ON 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 This page intentionally left blank 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 This page intentionally left blank 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