James P. Lenfestey · 2014 · pilgrimage

James Lenfestey's account of going to find a cave. Handed the Cold Mountain poems by a bookseller at thirty, he read them for the next three decades and then went to Zhejiang to look for the rock the eighth-century hermit Han Shan wrote them on - which almost everyone had assumed was a figure of speech.

1. 1
   Minneapolis

   A man turning thirty with a young family, a demanding job and a growing suspicion that he is a poet - and a bookseller who hands him the Cold Mountain poems and says try these, which he then swallows like aspirin for thirty years.

2. 2
   Tokyo

   The first stop, to sit with Burton Watson - the translator who did more than anyone to bring Chinese poetry into English, and who is eighty-something and living quietly in a Tokyo suburb.

3. 3
   Kyoto

   South by train past Fuji, and a few days among temples and a restaurant with a door so low you enter it bent double - the Japanese detour before China, and the last easy stretch.

4. 4
   Bailin Temple

   Hebei, and a chanting hall holding ten thousand Buddhas - the scale of Chinese religious revival, which is not what a Minnesotan reader of an eighth-century hermit is expecting to find.

5. 5
   Qufu

   Shandong, and the birthplace of Confucius - the other tradition, the one Han Shan spent his poems getting away from, visited by a pilgrim who wants to be fair to both.

6. 6
   Guoqing Temple

   The Tiantai mountains in Zhejiang, and the monastery where Han Shan is said to have scrounged leftovers from the kitchen and written on the walls - founded in 598 and still working.

7. 7
   Hanyan

   Cold Cliff, and the cave itself - which most people had assumed was a figure of speech, and which turns out to be a real hole in a real rock that a seventy-year-old American can climb up to and sit in.