02

Cold Mountain Poem #205



The cloud road’s choked with deep mist. 

No one gets here that way, 

but these Heaven-Terrace Mountains have always been my home:



a place to vanish among five-thousand-foot cliffs and pinnacles,

ten thousand creeks and gorges all boulder towers and terraces.



I follow streams in birch-bark cap, wooden sandals, tattered robes,

and clutching a goose-foot walking-stick, circle back around peaks.



Once you realize this floating life is the perfect mirage of change,

it’s breathtaking – this wild joy at wandering boundless and free.



— Han Shan, 8th century China, translated by the poet David Hinton in Mountain Home, copyright 2005, New Directions

‍Welcome to The Botanarchy Hotline Episode 2: This Wild Joy At Wandering Boundless And Free. It’s the second week of Spring, I’m a dazed maenad worshipping redbud trees all a’blooming in the Hollywood Hills, and today we look to the taoist masters and the French Situationists for some new dance moves. 

No one knows where the Chinese recluse poet Han Shan came from. A true topophile if there ever was one, Han Shan’s name translates to Cold Mountain, and it speaks to the mountain hermitage he eventually made his home: a cave on the crags of Cold Cliff. But here’s the ruse - we’re not really sure who he was, when he lived and died, or whether he actually existed at all. Color me jealous! Legend has it that he wore a hat make of birch and bark clogs on his feet, and he carved his verses onto rocks, stones, cliffs and trees in China’s Tientai Mountains, which he wandered boundless and free during the Tang Dynasty.

We do know that he was possibly a Buddhist monk, definitely a poet, and his verses feel like texts from your most mysterious, mischievous, and mercurial best friend. They’re funny, unpretentious, sarcastic, thoughtful, wryly observant, and instructive in a chill, non dogmatic, wilderness eccentric kinda way. He is revered throughout China, Japan, and Korea where his sits on altars next to immortals and boddhisatvas alike. Han Shan just wants you to find some soft grass to lie down on, blue sky for covers, and sanctuary in the song of the wind blowing through the pines. 

(Cont’d below)



Book Rec: Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry Of Ancient China, David Hinton