Back and forth my children prattle at their play.
The mountain fruits child in hand I pluck;
Nothing at all but one stand of books.20_
So we have a gentleman scholar, comfortably well off, with wife and children and an idyllic life undisturbed by the incursions of the world. It is all too perfect by half, and sure enough sometime before his thirtieth year his life was disrupted by an (undescribed) event so catastrophic that his wife and family turned him out:
_I took along books when I hoed the fields,
In my youth, when I lived with my older brother.
Now I've broken my ties with the world of red dust;
I spend my time wandering and read all I want.
Just when this sad event took place we do not know. However, by the time Han-shan was thirty he found himself on Cold Mountain, part of the T'ien-tai mountain range and near the town of T'ang-hsing.
_Thirty years ago I was born into the world.
A thousand, ten thousand miles I've roamed,
By rivers where the green grass lies thick,
Beyond the border where the red sands fly.
I brewed potions in a vain search for life everlasting.
And today I've come home to Cold Mountain
To pillow my head on the stream and wash my ears.22
He described his life in the mountains in a number of verses that often seem more Taoist than Buddhist. One of the most lyrical follows:
_Ever since the time when I hid in the Cold Mountain
I have kept alive by eating the mountain fruits.
From day to day what is there to trouble me?
The days and months flow ceaseless as a stream;
Our time is brief as the flash struck on a stone.
If Heaven and Earth shift, then let them shift;
I shall still be sitting happy among the rocks.23
He was a contradictory individual, one minute solemn in his search for Mind, and the next minute a buoyant bon vivant, writing verses that seem almost a T'ang version of our own carpe diem:
_Of course there are some people who are careful of money,
Because I dance too much, my garment of thin cloth is worn.
My bottle is empty, for I spurt out the wine when we sing.
The day when weeds are sprouting through your skull,
The life he describes for himself is one immersed in poetry. He is the compleat poet, whose only concern is writing (not publishing) verse.
Taking whatever comes, like a drifting boat.25