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.
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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.
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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).
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