Chinese · 730–850
Hanshan means Cold Mountain, and it is a place in the Tiantai range in Zhejiang as much as a person. According to a preface of doubtful authorship, he was a poor scholar who withdrew to a cave there, wore birch bark, laughed at the monks of the Guoqing monastery, and wrote his poems on rocks, trees and walls, from which a local official collected some three hundred of them. The dates cannot be fixed and the poems appear to come from more than one hand across a couple of centuries. They are colloquial, sometimes crude, and range from Buddhist and Daoist argument to complaints about a wasted life and jokes about people who cannot read them. Chan monks kept him in circulation; Japanese Zen made him and his friend Shide a standard subject in painting. Gary Snyder's twenty-four translations in 1958 put him into American poetry, and Jack Kerouac dedicated The Dharma Bums to him.