"You can't fall off a mountain": Han Shan's Cold Mountain Poems

The words of our beloved Ray never seem to fade from the minds of those who at one time or another fell in love with Kerouac’s motivated, confused, curious character of The Dharma Bums. Ray Smith comes to his epiphany as he watches his buddy Japhy jumping from rock to rock like a mountain goat all the way up what might as well be Han Shan’s Cold Mountain, for all the similarities Kerouac's story and Han Shan's poems hold. Both Ray and the speaker of Han Shan's poems trek up a cold mountain to the solace of a clear night sky and crystal streams, and both essentially vow that there’s no need to fear, that what is meant to come shall come, that it'll all come out in the wash – "you can’t fall off a mountain," Ray realizes, as Han Shan discovers his home "was at Cold Mountain from the start". It sounds to me like both men found more than fresh air on their hike…or perhaps they realized that’s all they were ever really after.

I’m no expert on the Beats and I’m definitely no expert on 8th century Chinese poets. I do know that Gary Snyder thought pretty highly of Han Shan though, highly enough to devote his grad-school academic life to him and his compatriots and to translate a whole bunch of his work. I know also that Gary and Jack were pretty good pals - Kerouac actually molded Japhy's character in Snyder's image - so odds are that more than once Han Shan came up in conversation between the two writers. It’s not surprising that Jack Kerouac picked up what the little mountain bum who hollered “Ho!” and who had a mind as deep as the universe was figuratively and literally putting down.

I read the Dharma Bums for the first time when I was a junior in high school and it was the spark that lit the beatnik fire in me, a fire that would end up raging inside for a few years (and I must admit, the coals are still hot - or hot once again? - as I sit here writing this). I became obsessed with the Beats’ view of the universe, their emphasis on the fleeting nature of everything we see and perceive and, for Kerouac at least, the emptiness of the void in which we dwell. If you’ve never read Beat poetry or prose, it might sound from my description extremely fatalistic and depressing. But that’s the thing – it's so not. The Beats managed to make the idea of living an existence of deception the object of my fascination, and I, as so many others do upon reading Kerouac, began to look at my experience on Earth as perhaps something different than I previously believed it to be. I saw myself taking the world at face value, believing that everything I saw and felt were true and real. And as I became critical, I began to challenge that belief and to consider that maybe, just maybe, there was a greater, truer underlying force, a unifying, enormous, harmonious force that I might begin to experience and understand if I could just somehow come to terms with the illusory world and transcend it.

So that was me as a 16 year-old. Ha! Or "Ho!" as my friends Ray and Han Shan would say! I started to meditate, to write poetry, to take long walks and bike rides, to do just about anything that allowed me to clear my mind and glimpse something glorious writhing just above the perceivable surface. I was convinced that Kerouac was God or Buddha incarnate without really knowing much about who the Buddha was at all. (I did read Hermann Hesse’s novel around this time, though, and paired with Kerouac’s Wake Up, the duo became the basis of my understanding of Buddhism. Ho!) Little did I know that years later, I would become similarly enchanted with a poet who wrote centuries and centuries before Kerouac was born but who preached the same message, a poet who inspired Kerouac and Snyder and probably a huge populous of the Beat artists, a poet named Han Shan.

I noticed the name popping up in Beat literature quite a bit when I was younger, but it wasn’t until very recently, kind of out of the blue, that the name resurfaced in my mind and I decided to look him up. (I'm a firm believer that when a name, a word, a phrase just pops into your mind, there's a reason for it.) This was when I learned about Snyder's involvement in the translation of Han Shan's works, and about when I realized how big a player this Han Shan guy was. As soon as I read that he was a recluse who lived on Cold Mountain and only came down once in a while to pay the monastery a visit, yelling “Ho!” all the while, I knew I had to read more about him.

So I did. And I found that much of the – forgive me if this sounds sensational – enlightenment I felt as a 16 year-old reading Kerouac came flooding back to me. This is not to say that I grew out of my spirituality, but to be honest I had not thought about the universe as Jack had mapped it out for me in quite a while; I had ceased to consider the illusions and deceptions we humans find ourselves caught up in every day as just that - illusions. And then I read the Cold Mountain poems and I was returned to my days of meditating on Wake Up sitting cross-legged, grasping at Kerouacian emptiness. I wish I could say something like, “I saw and understood the void and the illusory nature of the universe as a mature 20 year-old instead of as a young, impressionable 16 year-old, with a greater understanding of what it all means,” (I don't really wish I could say that, that sounds totally pretentious!) but I can’t – that would be a lie. Instead, I was reminded of the warnings that lurk in all of Kerouac’s books, and indeed in Han Shan’s poems too: it’s easy to take the world at face-value, to believe that money and status and who you know are the things that make or break you, are the things that determine your happiness. I was reminded of what I learned when I was 16, that these are not the things that make for a full life. They might be what seem to matter, but I can make all the money in the world and still die a fool if I don’t understand that every attempt at fortune and fame is simply an act of running from one falling star to the next, trying to catch them but always coming up with hands empty, the stars fizzling into the ether before I can grab hold. We have zero control over the way we'll be remembered, and no thing can truly make us happy, because when we die and our spirits rise or fall or whatever they'll do, one thing's for sure: we'll most definitely be thing-less.

I hope you will take the time to read Cold Mountain poems. If you too went through a period when you thought Jack Kerouac was God – read them. And if you have no idea who Jack Kerouac is – read them. I guarantee you'll reap some of the harvest Han Shan sowed.

http://www.hermetica.info/hanshan.htm

Gary Snyder's a wicked cool badass: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIQC0p_xLFk

DUALITY/MULTIPLICITY

The beginning of this collection of poems is filled with dualities. Take the line structure of 1-6 – first comes the emotional response, then comes the logical, reasoning response. This dichotomous thinking is why the trail to Cold Mountain's summit is so hard: we humans have conditioned ourselves to experience in two different ways, analyzing feelings, trying to make logical that which is not. In 14, we witness a movement away from cause and effect of nature on nature and a move toward more objective observations. This movement away from dichotomous perception should signify to the reader, I think, a step toward enlightened thinking and harmony. The line pairs - a structure that perpetuates and validates the dichotomous approach - begin to deteriorate.

UNITY

Unity and harmony in the poem series come only toward the end as Han Shan accepts the inability of man to reach anything more than partial understanding of the universe until he understands the unity of it, the "transcendent layer" I spoke of earlier. Only then will he cease to see things in terms of dualities – only then will he reach enlightenment. Han Shan does not try to explain the unexplainable - "If your heart was like mine / You’d get it and be right here”. These lines underscore the impenetrability of the enlightened state for those who have not reached it; it cannot be shown, only experienced. The fact that there is no through trail shows that climbing the mountain leads the hiker to an end from which he won’t return – this is enlightenment, permanent understanding. Cold Mountain is a mental state, then, is more than simply a physical place. The road up the mountain is not easy. And it is lonely. But Han Shan reveals the giant, beautiful sensation of enlightenment in 22 when at the summit of the mountain, he understands nature's “priceless natural treasure” and the reader understands his enlightenment to be worth all his loneliness and effort. Life's true value is not found in money or material, he understands, and it seems that though he's believed this all along, his trek up Cold Mountain actually makes him understand it. Though this truth is concealed in shadow, we all know it deep within; it is “sunk deep in the flesh,” and it takes a trek up Cold Mountain to unearth it and see it for what it is, to understand its enormity and influence. Han Shan sees “the pearl of the Buddha nature” and understands its use is “a boundless perfect sphere” – beauty, knowledge that all continues unbroken and beautiful and self-contained. He cannot communicate all he has learned about enlightenment in words to the people he meets, for the knowledge he has discovered cannot be transmitted through words, human to human - it must be experienced, one must find it for oneself.

And once you reach the top, there you stay. You can’t fall off a mountain, in the words of dear Ray Smith. And you can’t un-know.