Two Arrows Zen

09/12/2026

Tomorrow, we’re bringing back Sunday Wake Up at Two Arrows Zen, a program that some of you may remember in an earlier form from before the pandemic. It has been a while, and I’m very happy that we’re returning not only to the practice, but to our old home at the Artspace Zendo.

There is something profound about making space for the Dharma on a Sunday morning.

People come to practice through many different doors, and our lives rarely arrange themselves around a perfect schedule. Work, family, children, travel, health, and all the ordinary demands of being human shape when and how we can practice. Sunday Wake Up gives us another opportunity to sit together, hear the Dharma, ask questions, and experience the simple but powerful fact of practicing in community.

Whether you are completely new to meditation, returning after some time away, or have practiced for many years, you are welcome.

We’re asking for a modest contribution to help us cover the rent and sustain the program. Mostly, I hope you’ll come practice with us.

It feels good to bring this one back.

And it feels especially good to bring it home.

Sunday Wake Up begins tomorrow and continues every Sunday.

For details about Sunday Wake Up and all Two Arrows Zen programs, visit:

twoarrowszen.org

09/12/2026

September 11, 2026, marks 133 years since the opening of the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago.

Convened as part of the World’s Columbian Exposition, the Parliament opened on September 11, 1893, and continued for seventeen days. Roughly four hundred participants representing religious traditions from around the world took part. It is now widely regarded as an important early landmark in the modern interfaith movement.

For the history of Buddhism in the United States, the gathering was especially significant.

Buddhism was not new to America in 1893. Chinese immigrants had already established temples and religious communities in the American West, and Buddhist texts and ideas had circulated among American intellectuals during the nineteenth century. What changed in Chicago was the scale and visibility of the encounter. Asian Buddhist teachers were given a major public platform from which to explain Buddhist teachings directly to American audiences.

Among the Buddhist delegates was Anagārika Dharmapāla of Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. A central figure in the Buddhist revival of the late nineteenth century and a founder of the Maha Bodhi Society, Dharmapāla became one of the Parliament’s best-known Buddhist representatives. His presentations introduced large American audiences to Buddhist teachings while also challenging Western assumptions about Asian religious traditions.

Japan sent several Buddhist representatives. Among them was the Rinzai Zen master Shaku Sōen, associated with Engaku-ji in Kamakura.

Sōen prepared a paper titled “The Law of Cause and Effect, as Taught by Buddha.” Because he did not deliver the address in English himself, the paper was read before the Parliament by its chairman, John Henry Barrows.

Behind that presentation was a young Zen student in Japan named Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki.

Before Sōen left for Chicago, Suzuki helped translate his teacher’s paper into English. Suzuki did not attend the Parliament, but this indirect participation became part of a chain of events that would prove enormously important to the development of Zen in the West.

At the Parliament, Sōen became acquainted with the German-American philosopher and publisher Paul Carus of the Open Court Publishing Company in Illinois. Carus was deeply interested in Buddhism and comparative religion. A few years later, Suzuki traveled to Illinois and began working with him, translating and editing Buddhist material.

That young translator would eventually become known throughout the English-speaking world as D. T. Suzuki.

During the twentieth century, Suzuki’s books, essays, lectures and translations became enormously influential in shaping Western understandings of Zen. His work was read by scholars, psychologists, artists, writers and religious practitioners, and eventually became part of the intellectual environment in which Zen communities began developing more broadly in Europe and North America.

The connection is striking: Shaku Sōen wrote a Buddhist address in Japan. His young student D. T. Suzuki helped translate it into English. The address traveled to Chicago. Sōen met Paul Carus there. Suzuki later came to Illinois to work with Carus. From those relationships emerged one of the most influential interpreters of Zen Buddhism in the modern West.

The 1893 Parliament should not be described as the moment Buddhism “arrived” in America. That history had already begun, particularly within Asian immigrant communities. Nor was the Parliament a completely equal meeting of religions; many of its organizers approached religious pluralism through nineteenth-century Christian assumptions.

Its importance lies elsewhere.

For seventeen days in Chicago, Buddhist representatives from Asia stood before large American audiences and spoke about Buddhism in their own voices. Americans encountered Buddhist teachers not simply through missionary descriptions or Western scholarship, but through living representatives of Buddhist traditions themselves.

For American Buddhism—and particularly for the later development of Zen in the West—the World’s Parliament of Religions remains an important chapter in a much larger story.

READING & SOURCES

Parliament of the World’s Religions — 1893 Chicago
https://parliamentofreligions.org/parliament/1893-chicago/

Parliament of the World’s Religions — History
https://parliamentofreligions.org/history/

Harvard University Pluralism Project — At the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions
https://pluralism.org/at-the-1893-world%E2%80%99s-parliament-of-religions

The Eastern Buddhist / Otani University — Shaku Sōen, “The Law of Cause and Effect, as Taught by Buddha”
https://otani.repo.nii.ac.jp/records/8660

Tricycle — “Soyen Shaku: One Hundred Years Ago”
https://tricycle.org/magazine/soyen-shaku-one-hundred-years-ago/

Parliament of the World’s Religions — Buddhist participation and the 1893 Parliament
https://parliamentofreligions.org/articles/shambhala-sun-interview-with-the-council/

09/10/2026

September 10 marks the birth of Mary Oliver, born in Maple Heights, Ohio, in 1935. One of the most widely read American poets of the modern era, Oliver received the Pulitzer Prize for American Primitive and the National Book Award for New and Selected Poems. She died in 2019 at the age of eighty-three.

Oliver’s poetry does not emerge from a formally Buddhist tradition. Its literary roots are more readily found in American nature writing and transcendentalism, particularly the influence of Walt Whitman. But again and again, her work enters territory deeply familiar to Buddhist practice: attention, impermanence, mortality, intimacy with the natural world, and the effort to encounter things before turning them into abstractions.

Much of Oliver’s life was organized around walking and looking. During the decades she lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts, the woods, shoreline, ponds, birds, animals, weather, and changing seasons of Cape Cod became part of the vocabulary of her poems. She often begins with something remarkably ordinary—a grasshopper, a wild goose, a dog, a tree, a pond—and looks closely enough that the distinction between observer and observed seems, for a moment, less certain.

There is something recognizably contemplative in that way of seeing. Zen continually returns us to what is immediately present: this body, this sound, this breath, this particular thing before us. Oliver rarely tells the reader what to believe. She pays attention.

And beneath that attention is impermanence. Things bloom and disappear. Animals die. People we love die. Bodies age. Seasons turn. Oliver does not remove death from beauty; she repeatedly sees the two together. The fleeting nature of the world is part of what makes the world worthy of attention.

From a Zen perspective, it is difficult not to feel Buddha nature moving through much of her work—not because Oliver was attempting to write Buddhist poetry, but because she trusted the ordinary world so completely. Birds, ponds, trees, darkness, grief, joy, the aging body: nothing needs to become something else before it can be fully encountered.

Perhaps that is one reason her poetry has found such a natural home among meditators and contemplative communities.

In The Summer Day, Oliver reduces much of this to a remarkably simple declaration:

“I do know how to pay attention.”

That may be one of the clearest places where her poetry and contemplative practice meet.

Mary Oliver was born September 10, 1935. Her work continues to remind us that careful attention to an ordinary world can reveal just how extraordinary it already is.

READING & VIEWING

Academy of American Poets — Mary Oliver
https://poets.org/poet/mary-oliver

Academy of American Poets — “The Summer Day”
https://poets.org/poem/summer-day

PBS American Masters — Mary Oliver
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/masters/mary-oliver/

PBS American Masters — Mary Oliver Biography and Career Timeline
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/mary-oliver-biography-and-career-timeline/38189/

PBS American Masters — Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/masters/mary-oliver/

09/08/2026

September 6 marked the thirty-sixth anniversary of the death of Issan Dorsey (1933–1990), a Sōtō Zen priest and teacher whose life occupies an important place in the history of American Zen, LGBTQ Buddhist practice, and the Buddhist response to the AIDS epidemic. Dorsey died in San Francisco on September 6, 1990, from complications associated with AIDS. Contemporary records from his Zen community confirm the date.

Born Tommy Dorsey Jr. in Santa Barbara, California, Dorsey served in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War but was discharged after his relationship with another male sailor became known. He subsequently settled in San Francisco and worked for a period as a drag performer. His early adult life also included serious problems with alcohol and drugs. By the late 1960s, however, Dorsey had begun practicing Zen with Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, founder of the San Francisco Zen Center.

Dorsey’s development within the San Francisco Zen Center was substantial. Suzuki gave him lay ordination in 1970. Dorsey later served as tenzō, or head cook, at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, Green Gulch Farm, and the City Center. In 1975 he received priest ordination from Suzuki’s successor, Zentatsu Richard Baker Roshi, and in 1977 served as shusō, or head monk, at Tassajara. By 1980 he had become director of the San Francisco Zen Center’s City Center operations.

At approximately the same time, gay Buddhist practitioners in San Francisco were beginning to organize more explicitly around their own experience. The Gay Buddhist Club, established in 1980, initially met at the San Francisco Zen Center before moving to a house at 57 Hartford Street in the Castro. A zendo was formally inaugurated there on December 8, 1981, and the community gradually developed into what became the Hartford Street Zen Center. Dorsey became one of its principal teachers and was installed as its abbot in 1989. The temple became known as Issan-ji, or “One Mountain Temple,” after Dorsey’s Dharma name, Issan.

The historical importance of Hartford Street became particularly visible during the AIDS epidemic.

By the middle of the 1980s, AIDS was devastating San Francisco’s gay community. In 1987, when one of Dorsey’s students became seriously ill and had nowhere adequate to live, Dorsey brought him into the Zen center. Other patients followed. What began as care for individuals inside the temple developed into Maitri Hospice, described by Hartford Street Zen Center as the first Buddhist hospice of its kind in the United States.

The development is significant in the history of American Buddhism because Maitri did not begin as an abstract program in Buddhist social ethics. It emerged directly from the circumstances confronting a particular sangha. Meditation, temple life, nursing, cooking, companionship, and care for people approaching death became parts of the same community practice.

Dorsey himself was eventually diagnosed with HIV and developed AIDS-related lymphoma. He continued teaching and participating in the hospice community as his health declined. He died at Maitri on September 6, 1990, surrounded by the community that had grown around Hartford Street. He was fifty-seven years old.

Maitri survived him. It eventually moved from Hartford Street to a purpose-built facility in San Francisco and continues today, its work having expanded beyond its original role as an AIDS hospice to include specialized nursing, respite care, and other forms of support. Hartford Street Zen Center also continues as a Sōtō Zen temple in San Francisco’s Castro district, maintaining its historic connection to LGBTQ practitioners and the Suzuki lineage.

Dorsey’s biography complicates conventional images of how a twentieth-century Zen teacher was supposed to look or where such a teacher was supposed to come from. His path ran through q***r San Francisco, nightclub performance, addiction and recovery, the formative decades of the San Francisco Zen Center, and finally the AIDS wards of the 1980s.

In the history of American Zen, Issan Dorsey is therefore connected not only with the transmission of Sōtō practice from Shunryu Suzuki’s generation to American students, but with an early attempt to make Buddhist community directly responsive to people whom the surrounding culture was frequently unwilling or unable to care for.

Further reading

David Schneider, Street Zen: The Life and Work of Issan Dorsey
https://www.shambhala.com/street-zen-9781611802561.html

Hartford Street Zen Center, “History of HSZC”
https://hszc.org/about/history-of-hszc/

Maitri, “Our Story”
https://www.maitrisf.org/our-story

David Schneider, “Accidents & Calculations,” Tricycle
https://tricycle.org/magazine/issan-dorsey/

LGBTQ Religious Archives Network, “Issan Dorsey”
https://lgbtqreligiousarchives.org/profiles/issan-dorsey

09/06/2026

Utah Senator Luz Escamilla joined members of the Wat Lao Salt Lake Buddharam Temple of Utah to honor Buddhist monks who participated in the nationally recognized Walk for Peace.

Story link in comments

09/06/2026

09/06/2026

September 5, 2026, marks the 69th anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, a book that helped awaken a generation to the possibilities of travel, spiritual seeking, alternative ways of living, and experience outside the conventions of postwar American life. Published by Viking Press in 1957, the novel became Kerouac’s breakthrough and established him as one of the central figures of the Beat generation. Its improvisational style, later associated with Kerouac’s idea of “spontaneous prose,” drew on jazz, speech, memory, and the momentum of lived experience.

The significance of On the Road extends beyond the novel itself. During the six years between the completion of its famous scroll manuscript in 1951 and its publication in 1957, Kerouac’s intellectual and spiritual interests changed considerably. By the early 1950s, he had begun reading Buddhist texts seriously, and Buddhist concepts increasingly entered his notebooks, poetry, fiction, and reflections on writing. The same literary method that had first been used to record travel, friendship, jazz, and American restlessness gradually became a vehicle for exploring suffering, impermanence, emptiness, solitude, and awakening.

On the Road is not itself a Buddhist novel. Its central material came largely from Kerouac’s travels with Neal Cassady during the late 1940s, before Buddhism became a sustained concern in his work. By approximately 1953, however, Kerouac was reading widely in Buddhist literature and recording quotations, commentaries, poems, prayers, and personal reflections. Much of this material was later published as Some of the Dharma, an extensive record of the period in which Buddhist thought became one of the strongest influences on his writing.

Kerouac’s relationship to Buddhism was never simple. He remained deeply shaped by the Catholicism of his upbringing, and Christian imagery continued to appear throughout his work. Rather than replacing one religious framework with another, his writing often placed Christian and Buddhist language alongside one another. His Buddhism was highly personal, developed primarily through reading, friendships, and self-directed study rather than through prolonged formal training in a Zen institution.

In 1955, Kerouac completed Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha, a retelling of the life of Siddhartha Gautama based on Buddhist sources. Although the book was not published during his lifetime, it demonstrates the seriousness of his Buddhist study during this period. The following year he wrote The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, a sequence of sixty-six short meditations drawing on Buddhist ideas of emptiness and nonduality while retaining elements of Kerouac’s Christian vocabulary.

His Buddhist interests entered his fiction most visibly in The Dharma Bums, published in 1958, only a year after On the Road. The novel follows Ray Smith, Kerouac’s fictional counterpart, and Japhy Ryder, a character based on poet Gary Snyder. Snyder’s engagement with Zen would eventually include years of study and practice in Japan. Through conversations about Buddhism, mountain climbing, meditation, poetry, and solitude, The Dharma Bums introduced a broad American readership to Buddhist terminology and to the particular form of spiritual experimentation developing within the Beat circle.

Kerouac’s poetry developed along similar lines. Mexico City Blues combined the rhythms of jazz improvisation with Buddhist references and meditations on consciousness, mortality, and emptiness. At the same time, he became increasingly interested in haiku and studied Japanese poets including Bashō, Buson, Issa, and Shiki.

Kerouac did not believe English-language haiku needed to reproduce mechanically the traditional Japanese seventeen-syllable structure. His own haiku favored immediacy, ordinary observation, and economy of language. Hundreds of these poems were later gathered in Book of Haikus. They reveal a side of Kerouac that differs from the popular image of the endlessly moving traveler: a writer increasingly interested in brevity, stillness, and direct perception.

That development also complicates the usual understanding of Kerouac’s spontaneous prose. His literary method was not simply about speed or lack of revision. He sought a form capable of preserving the movement of perception before experience became overly organized or explained. The long improvisational sentences of his prose and the compressed observations of his haiku emerged from different traditions, but both reflected an effort to remain close to immediate experience.

Kerouac died in 1969, but the relationship between Beat literature and Buddhist practice continued through the writers and institutions associated with his generation. In 1974, Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman established the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, an institution founded by Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Diane di Prima was also closely involved in the school’s early development.

Kerouac himself never taught at Naropa, but the decision to name the school after him placed his literary legacy within an institution where experimental writing and contemplative practice were brought into sustained conversation. Over the following decades, writers and artists associated with Naropa included Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Diane di Prima, John Cage, Robert Creeley, and many others.

The publication of On the Road on September 5, 1957, therefore marks both a literary breakthrough and a transitional moment in Kerouac’s career. The novel introduced the public to the restless traveler and spontaneous prose stylist, while the work developing around it revealed a writer increasingly engaged with Buddhist philosophy and Asian literary traditions.

The Dharma Bums, Some of the Dharma, Wake Up, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, Mexico City Blues, and Book of Haikus document that evolution. Together, they form an important part of the history of Buddhism’s encounter with postwar American literature and help explain why Kerouac’s influence would extend beyond the Beat generation into institutions such as Naropa, where poetry and contemplative practice continued to develop alongside one another.

READING & MORE INFORMATION

Jack Kerouac — On the Road

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/300451/on-the-road-by-jack-kerouac/

Jack Kerouac — The Dharma Bums

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/579958/the-dharma-bums-by-jack-kerouac/

Jack Kerouac — Some of the Dharma

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/330143/some-of-the-dharma-by-jack-kerouac/

Jack Kerouac — Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/302999/wake-up-by-jack-kerouac/

Jack Kerouac — Book of Haikus

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/288771/book-of-haikus-by-jack-kerouac/

Jack Kerouac — The Scripture of the Golden Eternity

https://openroadmedia.com/ebook/the-scripture-of-the-golden-eternity/9781504033992

Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics — Naropa University

https://www.naropa.edu/academics/schools-centers/jack-kerouac-school-of-disembodied-poetics/

History of the Jack Kerouac School and Summer Writing Program — Naropa University

https://www.naropa.edu/academics/swp/history/

09/05/2026

JOHN CAGE: John Cage was born September 5, 1912, in Los Angeles. By the time of his death in 1992, he had become one of the most influential experimental composers of the twentieth century, expanding the possibilities of music through percussion, prepared piano, electronics, chance operations, unconventional notation, performance, writing and, most famously, silence.

For students of Zen, Cage is especially interesting because his relationship with Buddhism was both substantial and unconventional. He encountered Zen through books and through the teachings of Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, whose lectures he attended in New York. Cage also read Buddhist texts, including teachings associated with Huang-po, and returned repeatedly to the traditional Ten Oxherding Pictures. Another important influence was the Indian philosopher and art historian Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, whose writing helped Cage think about art as something other than personal self-expression.

Cage was careful, however, not to present himself as a conventional Zen practitioner. He acknowledged that he did not practice seated meditation and resisted explanations that reduced his work to Zen alone. What interested him more broadly was the possibility of loosening attachment to personal preference. Questions about who decides which sounds are beautiful, important or musical became central to his work.

Beginning around 1950, Cage increasingly used chance procedures, especially the Chinese I Ching, to make compositional decisions he might otherwise have made according to taste. Chance was not simply randomness for its own sake. It allowed Cage to interrupt his own habits and preferences while still creating the conditions in which a work could unfold. In this sense, composition became partly an exercise in relinquishing control.

That approach became inseparable from Cage’s best-known work, 4′33″. The piece was first performed by pianist David Tudor at the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York, on August 29, 1952. Tudor sat at the piano through three timed movements without intentionally sounding the instrument. Yet the performance was not actually silent. Sounds from the room, the audience and the environment remained present. Cage’s interest was increasingly directed not toward silence as an absence of sound, but toward the act of listening itself.

His well-known experience in an anechoic chamber at Harvard reinforced this idea. The room was designed to eliminate external sound, yet Cage reported hearing sounds produced by his own body. The experience contributed to his conclusion that complete silence was effectively impossible. There was always something occurring, even when nothing had been intentionally composed for the listener to hear.

This is one of the places where Cage’s work has a clear resonance with Zen. A quiet zendo is never entirely quiet. There is breathing, traffic, birds, a heating system, physical discomfort, coughing and the movement of thought. The mind may classify these things as distractions, but they are also part of the actual conditions of the moment. Zen practice does not necessarily require those conditions to disappear. It asks the practitioner to examine the tendency to divide experience immediately into what is wanted and unwanted, meaningful and meaningless, pleasant and unpleasant.

Seen in this way, 4′33″ is more than the familiar joke about a composition in which nothing happens. A great deal happens. What changes is the framework through which the listener encounters it. In conventional music, melody, rhythm and harmony organize attention. Cage removes that structure and allows the room itself to become audible. A cough, shifting chair, wind outside the building or the listener’s own impatience can become part of the experience.

This is also where Cage comes closest to an idea familiar in Zen: awareness does not need to be manufactured so much as noticed. A bell in a zendo does not create awareness; it calls attention to what is already present. Zazen does not create the world. It provides a setting in which the practitioner can observe how quickly the mind sorts the world into categories, including music and noise, silence and sound.

Cage was not alone among twentieth-century musicians in finding Buddhist practice or philosophy useful. Herbie Hancock has practiced Nichiren Buddhism since the early 1970s and has spoken about its relationship to openness, improvisation and his approach to music. Tina Turner also practiced Nichiren Buddhism for decades and described chanting as central to the transformation of her life. Laurie Anderson has spoken extensively about meditation and Buddhist practice as part of her artistic and personal life. None of these artists produced something that could simply be classified as “Buddhist music.” The influence appears instead in questions of attention, discipline, identity, control and the relationship between performer and experience.

Cage’s contribution was to make listening itself one of the central subjects of his art. His work repeatedly asked what happens when sounds are no longer required to justify themselves according to conventional ideas of beauty, order or importance. 4′33″ remains his clearest expression of that question. It suggests that what we commonly call silence is not empty at all. The world continues to occur, whether or not we have decided that what is happening deserves our attention.

For Cage, the discovery was not silence. It was everything else.

READING & MORE INFORMATION

John Cage Trust — About John Cage
https://johncage.org/about

John Cage — Autobiographical Statement
https://johncage.org/cage-autobiographical-statement

John Cage — Silence: Lectures and Writings
https://www.weslpress.org/9780819571779/silence/

Kay Larson — Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/304454/where-the-heart-beats-by-kay-larson/

Museum of Modern Art — There Will Never Be Silence: Scoring John Cage’s 4′33″
https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1386

WATCH / LISTEN

John Cage’s 4′33″ — performance by William Marx
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTEFKFiXSx4

Music Made of Listening: John Cage and 4′33″ — Gresham College
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItEntABdofc

09/04/2026

More than three hundred poems survive under the name Han Shan, meaning “Cold Mountain.” They have been read for centuries in China and Japan and, during the twentieth century, became some of the most widely translated Chinese Buddhist poetry in the English-speaking world.

The person behind them is considerably harder to identify.

Han Shan was probably not the poet’s personal name. It refers to the mountain retreat in the Tiantai region of eastern China with which he became associated. His actual name and dates are unknown, and scholars disagree about when the poems were composed and whether they can all have been written by a single person. Robert G. Henricks’s complete scholarly edition specifically treats the dating, authorship and biography of Han Shan as unresolved historical problems. (SUNY Press)

The traditional account describes a ragged hermit living around Cold Mountain and periodically appearing at nearby Guoqing Temple. He is associated with two other legendary figures, Shide and Fenggan, and supposedly left poems written on rocks, trees and walls. Later Buddhist tradition identified Han Shan and Shide with the bodhisattvas Mañjuśrī and Samantabhadra. In Japan the pair became known as Kanzan and Jittoku and became established subjects of Zen literature and painting.

The poems themselves contain Buddhist, Daoist and other strands of Chinese thought. Some describe solitude, poverty, mountains, aging and everyday life; others address Buddhist practice, impermanence, attachment and the workings of the mind. Whatever the biography of their original author or authors, Han Shan eventually became firmly established within the Chan and later Zen literary traditions. Modern scholarship consequently distinguishes between the uncertain historical author and the much more clearly documented literary and religious figure that developed around the poems. (SUNY Press)

The history of Han Shan in English adds another layer.

The earliest English translation currently identified by researchers appeared not in the 1950s, but in 1933. Henry H. Hart included a single Han Shan poem, Chengbei Zhongjia Weng, in The Hundred Names: A Short Introduction to the Study of Chinese Poetry with Illustrative Translations. Hart rendered the poem about an elderly host whose former guests abandon him after his death in colloquial English. Research into Han Shan’s American reception identifies Hart’s version as the earliest English translation so far located. (Zhejiang Province Government)

Four years later, in 1937, Japanese scholar Tetsuzo Okada included six Han Shan poems in his English-language Chinese and Sino-Japanese Poems. Neither Hart nor Okada appears to have produced much immediate interest in Han Shan among general English-language readers. (Zhejiang Province Government)

That changed in 1954, when the British sinologist Arthur Waley published “27 Poems by Han-shan” in Encounter. Waley was already one of the major English translators of Chinese and Japanese literature, and his twenty-seven poems constituted the first substantial presentation of Han Shan available to a broad English-language literary readership. (Terebess)

Then came Gary Snyder.

While studying Chinese at the University of California, Berkeley, Snyder began translating Han Shan in 1955 under the guidance of Chinese literature scholar Chen Shih-hsiang. Snyder selected twenty-four poems from the much larger corpus. They appeared as “Cold Mountain Poems” in the Evergreen Review in 1958 and were later incorporated into Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems. (eNotes)

Snyder’s translations became especially significant because they crossed from Chinese literary translation into the developing literature of the Beat generation. Snyder did not attempt a representative or complete edition: he selected twenty-four poems from more than three hundred. Scholars studying the translations have consequently examined the extent to which Snyder’s selection helped shape a particular American Han Shan—the mountain recluse, Buddhist outsider and poet removed from conventional society. (KCI)

Jack Kerouac gave that Han Shan an even larger audience. Snyder became the model for Japhy Ryder in Kerouac’s 1958 novel The Dharma Bums. In the novel, Ryder is shown translating and discussing Han Shan with Kerouac’s fictional counterpart, Ray Smith. The connection appears before the novel even begins: Kerouac dedicated The Dharma Bums simply “to Han Shan.” (Faded Page)

English translation continued well beyond the Beats.

In 1962, Burton Watson published Cold Mountain: 100 Poems by the T’ang Poet Han-shan. Watson’s hundred-poem selection offered English readers a substantially larger portion of the collection than either Waley or Snyder had translated. It was first published by Grove Press and later reissued by Columbia University Press. (Google Books)

In 1983, Red Pine, the pen name of Bill Porter, published The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain through Copper Canyon Press. It was the first complete translation of Han Shan’s poems into English and presented the Chinese alongside the English translation. Later editions added extensive notes and material concerning Shide and Fenggan. (Copper Canyon Press)

In 1990, scholar Robert G. Henricks published The Poetry of Han-shan: A Complete, Annotated Translation of Cold Mountain. Henricks translated 311 poems and devoted substantial attention to the textual problems surrounding Han Shan: dating, authorship, biography, Buddhist terminology and the internal evidence contained in the poems themselves. (SUNY Press)

Other translators continued to approach the collection differently. J. P. Seaton placed Han Shan alongside Shide and Wang Fan-chih in Cold Mountain Poems, emphasizing the broader tradition of unconventional Chinese poetry. Paul Rouzer produced a complete scholarly translation of the works attributed to Han Shan, Shide and Fenggan, presenting Chinese and English together.

Then, in 2018, Kazuaki Tanahashi and Peter Levitt published The Complete Cold Mountain. Their edition includes the entire traditional corpus and proposes that the collection represents not one Han Shan but three different poets from different historical periods. (Shambhala Pubs)

The history of these translations shows why identifying a single English-language “Han Shan” is difficult. Hart translated one poem. Okada translated six. Snyder chose twenty-four. Waley chose twenty-seven. Watson chose one hundred. Red Pine, Henricks, Rouzer, and Tanahashi and Levitt undertook complete or substantially complete editions. Each worked at a different moment, for different readers, and with different assumptions about the history and authorship of the collection.

There may never be a definitive biography of the person who first wrote poems under the name Cold Mountain.

The history of the poems themselves is much easier to follow: from medieval China into the Chan tradition, from China into Japanese Zen culture, and eventually through generations of translators into twentieth- and twenty-first-century English literature.

Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac form one important chapter in that history.

They were far from the first.

HAN SHAN IN ENGLISH

Henry H. Hart — The Hundred Names (1933)
The earliest English translation of a Han Shan poem currently identified by researchers.

https://archive.org/search?query=Henry+H+Hart+The+Hundred+Names

Tetsuzo Okada — Chinese and Sino-Japanese Poems (1937)
Includes six Han Shan poems.

https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=%22Chinese+and+Sino-Japanese+Poems%22+Okada

Arthur Waley — “27 Poems by Han-shan” (1954)
Published in the September 1954 issue of Encounter.

https://www.unz.com/PDF/PERIODICAL/Encounter-1954sep/5-11/

Gary Snyder — Cold Mountain Poems
Twenty-four translations originally published in Evergreen Review in 1958.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/675190/cold-mountain-poems-by-gary-snyder/

Burton Watson — Cold Mountain: 100 Poems by the T’ang Poet Han-shan (1962)

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/cold-mountain/9780231034500/

Red Pine — The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain (1983)
The first complete English translation.

https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/books/the-collected-songs-of-cold-mountain-by-han-shan-cold-mountain-tr-bill-porter-red-pine/

Robert G. Henricks — The Poetry of Han-shan: A Complete, Annotated Translation of Cold Mountain (1990)

https://sunypress.edu/Books/T/The-Poetry-of-Han-shan

J. P. Seaton — Cold Mountain Poems: Zen Poems of Han Shan, Shih Te, and Wang Fan-chih

https://www.shambhala.com/cold-mountain-poems-9781611806984.html

Paul Rouzer — The Poetry of Hanshan (Cold Mountain), Shide, and Fenggan

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781501501913/html

Kazuaki Tanahashi and Peter Levitt — The Complete Cold Mountain (2018)

https://www.shambhala.com/the-complete-cold-mountain.html