Cold Mountain: silence, retreat, repose, quiet, awareness

 

      Couvent des Jacobins, Toulouse, May 2025

   Cold Mountain Verse 1

   (translated by Burton Watson)

In my first thirty years of life
I roamed hundreds and thousands of miles.
Walked by rivers through deep green grass,
Entered cities of boiling red dust.
Tried drugs, but couldn’t make Immortal;
Read books and wrote poems on history.
Today I’m back at Cold Mountain:
I’ll sleep by the creek and purify my ears.

 

🔹 Comment:
The final line — "I’ll sleep by the creek and purify my ears" — suggests a profound turn inward, where silence and the natural world cleanse the mind. This is an implicit homage to the sound of silence, where water replaces noise and the mind returns to quiet attention.

From ChatGPT, May 29, 2025: Thread on Cold Mountain Silence Awareness

Here are a couple of verses by Han Shan (Cold Mountain) that resonate deeply with the theme of silence in service to mindful awareness, especially in the context of his solitude, introspection, and the quietude of nature.

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Cold Mountain Verse 1

(translated by Burton Watson)

In my first thirty years of life
I roamed hundreds and thousands of miles.
Walked by rivers through deep green grass,
Entered cities of boiling red dust.
Tried drugs, but couldn’t make Immortal;
Read books and wrote poems on history.
Today I’m back at Cold Mountain:
I’ll sleep by the creek and purify my ears.

🔹 Comment:
The final line — "I’ll sleep by the creek and purify my ears" — suggests a profound turn inward, where silence and the natural world cleanse the mind. This is an implicit homage to the sound of silence, where water replaces noise and the mind returns to quiet attention.

---

Cold Mountain Verse 2

(translated by Gary Snyder)

Men ask the way to Cold Mountain
Cold Mountain: there’s no through trail.
In summer, ice doesn’t melt
The rising sun blurs in swirling fog.
How

Pablo Neruda: Keeping Quiet

 

KEEPING QUIET

by Pablo Neruda

(English translation by Alastair Reid)

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the earth
let’s not speak in any language,
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines,
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victory with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.