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.

Shiwu

Shiwu (1272–1352) was a Chinese Chan poet and hermit who lived during the Yuan Dynasty. He got the nickname Stonehouse because of where he lived as a hermit in Yushan, in the north of China. He studied under master Yung-Wei and three years later was ordained and received the dharma name Ch'ing-hung. Kao-feng took him as his pupil and gave him the koan "All things return to one" for study. He had more adventures with another teacher, and then in 1312 at the age of forty he moved to Xiamu Mountain near Huzhou. He composed his "Mountain Poems" (Shan-shih), one-hundred and eighty-four verses mostly dealing with life in the mountains. He had stints as abbots at various temples, seems like 3 times. 

I'm reading The Mountain Poems of Stonehouse translated and commentary by Red Pine. I really like it. This book, like the one before, could bear rereading.

Red Pine went to the monastery where Shiwu studied for 3 years with Kao-feng. The abbot had never heard of Shiwu or Stonehouse or Ch'ing-hung, his nickname and ordination name.

His last poem before his death: 

corpses don't stink in the mountains

there's no need to bury them deep

I might not have the fire of samadhi

but enough wood to end this family line