Cold Mountain Sutras

In my hermitage a volume of Cold Mountain Poems —
It is better than any sutra.
I copy his verses and post them all around,
Savoring each one, over and over.*1

Who is Cold Mountain?  I don't know.  The only fragments of his life that survive are stories and poems, but it's paltry pickings.  He was an enigma even while he lived.  How much more so centuries after his passing.  Here's what we do know.  He lived during the Tang Dynasty (618 to 917AD) on the mountain that became his name.  He spent most of his life in a cave high on a harsh mountain.  He survived mostly by foraging.  He dedicated his life to meditation, song, and relishing nature.  So austere and simple was his life that he didn't even have paper and brush to record his poems.  Instead, he carved them into stone and wood.  After his death, he gradually entered into the Taoist-Buddhist mythos.  Artists, philosophers, and monks appreciated his gritty, honest, and direct verse.  Stories abounded that confirmed that the man behind the poem wasn't just preaching emptily.  He lived the philosophy.  

Like Ryokan, he became a childless father to countless generations of seekers.  He had no formal students.  No temple.  No lineage.  No brand.  No manual on how to wake up or live life.  And yet through his poems and stories has shaped and inspired generations of practitioners until this very day.  So highly regarded is he that many have worshiped him as a manifestation of Manjusri.  For Ryokan, he even held Han Shan's poems higher than the sutras.

If we want to understand Ryokan, a figure who often baffles and frustrates as much as he charms and inspires, it's worthwhile to look at Han Shan.  A comparison of the two could fill volumes, but I'll take a more modest approach.  I'm going to highlight four key poems that show a sliver of Han Shan.  I will make no comparisons.  Instead, I'll allow for those connections to happen quietly and spontaneously, like mycelia webbing its way through the soil.

Wild

Parrots live in western lands
hunters bring them back in nets
courtesans tease them dawn to dusk
somewhere behind palace curtains
they're given a golden cage
but locked away their plumage fades
not like wild geese and swans
flying up in the clouds*2

By all accounts, Han Shan was a wild man.  He wore his hair long.  He shunned the pomp and decorum of the court.  He even rejected the monastic institution's hierarchies, ceremony, and dogma.

In his estimation, society's one big ponzi scheme.  Society uses the carrot of financial security, power, prestige, and pleasure to entice compliance.  This is the golden cage that they lured those poor parrots into.  Society also uses the stick of poverty, impotence, exile, and hardship.  This is the threat of recapture and punishment for escaping.  It's a trap and a farce.  Want that big house, good school for your kids, gorgeous wife, a nice holiday on the coast every once in a while, and the power to tell others what to do?  Well then, be a good boy.  Play the politics game.  Don't step on big people's toes.  Work really, really hard to distinguish yourself.  Keep abreast of the trends.  Keep the right friends.  And then, the fable goes, you're assured of getting your just desserts.

Han Shan rejects this myth.  Society is not a vehicle to better man, but a pyramid scheme of misery that drives us further from our nature and our freedom.  The problem for us, however, like the parrots, is that we've been so institutionalized that life beyond the cage seems suicide.  How, many might wonder, can I survive without the security of a monthly wage or health insurance?  How can I be happy if I can't watch Netflix or eat out at my favorite pizzeria?  Impossible to consider, let alone attempt.   And many parrots will spend their days in golden cages entertaining courtiers until their final breath, but, he whispers, there's another way.  Escape.  Don't play their game.  Unbound your spirit and your wings.

Like the geese and swans, he foregoes the comforts and security of the cage.  In exchange, he gains the freedom to follow his nature without the weight of expectation and fear of reprisal.  He does so wide-eyed, having lived in these mountains for decades.  He knows his lot is rough.  He's so high up on the mountain that his home's never known spring.  Food is hard to come by.  Cold, wind, snow, and rain batter his body.  He's exposed to attacks by bandits and tigers.  But like the other creatures living on the mountain, he endures.  And in the midst of such hardship, leads an unfettered, hardy life.  Far better to let his stomach growl and frost gnaw at his hands than wither away as someone's pet.

Unlearning

Born thirty years ago
I've traveled countless miles
along rivers where the green rushes swayed
to the frontier where the red dust swirled
I've made elixirs and tried to become immortal
I've read the classics and written odes
and now I've retired to Cold Mountain
to lie in a stream and wash out my ears

A poor young man went out drinking with his best pal, a hi-so well-to-doer.  As the party dragged on and the drinking grew more excessive, the poor man passed out on one of the couches.  While he was still asleep, his friend sewed a jewel into his passed out friend's robe and departed.  When the man came to, his friend had already left for other business.  He chastised himself for being so negligent.  To correct his mistake, he vowed to travel to the wealthy capital and earn enough money to finally live the comfortable life he longed for.

The two didn't meet each other for years.  The rich man went about with his business, occasionally wondering what became of his friend.  The poor man went about his, grinding away to get ahead.  The poor man endured trial after trial to advance in his career, but it was all for naught.

As the years passed, the poor man grew weary of his dream.  He'd tried so hard, but his efforts ended in failure.  Enough, he thought to himself, and he decided to return home and accept his lot.  He was broken and dissipated.

While he was returning to his village, he ran across his rich friend in the street.  The rich man sighed as he saw his old companion's sorry state.  He told him that he'd sewn a priceless jewel into his robes all those years back but hadn't been able to tell him.  Delighted, the man unstitched the jewel.  Relief washed over him as he held it in his hand.  At last, he thought to himself, his hardship was over.  A comfortable life awaited him and his family after too many years of suffering.

The above parable come's from the Lotus Sutra and points directly to our own Buddha nature.  The man had this priceless jewel with him all along, but he didn't know it.  Instead, he ran the world over and met with failure after failure.  In the process, he nearly killed himself.  When he realizes that he's had this jewel with him all along, he no longer needs to search or work.  He can rest content until the end of his days, living of the riches of what was with him all along.

There's an important twist to this fable's place in the Lotus Sutra: nowhere in the Lotus Sutra does anyone actually teach what Buddha Nature is.  The key concept around which the entire text pivots is, instead, passed over in silence.  The highest truth and our truest selves, therefore, is beyond description or philosophy.  To reach the essence of the Lotus Sutra, we must forget all words and concepts.  We must unlearn.

How many of us really know that ineffable truth that lies at the heart of our being?  How many of us really see the mystery of our best friend or the tree blossoming outside our house?  How many of us really feel at home in this world?  How many of us feel that everything is just as it should be?  Few.  The problem: we've learnt too much.

Han Shan begins by listing his efforts to understand the world.  He traveled far, made Taoist elixirs to gain immortality, and even memorized and studied sacred texts, yet this did not settle his doubts.  He cast it all aside and returned to the wilds of his spirit and his country to unlearn so he can see the truth before his very eyes, within his very bones.

The irony is that that's the natural state of things all the time.  No matter how horrific, ugly, trying, painful they might seem, at base, it's all Buddha Nature.  What obstructs us is our conditioned ideas about how reality is.  I'm here, this website's there, my wife's there.  President Biden is good, Trump is bad.  Earth is 4.5 billion years old.  Everything is fleeting.  Communism is the best form of governance.  Blah blah blah.

These are the ideas that float around in our head and shape how we see the world.  While they are important and useful, they also obscure the ineffable.  So how do we see it?  Do we make an idea about it and believe, really, really, deep down inside, that the universe is beyond reckoning?  No.  That's just another idea.  We must let go of all ideas.  We must unlearn.

Han Shan doesn't literally mean never read another book or poke around to see something interesting over yonder.  Instead, what he's saying is be careful.  Don't delude yourself into thinking that by reading all of these great books and thinking a bunch of profound thoughts is going to bring you much closer to the truth.  If you want that, best to toss most of it away, live simply, and stay near to the wilderness of the heart and land.

Purity

Steam some sand for your dinner
when you're thirsty dig a well
polish a brick with all your might
you still won't make a mirror
the Buddha said we're basically equal
we share the same true nature
figure it out for yourself
give up this useless struggle

Following from the principal of unlearning is the principal of purity.  In Han Shan's view, since we're all fundamentally pure, what need need is there for all this effort, these rules, ideas, institutions, cages, carrots, and sticks?  To quote Hui-Neng's famed enlightenment poem:

Bodhi originally has no tree,
The mirror has no stand.
Buddha Nature is always clean and pure;
Where is there room for dust?

The idea, then, of "purifying" the mind is backwards and itself an obstacle to awakening.  Just as you can't make a tile into a mirror by polishing it all day, no matter how assiduously, you can't make the mind pure by cleansing it of defilements.  The mind, our nature, is already pure as it is.  All that there's to do is recognize and live that truth.  There's nothing to do.  Nothing to build.  No virtues to strengthen.  No lofty states to attain.  No stages to pass through.  Our nature is pure as it is and has been so since beginningless time.  The only thing lacking is trust in that basic purity.

But how do you practice in a way that's not deepening delusion?  Meditation to enter some special state, the demon's hook.  Studying scriptures to better understand path and practice, bewitching oneself with ignorance.  Reflecting on oneself to overcome one's shortcomings, a fool grasping at the air.  The answer is another question: how do you make water still?  You leave it alone.

When we start to trust in and allow for that basic purity, the struggle of self-improvement and self-discovery dissolves.  What replaces it is the feeling of serenity and awe that infuses much of Han Shan's work.  Everything, including himself, is perfect as it is.  

Indifference to the World

Since I came to Cold Mountain
how many thousand years have passed
accepting my fate I fled to the woods
to dwell and gaze in freedom
no one visits the cliffs forever hidden
by clouds soft grass serves as a mattress
my quilt is the dark blue sky
a boulder makes a fine pillow
Heaven and Earth can crumble and change

One of the most confounding aspects of Han Shan is his disregard for the troubles of the world.  Few poems bring it home harder than this.  Han Shan's off blissing out for thousands of years in his cave while Heaven and Earth crumble about him.  How selfish, right!?

Here's another poem to bring the indifference home:

The layered bloom of hills and streams
kingfisher shades beneath rose-colored clouds
mountain mist soaks my cotton bandana
dew penetrates my palm-bark coat
on my feet are traveling shoes
my hand holds an old vine staff
again I gaze beyond the dusty world
what more could I want in that land of dreams

This isn't the gushing compassion of the bodhisattva bent on saving all sentient beings.  I can easily and uncharitably read this as the smug satisfaction of man whose left the world and cares little for those suffering within it.  There might be some trace of that in Han Shan, or at least at the time he wrote this.  Who knows?  And outside of the poems, there's the glaring indifference seen through his actions.  He likely never deigned to leave his hermitage to help villagers in need.  He didn't preach the dharma to officials to turn their minds away from callousness and greed.  He mostly just sat back and let the suffering be as it is.  However, before criticizing his indifference, there are two points to bear in mind.

First, there are many other poems where Han Shan weeps over the suffering of friends and strangers alike.  In one, he can hardly sleep as he thinks of an unnamed person who suddenly died.  In another, he mourns the needless suffering of those caught-up in the net of samsara.  Also, he's also a strict vegetarian and chastises other so-called Buddhists that eat meat.  Clearly, then, he has compassion.  So why the seeming indifference to the suffering of the world?

That's where point two needs to be borne in mind: fundamental purity.  The idea of Buddha Nature blends nicely with the older Taoist philosophy of the intrinsic intelligence and correctness of nature.  From this principle, the concept of wu-wei, or non-action, was derived.  If our self-conscious, calculating actions take us further from the intrinsic goodness and intelligence, the appropriate response is to focus on simply following nature's flow and not interfering too much in the workings of the world.  Wu-wei says trust that everything will be ok and keep your nose out of life's business.

In other poems, Han Shan echoes the Soto edict to let everything be as it is.  By allowing your mind rest without interference, it naturally settles into a state of tranquility.  The same holds for the world.  Pines, pavilions, and even people are all fundamentally pure.  We don't need to go out and make these things pure,  all we must do is step out of the way and allow nature to do it's work.  The reason why the world's in such a tumultuous state is because so few people get out of the way.  Not allowing water to settle in its natural state of stillness, they try desperately to make it still with all sorts of antics.  Often, their intentions are noble.  They want to make sure that society's just, but then draconian laws and harsh punishments follow.  Others want a bit more security for their family or to make sure that their children grow up into respectable citizens.  

Instead of trying to go in there and fix things, Han Shan's response is to allow the world to be as it is.  No need to interfere and improve.  No need to celebrate the good and shun the evil.  These ideas simply feed the dualistic thinking that caused this big mess in the first place.  The best thing to do is just hang back and let the world and people sort themselves out.

Whether you agree with Han Shan's passivity or not, viewed from this perspective his withdrawal from the world isn't a dismissal of it.  In his view, it's the best way to bring the world back into harmony.

The Cold Mountain and Five Scoop Hut

The similarities between Han Shan and Ryokan run deep.  They are the wild, quiet outcasts of Zen living on the margins.  As such, they remain an enigma.  Uninterested in explaining themselves or leaving some record for perpetuity, only fragments remain.  But like the fragments of Sappho or the dismembered torso of a Greek statue, the fragments that we have of them point to two beautiful oddballs at once at odds with the world and at ease within it.  One of the most important things they've left behind is not the fragments, but the absences, the uncertainty, the questions.

An old koan comes to mind:

“What is the ultimate meaning of the holy truths of Buddhism?”
“Vast emptiness, no holiness,” replied Bodhidharma.
“Who stands here before me?” asked Emperor Wu.
“I don’t know.”  

References

*1. Ryokan. Dewdrops on a Lotus Leaf. Translated by John Stevens. Boston: Shambhala, 2012.

*2. Han-Shan. The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain Translated by Red Pine. Translated by Bill Porter. Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2000.