The narrative invites readers on two journeys through the stunning landscapes and archaeological sites of the desert Southwest. Alongside the exploration of nature, the author delves into themes of consciousness and Taoist cosmology, blending the physical and philosophical realms. David Hinton's reflections offer a unique perspective on the interconnectedness of the environment and spiritual understanding.
A once-in-a-generation translation of the definitive Ch’an (Zen) koan collection from preeminent translator David Hinton. The Blue-Cliff Record, a collection of Ch’an (Zen) koans stemming from the eleventh century, is a remarkable masterwork of classical Chinese literature, a philosophical text of profound power, and an active practice guide in use by Ch’an and Zen Buddhists all over the world. Rendered with his trademark lyricism and philosophical rigor, this new edition from renowned translator David Hinton presents a whole new Blue-Cliff Record. Full of poetry, storytelling, and characters both zany and profound, Hinton’s translation unveils the earthy insights of Ch’an’s original wisdom. Though it carries a reputation for impenetrable paradox, The Blue-Cliff Record was not meant to be a teaching tool understood only through long instruction from Zen masters. Rather, it is a finely crafted text intended to create a direct and immediate experience of awakening, a text that insists on the need to trust oneself rather than teachers for insight. Embracing this, Hinton’s translation presents only the original koans and poems, free of the commentaries that usually shroud it. In doing so, he rekindles the provocative and illuminating fire of these one hundred classic koans.
This sweeping collection of new translations paints a brilliant picture of the development of Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism, China’s most radical philosophical and meditative tradition. In this landmark anthology of some two dozen translations, celebrated translator David Hinton shows how Ch'an (Japanese: Zen)—too long considered a perplexing school of Chinese Buddhism—was in truth a Buddhist-inflected form of Taoism, China's native system of spiritual philosophy. The texts in The Way of Ch’an build from seminal Taoism through the “Dark-Enigma Learning” literature and on to the most important pieces from all stages of the classical Ch’an tradition. Guided by Hinton’s accessible introductions, readers will encounter texts and authors including: I Ching (c. 12th century BCE) Lao Tzu (c. 6th century BCE Bodhidharma (active c. 500-550 CE) Sixth Patriarch Prajna-Able (Hui Neng, 638-713) Cold Mountain (Han Shan: c. 8th-9th centuries) Yellow-Bitterroot Mountain (Huang Po, d. 850) Blue-Cliff Record (c. 1040) Through this steadily deepening and transformative reading experience, readers will see the profound and intricate connections between native Chinese philosophy, Taoism, and Ch’an. Contemporary Zen students and practitioners will never see their tradition in the same way again.
Exploring the confluence of ancient Chinese spirituality and modern Western environmental thought, Wild Mind, Wild Earth reveals the unrecognized kinship of mind and nature that must be reanimated if we are to end our destruction of the planet. Earth is embroiled in its sixth major extinction event—this time caused not by asteroids or volcanos, but by us. At bottom, preventing this sixth extinction is a spiritual/philosophical problem, for it is the assumptions defining us and our relation to earth that are driving the devastation. Those assumptions insist on a fundamental separation of human and earth that devalues earth and enables our exploitative relation to it. In Wild Mind, Wild Earth, David Hinton explores modes of seeing and being that could save the planet by reestablishing a deep kinship between human and earth: the insights of primal cultures and the Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism of ancient China. He also shows how these insights have become well-established in the West over the last two hundred years, through the work of poets and philosophers and scientists. This offers marvelous hope and beauty—but like so many of us, Hinton recognizes the sixth extinction is now an inexorable and perhaps unstoppable tragedy. And he reveals how those primal/Zen insights enable us to inhabit even the unfurling catastrophe as a profound kind of liberation. Wild Mind, Wild Earth is a remarkable and revitalizing journey.
"Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism emerged from the rich encounter of Indian Buddhism with Chinese Daoism. In this beautifully rendered literary meditation, renowned translator and author David Hinton illuminates anew the Chinese roots of Zen"-- Provided by publisher
The prehistoric, Roman, and Anglo-Saxon periods were all represented in an excavation carried out in the centre of a Worcestershire village some time ago, but with results that can now be seen in new light because of all the archaeological work that has taken place since. A deep Iron Age ditch can be set in the context of enclosures revealed, mainly by air photography, of the gravel terraces in the river valleys of the Severn and Avon. The Romano-British skeletons form a small, elderly and hard-worked group, providing a contrast to the better-known large urban cemeteries. The growing of crops on an increasingly large scale has been demonstrated for the seventh to ninth centuries A.D., and at Fladbury the complex arrangements made to dry grain on what is known to have been a large and important estate show the resources put into feeding royal, aristocratic, and ecclesiastical households.
"Although it tells the tale of an individual's life, this book is no ordinary biography. Awakened Cosmos presents the life and poetry of Tu Fu through the lens of the idea that animated all of his work that a person is a location in which the cosmos can awaken to itself. Each of the nineteen chapters begins with one of Tu Fu's poems, rendered first in literal character-by-character translation, then in translator David Hinton's signature style. Hinton captures the texture and density of the originals while rendering the poems in vivid, accessible English. He then offers a philosophically rich interpretation of each poem, at once delving into the depths of the Daoist and Ch'an influences, context, and subtext of the poems and guiding the reader through Tu Fu's dramatic life--which included everything from serving in the Emperor's court and achieving national prestige as a poet to experiencing warfare, deprivation, and years of refugee wandering. The result is nothing short of remarkable--a biography of the wild Cosmos awakened to itself in one particular human manifestation: the poet Tu Fu"-- Provided by publisher
The first collection of original poetry by the renowned nature writer and highly lauded translator of the Chinese classics. Traveling today I found a river somewhere inside me, wondered how far it wanders there and how much sky it mirrors. All day long, wind and desert light, I followed that river’s distances . . . Weaving mind and landscape together in meditations on sky and wind, ridgeline and horizon, existence and self, Desert marks David Hinton’s first collection of original poetry in over a decade. Hinton’s poetic art has long shined brilliantly through his widely acclaimed Chinese translations—and here speaks for itself in his contemporary voice as he turns his attention to the transcendent landscape of the American West. Updating the philosophical insights of ancient China that Hinton has explored so deeply, these poems bring the wonder and ancient mystery of the desert landscape to light. Hinton demonstrated in The Wilds of Poetry how those ancient Chinese insights shaped the innovative American poetry of our time, and here he extends that tradition in poems that are spare and spacious, as vast and open as the desert itself.
A new translation of one of the great koan collections--by the premier translator of the Chinese classics--that reveals it to be a literary and philosophical masterwork beyond its association with Chan/Zen. A monk asked: “A dog too has Buddha-nature, no?” And with the master’s enigmatic one-word response begins the great No-Gate Gateway (Wu-Men Kuan), ancient China’s classic foray into the inexpressible nature of mind and reality. For nearly eight hundred years, this text (also known by its Japanese name, Mumonkan) has been the most widely used koan collection in Zen Buddhism—and with its comic storytelling and wild poetry, it is also a remarkably compelling literary masterwork. In his radical new translation, David Hinton places this classic for the first time in the philosophical framework of its native China, in doing so revealing a new way of understanding Zen—in which generic “Zen perplexity” is transformed into a more approachable and earthy mystery. With the poetic abilities he has honed in his many translations, Hinton brilliantly conveys the book’s literary power, making it an irresistible reading experience capable of surprising readers into a sudden awakening that is beyond logic and explanation.
"An exploration of the emerging Western consciousness of the mystery of existence, as seen through the work of the great American poets from Walt Whitman to Gary Snyder --a thrilling journey with today's premier translator of the Chinese classics. David Hinton sees in the West beginning in the nineteenth century the dawning of a larger consciousness such as seemed to happen in Asia much longer ago: an opening up of mind and heart to something infinitely more mysterious and inexpressible than previous concepts allowed. It's an understanding that went against the grain of Western religion and philosophy up till that point, and for which Western models just didn't apply. Because this perception didn't fit the usual Western models, those who came up against it grappled with ways to express it. David holds that the first expressions of this dawning consciousness emerged among the great American poets, whose expression of the mystery often has an experimental freshness to it, as it comes from the period before things get conceptualized and codified. He takes us on a journey through the work of fifteen American poets in whose work he sees the Great Matter expressed, providing with each chapter a sampling of their work"--