Clerics › Religious Figure
Shide
Foundling raised at Guoqing Temple on Mount Tiantai and named for being picked up, friend of the poet Hanshan, whose own plain-spoken verses circulate appended to Hanshan's collection
In a temple courtyard at dusk, a great bronze bell hangs at the right and incense smoke rises from a bronze urn; monks in orange robes and plainly dressed visitors walk toward a lamplit hall, lotus flowers bloom in a stone basin, and a gold prayer wheel stands at the left.
Also known as Shi De
Nothing certain is known of Shide's family, home or dates; his story comes from a preface to Hanshan's poems attributed to the official Luqiu Yin and from the Song-dynasty Biographies of Monks (Song gaoseng zhuan). According to these, the monk Fenggan of Guoqing Temple on Mount Tiantai found a crying child beside the road to Chicheng and brought him back to raise, naming him Shide, picked up. Grown, he worked in the temple dining hall and saved the monks' leftovers in a bamboo tube for Hanshan, who came to visit. The preface has Fenggan declare Hanshan an incarnation of Manjusri and Shide of Samantabhadra, though the monks took the pair for madmen. Shide's plain, admonitory poems circulate appended to Hanshan's collection and fill one chapter of the Complete Tang Poems. Popular religion later paired the two as the Hehe twins of harmony, and Chan painters show Shide holding a broom.
Life and times
Dates Dates unknown; Tang dynasty