Below is the introduction to my book of poems called No Mountain: Improvisations from Han-Shan’s New Home in Ueno Park, Tokyo. Inspired by Cold Mountain/ Hanshan. Now available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B086Y2YXMT/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tpbk_p1_i0
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The island of Shotenjima
He Spoke and I Wrote
Like most poetry lovers who are also readers of English, I first came across the Tang Dynasty poet Cold Mountain in the pages of Gary Snyder, but Snyder is a strong poet, so once I had conceived my own project I put him aside and have not looked at him since. I even stopped using the name Cold Mountain and in my mind he lived under his Chinese name, Hanshan. Because I live in Japan, I also called him Kanzan. He is especially loved by the Japanese, who know him under that name. Both of these names are readings of the characters 寒山.
Instead of Snyder, I might have first picked up Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, published in 1958 but probably written soon after 1955, the year the novel recounts. It was also the year that Snyder began his translation. The legendary Chinese poet was a sympathetic figure for the Beat Generation. In the introduction to his translation which appeared in the Evergreen Review, Snyder wrote of Hanshan, "He and his sidekick Shih-te (Jittoku in Japanese) became great favorites with Zen painters of later days — the scroll, the broom, the wild hair and laughter. They became Immortals and you sometimes run into them today in the skidrows, orchards, hobo jungles, and logging camps of America." Kerouac's The Dharma Bums closes with a vision of Hanshan, and at Snyder's suggestion, Kerouac dedicated the book to the poet.
It is the image of Hanshan as a Beat poet that has primarily appealed to me. Without ever intending to be one, and certainly without joining any of the Beat organizations which nowadays flourish on line, I have been a Beat poet all my life, both beaten down and blessed, though never beatified.
For twenty years now I have lived a ten-minute walk from Shinobazu Pond in Tokyo’s Ueno Park. This whole area was once the Kan’ei-ji 寛永寺 temple complex, and much of it still is, including the lotus pond with its magnificent plants flowering from the primal mud of existence and symbolizing Buddhist paradise. Perhaps six months ago I became intrigued with a tiny circular island on the north side of Benzaiten 弁財天, the central shrine. It is kept locked except on Snake Days, once every twelve days as figured by the old Chinese sexagenarian reckoning. Benzaiten is one of the Seven Gods of Good Fortune 七福神 in Japan, and her father was a white snake. Thus, the gate to this tiny island, called Shōtenjima / 聖天島, opens only on Snake Days.
Of the many stone memorials on the island, two especially captured me, a statue of En no Gyōja 役行者, legendary founded of the Yamabushi 山伏, and the broken figure of a Kōshin 庚申, a name that defies translation, since his cult was banned in the Meiji Era and has died out, but a kind of god or guardian of crossroads and gates. Surprisingly it warrants an article in Wiki, where it is described as a “a folk faith in Japan with Taoist origins, influenced by Shinto,
Buddhism and other local beliefs.”
A typical event related to the faith is called Kōshin-kō (庚申講), held on the Kōshin days that occur every 60 days in accordance with the Chinese sexagenary cycle. On this day some believers stay awake to prevent Sanshi (三尸), entities believed to live inside the body of believers, from leaving it during that night in order to report the good and specially the bad deeds of the believer to the god . . .
The point should be taken that this is a folk religion with no hierarchy or formal organization. The cult was banned but the stone images remain, and they exist across the whole of traditional Japan (i.e., excluding Okinawa and Hokkaido.) With the widening of roads during the Meiji Era, the images were moved to undisturbed areas, often to the grounds of a nearby shrine.
Koshin, unbroken figure showing the amanojaku
and the three monkeys under his feet
Walk through the torii 鳥居 seen seen at the start of this essay, and the Kōshin figure is on the far left, as is that of his companion En no Gyōja. A scholar of Japanese history and archaeology visited the island once, examined the statue, and told me that the stone was from the Jōmon Era. It has facial features now, and hands and feet, but originally it was a phallus, as everyone recognizes who sees it from behind. At some time the hands, feet, and face, were chiseled into the original phallus, probably by Meiji Era puritans who were embarrassed by vestiges of what they considered “paganism.” En faces outward, toward the water, as do almost all the stones on the island, reflecting the fact that it could only be approached by boat because no bridge had yet been built.
This was the era when “tea houses” lined the banks of the pond on the Ueno Mountain side, such houses serving for assignations between prostitutes and their clients. These were customers who would likely have been much titillated by En’s shape.
The shape of the Kōshin is also not without interest. He treads on a poor devil known as a jaki or Amanojaku 天邪鬼. Underneath this downtrodden figure are three monkeys--speaking-, seeing-, hearing-no-evil--everywhere part of the Kōshin iconography. Part of the monkeys’ popularity over the centuries is surely due to a delicious pun in Japanese. The word for monkey, saru, is also a negative verbal suffix, so that negated “see” (miru) becomes mizaru; negated “hear” (kiku) becomes kikazaru; and negated “speak” (iu) becomes iwazaru. The three zaru (monkeys) with their negative imperatives must have helped control vicious gossip, the bane of village life.
Into the island’s rich historical broth, I decided to immerse Han Shan, that is insert him imaginatively by giving him a spiritual home there. He seemed happy enough with the idea and over the next two months gave me a total of fifty short verses, which you now hold in your hands. Whatever these verses are, they are not translations. I think of them rather as homages, instigations, and provocations inspired by my reading of Han Shan.
As I say, I have avoided Snyder, and that means I’ve not touched any of the thirty poems he translated, but Han Shan is credited with some three hundred poems, so I still had plenty left for my instigations. My sources have been primarily two, a standard Japanese translation of the poems (an image of the book provides the front flyleaf), and Red Pine’s The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain. Both of these are cited in my “Sources” and both are academic translations, well done and excellent in their accuracy but not inspiringly poetic. I have profited most from Red Pine’s notes, which are lengthy and detailed and often sparkle with glints of gold panned from his historical researches.
These poems came to me in such an abundance over a two-month period that I felt less like a poet and more like an amanuensis. Somehow Han Shan began to speak to me, and I wrote down what I heard. In my years by Ueno Park, I’ve come to call myself Ueno Wayne, both for the word play and for fine nuance that is felt when a poet calls himself by the name of the place that inspires him. I’ve had to give a new name to Han Shan’s place of residence as well, and since what the Japanese are pleased to call Ueno Yama 上野山 is no mountain at all but rather a good sized hill, my Han Shan also uses the moniker No Mountain.
The pun for No Mountain is obviously Noh Mountain but I’ve avoided it and the reader too should rid his mind of it. If anything, we should think of Donovan. “First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.” Han Shan was not a zen monk. He was not any kind of Buddhist monk, for he liked to get drunk. He wasn’t a man of Zen either, but from our perspective today he may seem like one. He offers no precepts (though he does like to moralize) but represents a practice, and that practice, we can say, was zen-like. Red Pine is clear on this matter: “Certainly his poems reflect an understanding of both [Buddhism and Taoism], and he has been claimed by both orders. But he poked fun at Buddhists as much as at Taoists and presented himself as a man free of spiritual conceit, whatever its name” (14-15). Little is known about his life except legends. As he remarks in one of my poems, “It is not even certain I ever lived but my poems do.”
What follows are the poems spoken by No Mountain as recorded by his amanuensis Ueno Wayne. Usually No Mountain responds to the world of the pond, but sometimes he gets topical, talking about the Monju nuclear plant, Prime Minister Abe, the corona virus, and other corporate disasters like Tokyo’s Drunk Poets. He can’t help it. He reads newspapers and he listens to people talk. The final poem, “No Mountain Bids Farewell,” was his last poem. After that he visited me no more.
Wayne would like to hear from any readers who would care to write him: poundsway@gmail.com. Or on FaceBook: https://www.facebook.com/wpounds46
Tokyo, 1 April 2020
the day before his 74th birthday
the year of the Corona Virus
