Han Shan Was My Own Love

[Guest guest]

The Han Shan was translated by Gary Snyder.

 

 

"As for me, I delight in the everyday Way,

Among mist-wrapped vines and rocky caves.

Here in the wilderness I am completely free,

With my friends, the white clouds, idling forever.

There are roads, but they do not reach the world;

Since I am mindless, who can rouse my thoughts?

On a bed of stone I sit, alone in the night,

While the round moon climbs up Cold Mountain."

 

~Han Shan

 

 

Like you Han Shan, my friend of friends,

i delight in the morning air wrapping

around the darkness, wild with freedom,

awaiting the sun that rises every day

to our astonishment and joy that it does so.

Among the many friends who've been with me in time,

you are the only one who understands my rapture

in the moment when the geese all look in one direction,

faces uplifted, anticipation at high peak, breathless,

lifted into the Sky of Happiness as the first star of sunlight

torches into dawn and we feel our Hearts burn up

in communal Bliss to witness the birds fly away

in one winging movement,

in one soaring motion into OneHeart.

 

Han Shan, the road we travel is one road

and we have been traveling together looking

into the dawn sky and the night sky and the deepest

looking within, we have done together, Beloved Priest.

Do you remember the night you were alone

sitting on the cold granite stones of Cold Mountain

watching the moon rise, round and golden?

i tell you now Beloved One,

you were not alone that night

as the bright moonlight broke wildly, ecstatically free across

the Dark Blue Sky of OneHeart, the infinite

Heart-Sky of Thou and i reaching forever into forever.

 

i rose inside you as this Love that broke your Heart then

and breaks your Heart now to hear this.

Oh Han Shan my treasured teacher!

i have always Loved you and been the very shadows

falling across the roads we've traveled together

as friends and lovers sighing at the Beauty,

the incredible Beauty of God in the sun setting

so poignantly on our longing for one another,

century after century.

 

i will meet You atop Mount Zion now,

mindless, clear in Understanding

of the things we are given to understand.

Oh! He doth know whom You let know.

i know that You and i have always been Beloveds.

It is so. And so it goes, this show and tell

telling of the Mystery to all who yearn to know

of the tale of Han Shan and his Mystery Lover.

This world will never know how deeply a Heart can break.

 

 

LoveAlways,

 

Mazie