Clambering up the Cold Mountain path,
The Cold Mountain trail goes on and on;
The long gorge choked with scree and boulders,
The wide creek, the mist-blurred grass.
The moss is slippery, though there’s been no rain
The pine sings, but there’s no wind.
Who can leap the world’s ties
And sit with me among the white clouds.

***

My home was at Cold Mountain from the start,
Rambling among the hills, far from trouble.
Gone, and a million things leave no trace
Loosed, and it flows through the galaxies
A fountain of light, into the very mind-
Not a thing, and yet it appears before me:
Now I know the pearl of the Buddha-nature
Know its use: a boundless perfect sphere.

 Translated by Gary Snyder, American poet

Han-shan (9^th century AD), the Master of Cold Mountain, was a legendary figure associated with a collection of poems from the Chinese Tang Dynasty in the Taoist and Chan tradition. Little is known of his work since he was a recluse living in a remote region of the sacred T’ien-t’ai Mountains. His poems were written on rocks in the mountains; of the 600 he was thought to have written, a little over 300 survived.

Before there was Cold Mountain, the movie, there was Cold Mountain, the poet. The story has it that Han-shan was forced to leave the political turmoil of Tang China and find refuge in the mountains. I like that he wrote his poems on the rocks – what simplicity!  If you do a google search you can find many other poems and articles about him.

What I like, for instance in the first poem, is physical detail, how he describes his environment in a very direct way. The second poem is just as direct but he is now describing an environment seen through a rare level of consciousness – no thing separating the seer and the seen. Consider, if you will, the last image, “a boundless perfect sphere.” If you can distance yourself a bit from the personal, the view you see through the ‘eyes’ is a perfect sphere. Our consciousness is like a ‘periscope’ scanning its eye back and forth seeing(?), creating(?) reality as it turns. “It flows through the galaxies, a fountain of light.”