An even more elusive figure is the hermit Han-shan, whose name means "Cold Mountain," the site where he supposedly resided. He is an almost totally lengendary character, for we actually know nothing for sure about when he lived (the current best guess is late eighth to early ninth century). Almost everything known about him has been gleaned from his poems and from a presumably contemporaneous preface to these poems composed by a mysterious hand untraceable to any historical Chinese individual. His was some of the most confessional, yet joyous, verse penned in T'ang China, and he has been claimed by the Ch'anists as one of theirs--although he might just as easily have been a Taoist conversant in Buddhist jargon. Han-shan embodied the archetypal hero of the Chinese imagination: a member of the rural gentry who gave up his staid family life and some sort of scholarly career to become a wandering poet. As he describes his own early life in the years before his wanderings: _From my father and mother I inherited land enough And need not envy others' orchards and fields Creak, creak goes the sound of my wife's loom; Back and forth my children prattle at their play. * * * The mountain fruits child in hand I pluck; My paddy field along with my wife I hoe. And what have I got inside my house? Nothing at all but one stand of books.20_ So we have a gentleman scholar, comfortably well off, with wife and children and an idyllic life undisturbed by the incursions of the world. It is all too perfect by half, and sure enough sometime before his thirtieth year his life was disrupted by an (undescribed) event so catastrophic that his wife and family turned him out: _I took along books when I hoed the fields, In my youth, when I lived with my older brother. Then people began to talk; Even my wife turned against me. Now I've broken my ties with the world of red dust; I spend my time wandering and read all I want. Who will lend a dipper of water To save a fish in a carriage rut.21 _ Just when this sad event took place we do not know. However, by the time Han-shan was thirty he found himself on Cold Mountain, part of the T'ien-tai mountain range and near the town of T'ang-hsing. _Thirty years ago I was born into the world. A thousand, ten thousand miles I've roamed, By rivers where the green grass lies thick, Beyond the border where the red sands fly. I brewed potions in a vain search for life everlasting. I read books, I sang songs of history, And today I've come home to Cold Mountain To pillow my head on the stream and wash my ears.22 _ He described his life in the mountains in a number of verses that often seem more Taoist than Buddhist. One of the most lyrical follows: _Ever since the time when I hid in the Cold Mountain I have kept alive by eating the mountain fruits. From day to day what is there to trouble me? This my life follows a destined course.