Road To Heaven - Encounters with Chinese Hermits

This event has been organised at short notice as we have been informed that Bill Porter is in Shanghai. Bill will attend to present and discuss the book. Copies will be available and may be autographed if requested.

Bill Porter (Red Pine) trekked through China's remote Chungnan Mountains in search of hermits. Lessons of spiritual wisdom emerge from his interviews with more than twenty male and female hermits.

"A stupendous corrective to modern American Zen practice" - Jim Harrison

Bill Porter (born October 3, 1943) is an American author who translates under the pen-name Red Pine (赤松, pinyin: Chì Sōng). He is a translator and interpreter of Chinese texts, primarily Taoist and Buddhist, including poetry and Sūtras.Porter was born in Los Angeles and raised in mountainous Idaho. After serving three years in the U.S. Army (refusing assignment in Vietnam and subsequently being reassigned as a clerk in Germany), he took a degree in anthropology from University of California, Santa Barbara and went on to graduate studies in language (Chinese) and anthropology at Columbia University, but dropped out in 1972 to go to the Fo Kwang Shan Buddhist monastery in Taiwan. In the years following, he lived in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Since 1989 he has traveled extensively in China, both as a journalist and on his own. He adopted a Chinese pen-name (hào) "Red Pine" (赤松 "Chi Song"), after the legendary Taoist immortal. In 1993, after 22 years in East Asia, he returned to the US.  In 1999 and 2000, he taught Buddhism and Taoism at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas.  He now lives in Port Townsend, Washington. His book Road to Heaven prompted Edward A. Burger to seek out and study with Buddhist hermits in the Zhongnan mountains of China and direct the 2005 film Amongst White Clouds.

His most recent book is a translation of the Lankavatara Sutra (Lankavatara Sutra: Translation and Commentary. Counterpoint, 2012.)  It is based on several early Chinese and Sanskrit translations including the Chinese translation made by Gunabhadra in 443.

One of the most noteworthy aspects of this translation is Porter's use of excerpts from China's vast and rich commentarial tradition.

Works:

•P’u Ming’s Oxherding Pictures and Verses. Empty Bowl, 1983. (translator)

•Cold Mountain Poems. Copper Canyon Press, 1983. (translator)

•Mountain Poems of Stonehouse. Empty Bowl, 1985. (translator)

•The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma. Empty Bowl, 1987; North Point Press, 1989. (translator)

•Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits. Mercury House, 1993. (author)

•Guide to Capturing a Plum Blossom by Sung Po-jen. Mercury House, 1995. (translator)

•Lao-tzu's Taoteching: with Selected Commentaries of the Past 2000 Years. Mercury House, 1996. (translator and editor)

•The Zen Works of Stonehouse: Poems and Talks of a Fourteenth-Century Chinese Hermit. Mercury House, 1997. (translator)

•The Clouds Should Know Me by Now: Buddhist Poet Monks of China. Wisdom Publications, 1998. (editor, with Mike O'Connor; and contributing translator)

•The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain. Copper Canyon Press, 2000. (translator and editor)

•Diamond Sutra. Counterpoint, 2001. (translator and extensive commentary)

•Poems of the Masters: China's Classic Anthology of T'ang and Sung Dynasty Verse. Copper Canyon Press, 2003. (translator)

•The Heart Sutra: the Womb of Buddhas. Washington: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004. (translator w. extensive commentary)

•Zen Baggage: A Pilgrimage to China. Counterpoint, 2008. (author)

•In Such Hard Times: The Poetry of Wei Ying-wu. Copper Canyon Press, July 1, 2009. (translator). Awarded a 2007 PEN Translation Fund Grant from PEN American Center. Winner of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA)'s inaugural Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize in 2010.

•Lao-tzu's Taoteching: Translated by Red Pine with selected commentaries from the past 2000 years. revised edition, Copper Canyon Press, 2009.

•Guide to Capturing a Plum Blossom by Sung Po-jen. Copper Canyon Press, 2011, (translator)

•The Lankavatara Sutra: Translation and Commentary. Counterpoint, 2012, (translator)