Much passes without meaning in the mountains.

Gold can’t buy the peace found on this mountain
Winter mornings, snow-covered ancient cedars
Icy waterfalls cracking and tinkling at dawn
Leaves fall, far-off mountain peaks appear
The beauty here can’t be bought and sold
Like clouds overhead
Time, gold, arguments about right and wrong
Pass without meaning.  
      - Stonehouse (Ch’ing-kung, 1272-1352).

Stonehouse (Ch'ing-kung, 1272–1352) spent decades alone on Cold Mountain, writing poems about mountain solitude, the passage of time, and the peace that neither gold nor argument can reach. His poems are read today as expressions of both Zen practice and Taoist quietude — not as instruction, but as witness: what a life stripped of accumulation looks like from the inside.

In the fourth-century a Buddhist monk, Chih Tun, offered to buy a mountain from the hermit who lived there, and became the subject of ridicule.