Looking for a refuge
Cold Mountain will keep you safe
a faint wind stirs dark pines
come closer, the sound gets better
below them sits a gray-haired man
chanting Taoist texts
ten years unable to return
he forgot the way he came

—The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain, Red Pine, (4)

For over a thousand years, this has been one of the most beloved poems in Chan-Zen Buddhist and Daoist communities everywhere. The hermit writes that for a very long time he has lived deep in the mountains, and he is now not sure if he wants to, or even can, return home. “Cold Mountain,” writes Gary Snyder, “in Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, is more than the name of an anonymous Tang Dynasty poet; it is also a place and a state of mind. As verse, the poems are ‘colloquial, rough, and fresh.’”

Cold Mountain has always been the people’s, rather than the critic’s, choice. “The Chinese literati over the centuries never seemed to embrace the rag-wearing beggar as one of their own,” writes Bill (Red Pine) Porter. Porter believes Cold Mountain is the people’s favorite just because he is simple, honest and rudely playful.

The 300 poems, collected off rocks, bamboo, wood and the walls of houses, demonstrate in the writer a vast range of human emotion: expansive consciousness (“my mind is like the autumn moon/clear and bright in a pool of jade”), occasional bitterness (“Wise ones you ignore me/I ignore you fools”), and a melancholy loneliness (“recently visiting family and friends/most have left for the Yellow Springs”).

He gives hints of a former, perhaps easier, life now lost: tending a garden with his wife, raising daughters, enjoying a high social position. This is what the people understand in him: Love, loss and loneliness. “Cold Mountain was a flesh-and-blood sage, not a bronze or porcelain image,” writes John Blofeld, in his introduction to Red Pine’s translation. But Cold Mountain also shows in stories of his madcap life with two sidekicks, Pickup and Big Stick, that all is not tears.

One day while he was dusting the statues in the shrine hall Pickup went to the altar and ate a piece of fruit left by a worshiper in front of the statue of Shakyamuni. Then before the statue of Kaundinya, the Buddha’s first disciple, he yelled, ”Hinayana monk!” The other monks who saw this reported it to the chief custodian, who moved Pickup into the kitchen to work…

–o–

Once when the monks were grilling eggplants, Cold Mountain (who occasionally worked in the temple kitchen) grabbed a string of them and swung them against a monk’s back. When the monk turned around, Cold Mountain held up the eggplants and said, “What’s this?” The monk cried out, “You lunatic!” Cold Mountain turned to another monk and said, “Tell this monk he’s wasting salt and soy sauce…”

–o–

Once I reached Cold Mountain
I stayed for thirty years
recently visiting family and friends
most had left for the Yellow Springs
slowly fading like a dying candle
or surging past like a flowing stream
today facing my solitary shadow
suddenly both eyes filled with tears (53)

–o–

I have a single cave
a cave with nothing inside
spacious and devoid of dust
full of light that always shines
a meal of plants feeds a frail body
a cloth robe masks a mirage
let your thousand sages appear
I have the primordial buddha (163)

COME JOIN US on Mondays for koan meditation, dharma talk and conversation. Register to participate. All are welcome.

Jon Joseph Roshi, Director of San Mateo Zen Community