Hanshan (poet) - Date

Date

In Lu Ch'iu-Yin's preface to Hanshan's poems, he claims to have personally met both Hanshan and Shide at the kitchen of the temple in Kuo-ch'ing, but they responded to his salutations with laughter then fled. Afterwards, he attempted to give them clothing and provide them housing, but Lu Ch'iu-Yin writes that the pair fled into a cave which closed itself and Shide's tracks disappeared. This led Lu Ch'iu-Yin, governor of T'ai Prefecture, to collect Hanshan's writings, "the poems written on bamboo, wood, stones, and cliffs — and also to collect those written on the walls of peoples' houses." However, Burton Watson is of the opinion that Lu-chiu Yin did not exist in reality and that his preface to Han-shan's poems is nothing more than myth. On page 8 in the introduction to his book, he says that Lu-chiu Yin's preface to the poems "...contrary to Chinese custom, is undated. Lu-chiu Yin represents himself as a high official and prefixes his name with a very imposing title. But there is only one mention of anyone by this name to be found in other works of the period, and it refers almost certainly to another person. This fact alone is peculiar enough, if Lu-chiu Yin was in fact as high up in the bureaucracy as his title indicates. Furthermore, the style of the preface, awkward and wordy, hardly suggests the writing of an eminent official. All other sources that tell us anything about Han-shan and Shih-te appear to be later than the preface and based upon it. For all we know, therefore, the whole picture of the two recluses built up in the preface may be nothing more than literary fiction. The poems, however, remain--over three hundred of them....If the reader wishes to know the biography of Han-shan, he must deduce it from the poems themselves."

If we follow Watson and discount the preface of Lu Chiu-Yin, accepting only the words of the poet himself, we see that Han-shan says only that he wrote his poems on the rocks. Nowhere in the poetry does he say that he wrote them on trees or bamboo or wood or the walls of people’s houses.

The collection of poems attributed to Hanshan may span the entire Tang Dynasty as Edwin G. Pulleyblank asserts in his study Linguistic Evidence for the Date of Hanshan. He identifies him as the monk Chiyan (智岩, 577 – 654), but that has been disputed by Paul Demiéville among others. The Encyclopedia of China gives his date as around 712 and after 793. Jia Jinhua came to the conclusion, after a study of Chan phrases in some 50 of the poems, that this particular group of poems may be attributable to the Chan monk Caoshan Benji (840-901). However, the dates for both Chiyan and Caoshan Benji contradict Han-shan, who says that he was much older than either. In several of the poems he says that he is 70...100...and more than 100 years old.