2.  Introduction

I liked the Introduction, especially the latter half. It’s short, about six pages plus a map, but it ties Stonehouse the man to Stonehouse the place in way that could only be done by someone who had been there. Red Pine’s description of his trip to Stonehouse in the fall of 1991 will resonate with anyone who has managed to travel off the beaten paths in China during the eighties and seen first-hand the destruction Mao’s Red Guard inflicted. In the later half of the sixties and early seventies, under the banner of  attacking the ‘Three Olds’ (old thought, old religion, old culture), they destroyed anything of long-term cultural value they could find.

To me, the location of Stonehouse itself, when Red Pine finally found it, was oddly reassuring. When reading old hermit poets, I tend to imagine them living on very remote and extremely rugged mountains, but in fact many of them lived in rural environments that would be almost familiar to someone who grew up in the valleys of Western Montana or Northern Idaho. Of course you must mentally adjust your image of the place, in terms of remoteness, to a much less populated China, probably 60 to 100 million at the time Stonehouse built his house at Xiamushan in 1312 AD, 679 years before Red Pine’s visit. Compare that to China’s current population of 1.33 billion! The population density in the Montana county where I live is about 4 people per square mile. In Yuan China overall it would have been less than 1 person per square mile, but probably a lot more in the area near the mouth of the Yangtze where Stonehouse lived, so maybe close to 4 people per square mile. (Would need more study to nail down these numbers.)  But the topology doesn’t change as fast, and if you squint sometimes you can blur the marks of modern sprawl and visualize how it was back then.

(Or, you can move to Montana. I’ve got nine acres for sale. <g>)

In the Introduction, Red Pine quotes the death poem of Stonehouse:

corpses don’t stink in the mountains
there’s no need to bury them deep
I might not have the fire of samadhi
but enough wood to end this family line

This may be the only poem in the book that lacks the original Chinese text. I’ll add it here:

壬辰秋七月二十四日與眾訣偈曰。

青山不著臭尸駭。
死了何須掘土埋。
顧我也無三昧火。
光前絕後一推柴。

擲筆而逝。

Here’s another translation which is nowhere as good as Red Pine’s in terms of poetics or simple elegance but does, pedantically, add some words he chose to omit.

L1: In the quickgreen hills, I’m unconcerned… with locking up a stinking corpse.
L2: Once dead, what need… a burial in a hand-dug grave?
L3: Notice, I do not possess samadhi fire either,
L4: For a clean sweep, past and future, [I left] one stack of firewood.

He tossed the brush and died.

(Translated by Jon Babcock)

Notes on the translation:

L1, It’s tempting to see L1.1 and L1.2, ‘quickgreen hills’ as the subject of the first line and that’s how I first translated it, but thinking of a friend’s comment about the Li Bo poem in my tangpoems blog, made me realize that it is better not to impute human sentiments to non-human things as I first did there and later changed. The combination of L1.3 + L1.4 bùzháo 不著 , ‘not-attached’, or ‘do not become attached to’, is such a common Buddhist term referring to living beings, that a more satisfactory solution is to parse the opening two characters as a “topological“, affix the implied ‘in/at’, and then insert the real subject, the poet himself.  Also, if I’m reading the final character in L1 right, hài 駭 means ‘to lock a door on the way out’. (See note in Chinese at the end of this graf.) Since a grave or tomb presumably would be located in the hills near Stonehouse, if the line were from the perspective of the hills, it would be locking the corpse in, not out. I think this lends credence to seeing the monk as the subject, rather than the hills.
[駭 --> 絯 -->閡 --> 出門後曳門使閉也。]

L1.1, qīng 青 . No one English word covers this ever-so-common Chinese color term, usually translated ‘green’. Qīng 青 combines all the hues of living (quick) nature, often as seen from some distance,  the blacks, dark blues, forest greens, grays. So I like to use the neologism Professor Peter A. Boodberg invented, ‘quickgreen’, and be done with it.

L3 and L4: I take the final couplet as meaning, Don’t look to me for any miracles. I can’t burn clean all past and future karmic debt with laser-like samadhi (concentration). But I did leave a pile of wood that you can use to burn clean my stinking corpse.