Hanshan Asked Shide: Tolerate Him, Yield to Him
Hanshan asked Shide: when someone slanders me, cheats me, insults me — how should I deal with it? Shide replied: tolerate him, yield to him, let him be, avoid him, endure him, respect him, pay him no mind.
I was flipping through an old book this morning and came across a dialogue. I read it several times, and each time it felt different.
It's between Hanshan and Shide.
Hanshan asked Shide: "When someone in this world slanders me, cheats me, insults me, ridicules me, belittles me, demeans me, hates me, or deceives me — how should I deal with it?"
Shide replied: "Simply tolerate him, yield to him, let him be, avoid him, endure him, respect him, pay him no mind. Wait a few years, and then look at him again."
That's it. Just those few lines.
The first time I read this, I was in my early twenties. I thought the answer was deeply satisfying — "wait a few years and look at him," wasn't that just saying he'd get his comeuppance eventually? It felt like a sophisticated curse.
Years later I read it again and realized that wasn't it at all. Shide wasn't cursing anyone. Everything he said — tolerate, yield, let be, avoid, endure, respect — none of it was about the other person. It was all about yourself.
Think about it. For someone to genuinely tolerate, yield, let be, avoid, endure, and respect — how much space must there be inside that person's heart? That kind of space isn't carved out through suppression. It comes from truly not minding.
Hanshan and Shide were two monks from Mount Tiantai during the Tang Dynasty.
I say monks, but they were more like a pair of wild hermits. Hanshan lived in a place called Cold Cliff on Mount Tiantai, which is how he got his name — Cold Mountain. Shide was a foundling, picked up and raised by the Zen master Fenggan at Guoqing Temple on the same mountain. That's how he got his name — Shide means "picked up."
By all accounts, they looked the part of madmen — tangled hair, ragged clothes, laughing and shouting on the mountainsides. The proper monks at Guoqing Temple didn't think much of them. They felt these two were an embarrassment. But Hanshan and Shide couldn't have cared less. They wrote poems back and forth to each other, sometimes stood on the mountain peaks and howled, sometimes helped out in the temple kitchen, packing leftover food into bamboo tubes to send up to Hanshan at Cold Cliff.
Over three hundred of Hanshan's poems survived. They're strange poems — plain speech mixed with Buddhist philosophy, complaints, loneliness, and every now and then a line that lights up suddenly, like a crack in the clouds just before dark, a sliver of light breaking through.
"My mind is like the autumn moon, clear and bright in the green pool. Nothing compares to it — how do I even begin to explain?"
Sometimes I wonder: when he wrote this, did he truly feel his mind was as clear as the autumn moon? Or was he just an ordinary person who, every once in a while, caught a moment of clarity and quickly wrote it down before it slipped away.
"Tolerate him, yield to him, let him be, avoid him, endure him, respect him, pay him no mind" — seven actions, seven directions, all saying the same thing: step back.
The word "retreat" is an interesting one. Everything we're taught growing up says to push forward, to fight, to prove yourself. When someone insults you, talk back. When you're wronged, defend yourself. When someone looks down on you, prove them wrong with your success. The first lesson society teaches us: don't lose.
But Shide's answer is all about stepping back. Tolerate is stepping back. Yield is stepping back. Avoid is stepping back. Endure is stepping back. Even "respect him" is stepping back — you insult me, and not only do I not get angry, I treat you with reverence. It goes against every instinct.
I've tried it.
Not in any dramatic way. Just the small, everyday things — someone says something uncomfortable online, or a colleague makes a careless remark that stings. The instinct is to explain, to push back, to prove you're right. But a few times, I held my tongue. Said nothing.
Something strange happened after I held back: the thing just passed. Left no trace. But every time I argued back, the incident would replay in my mind for days. The more I thought about it, the angrier I got, and the angrier I got, the more I wished I'd said something better.
Shide probably knew this all along. Stepping back isn't about fear. It's about knowing the cost of pushing forward — not the external cost, but the internal one.
"Wait a few years, and then look at him again." I used to think this was a threat. Now I think it's just the truth.
It doesn't mean the other person will get what's coming to them. It means time changes everything. The person who insulted you might not be that person anymore in a few years. You won't be who you were either. The anger will fade, the grievance will dissipate, and what seemed like the end of the world will look like a speck of dust in retrospect.
Hanshan lived on Mount Tiantai for a long time. I don't know if he was actually slandered, cheated, or insulted. He probably was. A ragged, wild-haired mad monk in those days — being looked down upon was the default. But the poems he left behind are sometimes impossibly quiet.
"Distant, the cold mountain trail. Sparse, the icy stream bank. Chirping, birds are always present. Silent, not a soul in sight."
Not a soul in sight. These five characters contain a strange kind of peace. It's not loneliness from being alone — it's being equally at peace whether someone comes or not.
That kind of peace is probably where Shide's seven "steps back" ultimately lead. You don't step back into emptiness. You step back into stillness.
I have a string of prayer beads that I sometimes finger absentmindedly. I'm not reciting any sutra — my hands just need something to do. And as I roll the beads, images float up through my mind — old arguments, moments of being misunderstood, the things I never said.
Then those seven phrases surface on their own: tolerate him, yield to him, let him be, avoid him, endure him, respect him, pay him no mind.
Not deliberately. More like a reflex.
Honestly, I still have a lot of questions about these words. For instance: what if someone is genuinely harming the people around you? Should you still "tolerate and yield"? What about real, structural injustice? Should you "pay no mind" to that?
I don't have answers.
But I don't think Hanshan and Shide were trying to offer a universal formula either. They were simply saying: there is a way of living where the storms outside don't get inside. Not because you don't care, but because you know the storms will stop on their own.
"Respect him" — those two words, I still can't quite manage.
It's easy to respect someone who treats you well. Respecting someone who treats you badly goes against every instinct. But sometimes I think about what's going on inside a person who deliberately puts others down. Is someone with genuine inner peace going to go out of their way to demean another person?
Probably not.
So "respect him" might not mean the other person deserves respect. It might mean: I see your anger, I see your malice, but I also see that you're trapped by these things. What I disagree with isn't you as a person — it's the suffering part inside you.
Thinking of it this way makes "respect" feel a little more possible. Though it's still not easy.
There's a poem of Hanshan's I really love:
"The stars are scattered, the night is deep. On the cliff, a lone lamp's flame hasn't died. Perfect brightness, unpolished, uncut — hanging in the blue sky, that is my mind."
"Hanging in the blue sky, that is my mind" — he says his mind is like the moon hanging in the sky. Unpolished, uncarved, naturally as it is.
I don't know if I'm capable of that. Most days I feel very far from that state. Temper flares, and I can't hold it in. I feel wronged, and I want to explain. But every once in a while — brewing tea in the early morning, turning the beads between my fingers, catching the moon out the window — there really is nothing in my mind. Not empty. Full. Quietly full.
Hanshan and Shide probably lived in that kind of quiet. Not because they were numb, but because they had felt everything, and then let it go.
That dialogue is short — fewer than forty characters. But I've returned to it over the years, and every time I feel like Shide left one thing unsaid.
His seven ways of stepping back all point to "wait a few years." But I've come to believe the real point isn't what happens to the other person in those years. It's that after those years, you won't care anymore what happened to them.
That's the truest kind of stepping back.
You're not stepping back for anyone else. You're stepping back into your own peace.
Three questions, for myself and for you:
When someone misunderstands you, what you can't let go of — is it the misunderstanding itself, or the feeling that "they have no right to treat me this way"?
If "stepping back" isn't about winning, would you be willing to try?
Do you think that "a few years from now," you'll still remember what made you angry today?
