Shì Hánshān 釋寒山 (fl. ca. 800–850?)
The eccentric Tiān-tái shān 天台山 recluse-poet known by the place-name Hán-shān 寒山 (“Cold Mountain”), the cliff overhang at Tāng-xìng xiàn 唐興縣 (modern Tiān-tái xiàn 天台縣, Zhèjiāng) where he was traditionally said to have lived. His historical existence is unverified and his dates are unknown; internal evidence in the poems (references to mid-Táng official titles and apparent allusions to Yuán-zhěn 元稹) locates the corpus in the late 8th to early 9th century. The Sòng Chán tradition canonized him together with his fellow Tiān-tái recluses Fēng-gān 豐干 and Shí-dé 拾得 as the San-sheng 三聖 (“Three Saints”) of the Guó-qīng sì 國清寺, with the cultic identification Hán-shān = Mañjuśrī, Shí-dé = Samantabhadra, Fēng-gān = Amitābha — a frame established in the famous (but pseudepigraphic) Hán-shān shī jí xù attributed to Lǘqiū Yìn 閭丘胤. The serious modern hypothesis — most fully developed by Iritani Sensuke 入谷仙介 and Robert Henricks — is that the corpus collects the work of two or three Táng-period poets later layered into a single oeuvre.
His extant collection is the Hánshān shī jí KR4c0002 of ca. 300 poems, plus the small body of verses in Shídé’s name (often indistinguishable in style) and the few gāthā of Fēnggān. He is one of the most translated Chinese poets in the modern world, and the only Táng poet to have entered American Beat-generation literature (through Gary Snyder’s 1958 selection in Riprap).