Hearing of this episode, Prefect Yu Ti rushed to the scene. The Layman addressed him with, "I pray you to hold all that is thought to be real as empty, and never take that which is empty as being real. Farewell. The world is merely a shadow, an echo."18 He then laid his head on the prefect's knee and died. He left a request that his body be cremated and his ashes scattered across the waters of nearby lakes and rivers.
When P'ang's wife heard of the death of her husband and daughter, she said, "That stupid girl and ignorant old man have gone away without telling me. How unbearable."19 She then relayed the news to her son, who was in the fields hoeing. He too subsequently died miraculously, while still standing up. For her own part, Madam P'ang journeyed about the countryside bidding her friends farewell, and then secluded herself, where it was never known. And with her passing ends the saga of Layman P'ang. This real-life individual was honored as China's answer to the mythical Indian businessman Vimalakirti, who combined enlightenment with the life of the market.
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;