Hanshan, Fenggan and Shide

Another Red Pine documentary, this one about Cold Mountain, also known as Hanshan. With Burton Watson, Gary Snyder, who's poetic name is Listen To The Wind. Watson says the Japanese took up Hanshan more than the Chinese did. This 29 minute short is fun.

Cold Mountain had 2 friends, sidekicks, his entourage, one called Big Stick (Fenggan) or and the other called Pickup (Shide) or Foundling. The friends were both monks, but Cold Mountain wasn't. He was an eccentric poet. Pickup has a story about how he got his name: "Fenggan was travelling between Guoqing Temple and the village of Tiantai, when at the redstone rock ridge called 'Red Wall' (赤城) he heard some crying. He investigated, and found a ten-year-old boy who had been abandoned by his parents; and picked him up and took him back to the temple, where the monks subsequently raised him." The boy was Pickup, and he was found by Big Stick, who was tall.

Hanshan and Shide (Foundling)

They lived in the Tang dynasty, which is 7th and 8th century. They don't know where he came from, but there's a Hanshan temple in China today. They were also around Guoqing Temple in legend. In the film they eat a meal at the cave where Hanshan lived, called Cold Cliff, a days travel from Guoqing Temple (Source). Tiantai mountain is there.

Guoqing Temple is spelled Kuoching by Red Pine, and it's supposedly where the Tientai sect of Buddhism was founded by Chih-yi in the 6th century, spelled Zhiyi on Wikipedia or maybe that's a different person because they said he was the 4th patriarch, and a great systematizer, founded an indigenous version of Buddhism. He wrote a commentary on the Lotus Sutra. Another book to read. "According to David W. Chappell, Zhiyi "has been ranked with Thomas Aquinas and al-Ghazali as one of the great systematizers of religious thought and practice in world history.""

I really like these Chinese hermit poets. I'm reading the Red Pine 2000 translation of his poems that includes Big Stick and Foundling's poems too.