Hanshan (poet)

Hanshan (Chinese: 寒山; pinyin: Hánshān; literally: "Cold Mountain", fl. 9th century) was a legendary figure associated with a collection of poems from the Chinese Tang Dynasty in the Taoist and Chan tradition. No one knows who he was, or when he lived and died. In the Buddhist tradition, Hanshan and his sidekick Shide are honored as emanations of the bodhisattvas Mañjuśrī and Samantabhadra, respectively. In Japanese and Chinese paintings, Hanshan is often depicted together with Shide or with Fenggan, another monk with legendary attributes.

Little is known of his work, since he was a recluse living in a remote region and his poems were written on rocks in the mountains he called home. Of the 600 poems he is thought to have written at some point before his death, 313 were collected and have survived. Among the 57 poems attributed to Hanshan's friend, Shide, seven appear to be authored by Hanshan, for a total of 320.

In Lu Jiuyin's (Wade–Giles: Lu Ch'iu-Yin) preface to Hanshan's poems, he claims to have personally met both Hanshan and Shide at the kitchen of Guoqing Temple, but they responded to his salutations with laughter then fled. Afterwards, he attempted to give them clothing and provide them housing, but Lu Jiuyin writes that the pair fled into a cave which closed itself and Shide's tracks disappeared. This led Lu Jiuyin, governor of Tai Prefecture, to collect Hanshan's writings, "the poems written on bamboo, wood, stones, and cliffs — and also to collect those written on the walls of peoples' houses." However, Burton Watson is of the opinion that Lu Jiuyin did not exist in reality and that his preface to Hanshan's poems is nothing more than myth. In the introduction to his book, he says of Lu Jiuyin's preface to the poems:

[The preface], contrary to Chinese custom, is undated. Lu-chiu Yin represents himself as a high official and prefixes his name with a very imposing title. But there is only one mention of anyone by this name to be found in other works of the period, and it refers almost certainly to another person. This fact alone is peculiar enough, if Lu-chiu Yin was in fact as high up in the bureaucracy as his title indicates. Furthermore, the style of the preface, awkward and wordy, hardly suggests the writing of an eminent official. All other sources that tell us anything about Han-shan and Shih-te appear to be later than the preface and based upon it. For all we know, therefore, the whole picture of the two recluses built up in the preface may be nothing more than literary fiction. The poems, however, remain — over three hundred of them....If the reader wishes to know the biography of Han-shan, he must deduce it from the poems themselves.

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