Writers › Writer / Poet
Hanshan
Tang recluse poet of the Tiantai mountains, known only through legend and some three hundred plain-spoken poems, whose verse later appealed to American Beat writers
In a study at night, a desk holds a brush pot, a porcelain vase with a plum branch, a lit red lantern, a folded fan and an unrolled blank scroll, with no one seated there, while through a round window the moon rises over a lake with a sailboat.
Also known as Han Shanzi · Han Shanwen
Hanshan, or Master Hanshan, has no biography in the official histories, and his real name, home and dates are all unknown. The preface to his poems, attributed to a Tang prefect of Taizhou named Luqiu Yin, says he lived at Cold Cliff seventy li west of Shifeng and often visited the Guoqing Monastery, where he befriended the kitchen worker Shide, and that the monk Fenggan called the pair incarnations of Manjusri and Samantabhadra. The same preface says some three hundred poems were collected from trees, rocks and walls where he had written them. Scholars such as Yu Jiaxi regard the preface as a later forgery, while Du Guangting placed him on Tiantai in the Dali era, so his period remains disputed. His poems use colloquial language to describe mountain life or preach Chan Buddhism, and the Complete Tang Poems (Quan Tang shi) gives them one chapter. Gary Snyder's English versions in the 1950s made him a hero of the Beat writers.
Life and times
Dates Dates unknown; Tang dynasty