On Cold Mountain: A Buddhist Reading of the Hanshan Poems.

• Author: Mazanec, Thomas J.
• Position: Book review

On Cold Mountain: A Buddhist Reading of the Hanshan Poems. By PAUL ROUZER. Seattle: UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS, 2016. Pp. xiv + 266. $40.

Buddhist literature occupies a paradoxical position in modern understandings of classical Chinese literature. At a popular level in the West, there remains the quasi-orientalist idea of traditional China being infused with a mystical spirituality, sometimes equated with Chan/Zen, sometimes with Daoism, and sometimes with a proto-environmentalism. In Chinese scholarship, Buddhist didactic texts played a fundamental role in the construction of the history of vernacular literature--a search for precursors to modernism carried out by Hu Shih (1891-1962) and other early twentieth-century reformers. Both of these strands have elevated the idea of Chinese Buddhist literature. However, in Western sinology, Chinese Buddhist literature gets short shrift. An indigenous Chinese tendency to place Buddhism outside of orthodox culture (traceable to at least the eleventh century), combined with the separation of "sinology" from "Buddhology" in the modern academy, has meant few serious treatments of Buddhist literature. In general, such works are dismissed as irrelevant to mainstream literary history or relegated to the ghetto of sub-specialization. This has led to the paradoxical position Buddhist literature now finds itself in: it is simultaneously deemed crucial and irrelevant to the history of Chinese literature.

In this context, Paul Rouzer's new monograph is a welcome contribution to the field, a shaft of light illuminating the brilliance of one jewel in a vast, neglected mine. Rouzer's work is the first book-length study in any Western language on the corpus of poems attributed to Hanshan ("Cold Mountain"), a shadowy Buddhist recluse thought to have lived during the first half of the Tang dynasty (618-907). Well known in the West thanks to their influence on the Beat Generation, the Hanshan poems are striking for their wit, unconventionality, and informal diction. The relative ease of their language--vernacularisms, concrete images, minimal allusions--and the challenge they pose to a life of urbane comfort have made them a source of inspiration to many modern Buddhists and spiritualists. Rouzer provides a nuanced look at this unique corpus through a series of close readings, contextualized by a summary of modern scholarship and bookended by interpretations of Hanshan-inspired works of American literature. On Cold Mountain is entirely successful in its stated goal of offering an "appreciation" (p. x) of the Hanshan verses and their modern reception, as it employs a kind of New Criticism to expose the hidden dynamics of this multi-layered corpus. Its contribution to the broader understanding of Buddhism and...