About
Community
Bad Ideas
Drugs
Ego
Artistic Endeavors
But Can You Dance to It?
Cult of the Dead Cow
Literary Genius
Making Money
No Laughing Matter
On-Line 'Zines
Science Fiction
Self-Improvement
Erotica
Fringe
Society
Technology
register | bbs | search | rss | faq | about
meet up | add to del.icio.us | digg it

Pick Up

by Maru Dubshinki

Shih-Tse

1 Biography

Shih-Tse ('Pick-Up') was a minor T'ang dynasty Chinese Buddhist poet, who lived sometime during the 9th century C. E. in Kuoching Temple, in the Tientai mountain range on the East Chinese Sea coast; roughly contemporary with Cold Mountain and Big Stick, but younger than either. He was close friends with both and together they formed the "Tientai Trio". Shih-Tse lived as a lay monk, and worked most of his life in the kitchen of Kuoching Temple. [edit]

1.1 Name

An apocryphal story relates how Shih-Tse ('Pick-Up') received his name: Once, Big Stick was travelling between Kuoching Temple and the village of Tientai, when at the redstone rock ridge called 'Red Wall' he heard some crying. He investigated, and found a ten-year old boy who had been abandoned by his parents; and picked him up and took him back to the temple, where the monks would raise him. [edit]

2 Poetry

Shih-Tse wrote an unknown number of poems, but 49 have survived. They are short; and rarely exceed 10 lines. They typically on a Buddhist subject, and executed in a style reminiscent of Cold Mountain's. Indeed, Shih-Tse's Poems 44 and 45 have often been considered to really have been written by Cold Mountain; not impossible as the two were especially good friends- see Poem 33:

We slip into Tientai caves,
We visit people unseen-
Eat magic mushrooms under the pines.
We talk about the past and present
And sigh at the world gone mad.
Everyone going to Hell
And going for a long time.

The case for Poems 44 and 45 being misattributed is further strengthened by the fact that Poem 45 is otherwise the only poem in Shih-Tse's canon which contains Taoist motifs- a thing common in Cold Mountain's poetry however. See Poem 45:

Up high the trail turns steep,
The towering pass stands sheer;
Stone Bridge is slick with moss.
Clouds keep flying past,
A cascade hangs like silk,
The Moon shines in the pool below.
I'm climbing Lotus Peak again,
To wait for that lone crane once more.

Common subjects include back-sliding monks and the foolishness of worldly people in both short-sightedness and their sins; like in Poems 43, 38 and 30, respectively:

By and large the monks I meet
Love their wine and meat.
Instead of climbing straight to Heaven
They slip back down to Hell.
They chant a sutra or two
To fool the laymen in town,
Unaware the laymen in town
Are more perceptive than them.

People crowd in the dust,
Enjoying the pleasures of the dust.
I see them in the dust
And pity fills my heart.
Why do I pity their lot?
I think of their pain in the dust.

Take these mortal incarnations
These comical-looking forms
With faces like the silver moon
And hearts as black as pitch.
Cooking pigs and butchering sheep,
Bragging about the flavor,
Dying and going to Frozen-Tongue Hell
Before they stop telling lies.

Other subjects included him and his friends. See Poems 27 and 39, respectively:

Partial to pine cliffs and lonely trails,
An old man laughs at himself when he falters.
Even now after all these years,
Trusting the current 'like an unmoored boat'.

A young man studied letters and arms
And rode off to the Capital,
Where he learned the Hsiung-nu had been vanquished;
And all he could do was wait.
So to kingfisher cliffs he retired,
And sits in the grass by a stream
While valiant men chase red cords
And monkeys ride clay oxen.

(The 'Hsiung-nu' was probably the 'Huns'.)

And sometimes he simply wrote about the Tientai mountain range where he lived. See his final poem, Poem 49:

Woods and and springs make me smile;
No kitchen smoke for miles.
Clouds rise up from rocky ridges,
Cascades tumble down.
A gibbon's cry marks the way,
A tiger's roar marks the way.
Pine wind sighs so softly,
Birds discuss sing-song.
I walk the winding streams,
And climb the peaks alone.
Sometimes I sit on a boulder,
Or lie and gaze at trailing vines.
But when I see a distant village,
All I hear is noise.

3 References

The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain, Red Pine, ISBN 1-55659-140-3. Copper Canyon Press 2000

All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (see Copyrights for details).

 
To the best of our knowledge, the text on this page may be freely reproduced and distributed.
If you have any questions about this, please check out our Copyright Policy.

 

totse.com certificate signatures
 
 
About | Advertise | Bad Ideas | Community | Contact Us | Copyright Policy | Drugs | Ego | Erotica
FAQ | Fringe | Link to totse.com | Search | Society | Submissions | Technology
Hot Topics
Just got back from a 311 concert...
Goose's new guitar
Unique Bands
Vinyls, what happened, man?
Is there something Pink Floyd related coming out?
Modal Progressions.
I have a guitar. Help me, guitarists!
The band with the most albums...
 
Sponsored Links
 
Ads presented by the
AdBrite Ad Network

 

 

TSHIRT HELL T-SHIRTS