy—alas! Such is not the case. Instead, I opened to nothing in mind.
‘Dedicated to Han Shan’ (thanks to the Internet Archive for preserving a copy with the inscription!) is the simple opening of an age-defining book, featuring the Way of poet Gary Snyder—Dharma Bums. Indeed, it is one and the same Han Shan- Cold Mountain whose most Zen poems that break apart the mind have been translated by Red Pine.
The introductions in the Revised & Expanded editions clearly show us the Dharma’s mettle in our age.
Bill skillfully paints the life and mystery that is Han Shan—to some, more myth than man? – and his kinfolk, Feng-kan & Shih-te, so colorfully that we find ourselves gone to climes that feature vistas of rivers and mountains.
Most portentously, upon completing the conjectures, Bill provides the reader with many academician’s explanations of the Poet Cold Mountain. My mind begged—
“And you, Red Pine—how do you see Cold Mountain?”
There begins Bill’s own offering to the Great Mystery of Cold Mountain.
John Blofeld, too, is no less. He provides an introduction that really whets the appetite to dive head-first into Cold Mountain’s Way. One tastes the hint of a highly way-found individual with John—the introduction for this volume of Cold Mountain poems is a piece of radiant Dharma.
The work of a single night, perhaps a single sitting even—amidst whiskey and later Tibetan chanting– is there yet hope left, wonders one.
Cold Mountain Poems
The poems lay bare. Each verse is sure to make us live, through and through, the reverberations of a wholly integrated Mad man.
It remains especially tasteful to remember that Han Shan wrote poems everywhere! On stones, walls, trees, spit-in-the-wind: it behooves to associate the poems with such a varied range of what one can truly call “Mixed” media!
The versatility of this Mind to compactly express the Great, Infinite, ever-expansive Tao, or Sunyata, is no less than the fruits of the great tree of enlightenment mentioned in the Buddhavatamsaka Sutra. They breed the tears of compassion—that water that nourishes the roots of this tree.
Funny—Han Shan, an entire one like no one, sparks the most Divine notes of the “real-that-lay-bare” in full-bodied language; one cannot but help chuckle… and cackle too!
An Anarchist? – yes, we would be well to suspect Han Shan to take most suitably towards and turn on to poet Dale Pendell’s Horizon Anarchism; even, maybe, crazy Ikkyu’s requests to not allow any Artificial Paradise to sway one the True Way.
And Lastly
Bill has done an excellent service to generations of humans, especially to the long, unbroken thread of a timeless tradition. The book births the subtle scents of the crazy hermit mountain men who would accept nothing less than Nothing! Red Pine—for this work, thanks!
