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    The Clouds Should Know Me By Now: Buddhist Poet Monks of China
    The Clouds Should Know Me By Now: Buddhist Poet Monks of China
    The Clouds Should Know Me By Now: Buddhist Poet Monks of China
    Ebook375 pages2 hours

    The Clouds Should Know Me By Now: Buddhist Poet Monks of China

    By Andrew Schelling

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    About this ebook

    This unique collection presents the verse, much of it translated for the first time, of fourteen eminent Chinese Buddhist poet monks. Featuring the original Chinese as well as english translations and historical introductions by Burton Watson, J.P. Seaton, Paul Hansen, James Sanford, and the editors, this book provides an appreciation and understanding of this elegant and traditional expression of spirituality.

    "So take a walk with...these cranky, melancholy, lonely, mischievous poet-ancestors. Their songs are stout as a pilgrim's stave or a pair of good shoes, and were meant to be taken on the great journey." --Andrew Schelling, from his Introduction
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWisdom Publications
    Release dateJun 10, 2005
    ISBN9780861719532
    The Clouds Should Know Me By Now: Buddhist Poet Monks of China
    Author

    Andrew Schelling

    Andrew Schelling is a poet, essayist, and translator of the poetry of India. He has taught at Naropa University for twenty years and from 1993-96 served as chair of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics founded by Alan Ginsburg and Anne Waldman. His publications include Tea Shack Interior and The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

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    • 5/5
      A wonderful anthology of Chinese poetry by Buddhist monks. Far ranging in both chronology and style, with concise introductions and pertinent footnotes. A pleasure to read.

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    The Clouds Should Know Me By Now - Andrew Schelling

    PREFACE

    CHINA’S CONFUCIAN ELITE weren’t the only ones who wrote poems. Buddhist monks also practiced the art that combined insight with the emptiness of language and the harmonies of the human voice. When the Fifth Patriarch wanted to appoint a successor, he asked for a poem. And the poem he accepted as worthy of the robe and bowl of Bodhidharma was from an illiterate kitchen worker. For many Buddhists the ability to compose a poem was just as important as a knowledge of ritual or scripture. For some it was more so.The poem was the lion’s roar and the hermit’s sigh.

    But while China’s monks have often been as prolific as scholar-officials in the writing of verse, little of their work has been translated into Western languages—the poems of Han-shan (Cold Mountain) being the rare exception. The purpose of this book, then, is to introduce several more voices of this Buddhist poetic lineage. To this end, each of the translators has chosen the work of a poet monk (or a group of them in Paul Hansen’s case) largely unknown in the West.

    Before passing on the results of our joint efforts to the reader, the editors would like to thank those without whose collaboration this book would not have been published. First, we would like to acknowledge the impetus given to this project by Albert A. Dalia, former editorial director of Wisdom Publications.The editors have talked about many books that disappeared with the sunset. Albert kept this one in the sky, as did the publisher,Tim McNeill. Moreover, both encouraged our active participation in the book’s design, accommodating, for example, our desire to include the Chinese text. Nothing gives us greater pleasure than to put such a useful and finely made book in the hands of readers. For this opportunity, we are most grateful.

    We are also grateful to our fellow translators. It would have been hard to assemble a more accomplished group. Not only are all long-time students of Buddhist practice and Chinese literature, they are also able poets and have taken the time to search beyond the words for the spirit of the poems they have translated.

    Thanks too to J.P. Seaton for including a selection of these translations in the Summer 1998 issue of The Literary Review.

    We also thank Andrew Schelling for providing readers a match with which to burn these incense lines and Steve Johnson for contributing his cover photograph of Huangshan that evokes their setting. Finally, we thank Gary Snyder for the opening Han-shan translation and Finn Wilcox for the book’s closing poem recalling a journey to the sacred mountain of Chiuhuashan and his encounter with a lone Buddhist nun whose closest neighbors were tigers. Thus does the present form a bridge to the past.

    The Editors

    Port Townsend,Washington

    Spring,Year of the Tiger

    EDITORS’ NOTE: In romanizing Chinese names and words, the translators have used variations of the Wade-Giles system, though an occasional inconsistency may sometimes appear. Some geographical locations, for instance, have been rendered in Pinyin style to reflect the way they are spelled on contemporary maps of China. Also, both Zen and Ch’an are used to refer to the transmission of understanding begun in China by Bodhidharma. Ch’an is the Wade-Giles romanization of the modern Mandarin pronunciation, while Zen represents the standard romanization of the Japanese pronunciation, by means of which the world has learned of this tradition.

    INTRODUCTION

    Andrew Schelling

    GNARLED PINES, wind-blown clouds, jutting mountain pinnacles, exiled scholars, horses, trailing willows. Moonlight on meandering rivers, fishermen, white cranes and mandarin ducks, the eerie screech of a gibbon, tiny white plum blossoms on twisted branches, a battered wooden boat moored in the distance. For more than a thousand years the poets in this book wandered a landscape that is vast and at the same time intimate, mysterious, and deeply familiar: the same mountain peaks, the same villages, the same river gorges.What makes this landscape feel so much like home? The old poets of China had a way of quickly getting down to elemental things. Using a vocabulary of tangible, ordinary objects, they composed unsentimental poems that seem the precise size of a modest human life—the reflective sadness, the fleeting calm pleasures.

    This book is a collection of poetry written by Ch’an Buddhist poet monks (shih-seng), men of enviable literary talent who lived out their years during turbulent times in accord with old Buddha’s precepts. Their work spans 1100 years, from the middle T’ang dynasty to the beginning of the twentieth century. One or two have had a taste of renown in the West, on the basis of a couple of poems, but the rest have gone unheralded. Several were established Buddhist teachers of their own day, the influence of their subtle minds reaching deep, but they had little reputation as poets. Recognition of their literary efforts comes late. Only Chia Tao, the earliest of the poets translated here, did not devote his adult life to Buddhist monasticism. He slipped off the monk’s robe of patches in his early thirties to pursue a life of poetry, which he supported with marginal government employment and years of inadequate pay. One lingers over the detail: at the time of his death, his only worldly possessions were a five-string zither and an ailing donkey. Chia Tao stuck by his decision to make poetry a life’s path, but a hint of regret sometimes lifts from his verse.

    As Buddhists, these men traveled a great deal. When reading their poems you observe how deliberately they led, as Thoreau would have put it, hyper-ethereal lives—under the open sky. It is no accident, then, that a prevalent theme in the poetry is the farewell poem for a comrade, typically situated at daybreak after a night of wine or tea, vivid talk, or silent companionship. These poets spent their days living in and journeying between the numerous Buddhist sites of pre-modern China—village temples, remote points of pilgrimage, monasteries tucked deep within forests, the mountain yogin’s hut in a secluded mossy gulch. The politics of those eleven centuries were shifty and uncertain as well. Scholars, poets, civil servants, Buddhist abbots, and even monks of no reputation were driven from region to region, into exile through wind-blown mountain passes, or when the regime shifted, summoned up a thundering river gorge to serve in some official capacity.

    Mountains, forests, and rivers make up the well-known landscapes of Chinese painting. In the poetry a clipped, selective vocabulary, surprisingly ambiguous in the Chinese originals, merely suggests what’s out there. It is up to the reader to fill in the details—tumbling watercourses, looming peaks, twisted mountain strata, lowland pools, deer and wild gibbons, wind-stunted trees.Always alongside the poet, nonhuman creatures move easily in the world of his poem. Deer and wild cranes follow their own tracks, but their travels seem to meaningfully crisscross the poet’s.At times untamed creatures become, with only a touch of irony, profound teachers for the wandering-cloud poets. And by an interesting karmic twist, these various citizens of Chinese verse have in recent decades sensitized American readers to distinct features of our own continent: watersheds, seasonal cycles, animal habits, plant successions, and the like.

    Not surprisingly, three of the six translators of the present collection have made their homes in the Pacific Northwest, where the natural world—dark clutching forests, shy owls, concealing mists, abrupt icy pinnacles lit by a fugitive ray of sun—so resembles the setting of a Chinese poem.Across the centuries you can hear Chia Tao asking, Where is the master? Gathering herbs, off on the mountain, hidden by clouds.

    Beyond a presentation of poems about the natural world, this collection offers possible examples of what in Chinese has been called shih-shu, rock-and-bark poetry. In 1703 one of the poets translated here assumed this term for a nom de plume, and craftily hid his identity behind it. It is uncertain how widely the phrase circulated, but shih-shu were colloquially written, mildly irreverent poems, not simply skeptical of city-folk hustle or merely celebratory of reclusive hours spent in savage wilderness settings. Rather than being brushed on silk or paper, shih-shu were written on scraps of bamboo, scratched into bark, on rocks, or pecked into cliff faces. The notorious practitioner of this genre, and maybe the originator of shih-shu, is the poet Han-shan (possibly seventh century), who is known to American readers as Cold Mountain.Translations by R.H. Blyth, Gary Snyder, Red Pine, and Burton Watson have made Han-shan well known in recent decades.

    According to Lu-ch’iu Yin, a minor T’ang government official and Buddhist enthusiast, Han-shan’s gatha, or Buddhist verse, were left littered about the forbidding cliff from which he took his name. The Han-shan promontory lies along the T’ien-t’ai range in Chekiang, a strikingly wild country in southern China. Contemporary photographs show cornfields beneath the rock wall, but in Han-shan’s day it was heavily forested land, and local woodcutters or monks occasionally saw the poet disappear into a cave, which

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