Please join us this Monday night when in our Pacific Zen Luminaries Series we visit with the celebrated Dharma translator, Red Pine. 

Red Pine, also known as Bill Porter, will share with us his pilgrimage to find and learn from present-day Chinese mountain hermits as chronicled in his book, Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits, and featured in the recent Woody Creek Pictures documentary, Dancing with the Dead. Also joining us for this multi-media presentation are the film’s producer and director, Ward Serrill, and the vocalist in the film, Spring Cheng.

In addition, Red Pine will read from one of his earliest translations, The Mountain Poems of Stonehouse. 

Stonehouse was a little-known Chinese hermit-poet of uncommon clarity and insight. Born into an elite family in 1272—the last years of the great Song Dynasty before it was overthrown by the Kublai Khan—at the age of twenty, Stonehouse decided to become a Buddhist monk and went on to study with several outstanding teachers of the day. 

A brilliant student, he accepted the post of meditation master at a prestigious temple, and was rapidly promoted to the position of abbot at several larger monasteries. But at age forty he tired of institutional prestige and position, and gave up teaching to live as a simple hermit in a hand-built bamboo hut in the mountains.

Below are two of his many poems:

Don’t think a mountain home means you’re free
a day doesn’t pass without its cares
old ladies steal my bamboo shoots
boys lead oxen into the wheat
grubs and beetles destroy my greens
boars and squirrels devour the rice
things don’t always go my way
what can I do by turn to myself

(Mountain Poems, 10)

Stripped of conditions, my mind is at rest
emptied of existence, my nature is at peace
how often at night, have my windows turned white
as the moon and stream passed by my door

(Mountain Poems, 108)

So I’ve come to realize that translation is not just another literary art. It’s the ultimate literary art. For me this means a tango with Li Bai, or a waltz with Wing-Wu. But in any case, a dance with the dead.

—Bill Porter

Short Bio

Bill Porter assumes the pen name Red Pine for his translation work, and is recognized as one of the world’s finest translators of Chinese poetic and religious texts.

He was born in Los Angeles in 1943, grew up in the Idaho Panhandle, served a tour of duty in the US Army, graduated from the University of California with a degree in anthropology, and attended graduate school at Columbia University. 

Uninspired by the prospect of an academic career, he dropped out of Columbia and moved to a Buddhist monastery in Taiwan. After four years with the monks and nuns, he struck out on his own and eventually found work at English-language radio stations in Taiwan and Hong Kong, where he interviewed local dignitaries and produced more than a thousand programs about his travels in China. 

His translations have been honored with a number of awards, including two NEA translation fellowships, a PEN Translation Prize, and the inaugural Asian Literature Award of the American Literary Translators Association. 

He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to support work on a book based on a pilgrimage to the graves and homes of China’s greatest poets of the past, which was published under the title Finding Them Gone in January of 2016. More recently, Porter received the 2018 Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation bestowed by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. 

He lives in Port Townsend, Washington.

source: https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/authors/bill-porter/

Jon Joseph Roshi of San Mateo Zen and PZI created this series to support the hardworking innovators and shining voices of modern Zen: scholars, writers, poets, translators, activists, artists, teachers, and more.

All proceeds for each event, including teacher dana, go directly to the guest speaker. Event attendees are encouraged to give as generously as you are able, so we can offer deep thanks to Luminaries guests.

Our suggested donation is $10 for PZI Members and $12 for Non-Members, but the scale slides from zero depending on one’s ability to contribute. We also greatly appreciate Patrons, who help support the program with larger gifts of $25—$250.