Character Study

Ordinary people and sages are all mixed together.
I advise you to stop being led by appearances.
The dharma is wondrous and difficult to understand,
but it is revered by heavenly dragons.

Cold Mountain was a Tang Dynasty hermit associated with a collection of poems in the Taoist and Chan traditions. No one knows who he actually was, when he lived and died, or even if he ever really existed. Little is known of his work, since he was a recluse living in a remote region and his poems were written on rocks and stones in the mountains he called home.  

In Chinese and Japanese paintings, he is often depicted together with Shide or with Fenggan, another monk with legendary attributes.  Based on textual studies of the poems, the time span over which they were written (200 years), and linguistic patterns and historical references, Cold Mountain may have actually been as many as three people who wrote under the same name.

According to legend, Lu Jiuyin, the governor of Tai Prefecture, first collected the poems "written on bamboo, wood, stones, and cliffs" and also on the walls of peoples' houses.  He claimed to have actually met both Cold Mountain and Shide at the kitchen of Guoqing Temple, but they responded to his greetings with laughter and then ran away. Afterwards, he attempted to give them clothing and provide them with housing, but writes that the pair fled into a cave which closed itself and Shide's tracks disappeared. 

The poetry of Cold Mountain has influenced the poets of many generations and cultures. He was a sympathetic and important figure for Beat Generation writers Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac. Snyder wrote, "He and his sidekick Shih-te (Shide) 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." That bohemian spirit is captured in the poem:

Children, I implore you - get out of the burning house now.
Three carts await outside to save you from a homeless life.
Relax in the village square before the sky, everything's empty.
No direction is better or worse, East just as good as West.
Those who know the meaning of this are free to go where they want.