An Interview with Bill Porter (Red Pine 赤松), Part 1
A Biography of Entering Mountains
I am delighted to share part one of an interview I recently conducted with author Bill Porter, whose translations appear under the name Red Pine. Bill has been such an important figure on my path through East Asian spiritual practice ever since I started reading his books in my mid-teens. As I’ve become increasingly interested in the craft of writing and translation, I’ve been inspired by his mix of academic rigour, linguistic beauty and how the fruit of practice shines through in his writing. It was a true pleasure having the chance to speak with him.
Our full conversation was too long to include in one piece, so I’ve broken it into three parts. Here in part one, you will find the fascinating story of Bill’s life and work. Having grown up in California and attended graduate school at Columbia, he spent over two decades living in East Asia and travelling extensively throughout China. He has published over 20 books of translation and travel writing, many of which cover classical Chinese poetry and texts related to Chan (Zen) Buddhism. Whilst continuing his translation work, Bill is now also setting up an aesthetically informed, non-denominational meditation centre, similar to the Rothko Chapel in Houston.
You can read part 2 here, and part 3 here.
Bill was born in Los Angeles, in 1943. His father had been a notorious bank robber who spent years in jail after a shootout in which all other members of his gang were killed. After his release, he entered the hotel business, became a multimillionaire and formed close connections with senior Democrat politicians. Although Bill was born into privilege, much of it disappeared after his parents divorced whilst he was young. After finishing high school, he served in the army for three years and took an undergraduate degree in anthropology at UC Santa Barbara. During this time, Bill spent a year abroad at the University of Göttingen in Germany, which is where Frederich Gauss invented the Bell Curve. Bill took a yearlong course in statistics and during this time experienced his first awakening.
“It was just a sudden wow, a new way of seeing the world. And it had to do with statistics! We were studying correlation coefficients. You have two variables of X and Y and you’re trying to establish a correlation between them. You adjust your formula and when you find the correlation, you have a straight line on the graph. It just occurred to me one day that to the extent we can create a perfect correlation between two variables, we’re mistaken in separating X and Y in the first place. I didn’t know what to do with this. It was a really profound thing for me, that there are no separations. Later when I read Alan Watts I thought, ‘Oh, so that’s the core correlations coefficient!’ At Göttingen I was just approaching it from a logical, philosophical point of view, but suddenly I found there was a way of life that went with this vision.”
Wanting to continue graduate studies in anthropology but lacking funds, Bill applied for a fellowship that required combining anthropology with a lesser studied language.
“I’d just read a book called The Way of Zen by Alan Watts. It had Chinese characters in it and I liked the book, so just on a whim I applied for Chinese.”
The summer before starting, Bill attended the Monterey Institute of Foreign Studies and at a party met a lovely Swedish girl. Unfortunately, his growing interest in Zen Buddhism came between them.
“It was one of those things, I fell instantly into lust. We continued to correspond after I got to Columbia. We decided to get married, and I visited her in Sweden that Christmas. When I got there, she told me that she had changed her mind. We’d been talking about our interests and she said that if I really believed all the Zen stuff, then we couldn’t possibly get married.”
During his time at Columbia, Bill met a monk in Chinatown who introduced him to Buddhist practice. Over the following couple years, his interest in academia waned whilst his interest in Zen grew. In 1972, after moving deeper into Zen through the works of DT Suzuki, he decided to leave America altogether and move to Fo Guang Shan monastery in Taiwan.
“The best decision I ever made in life was leaving America and going to live in a monastery. There are times in life when you really want to turn your back on something and walk away from it. For me, I was walking away from graduate school, from academia, from a career. A lot of people need to do that in their life, regardless of whether there’s already something there that would benefit them.”
After a number of years studying in monasteries, Bill was given the choice to become a monk. Deciding against the idea, he moved into the countryside and supported himself teaching English whilst working on his first book of translation, the complete poems of Cold Mountain, which you can find here. John Blofeld, another great figure in the history of Buddhism and Daoism’s transmission to the West, helped Bill prepare his translations for publication.
“One day, I’d just gotten a letter of rejection for my Cold Mountain poems from Shambhala, who said they had no real market value. This was about 1979, and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have a lot of poems translated, only about 50 or 60 that I was using as a sample to get a publisher. At the time, I was helping an Australian chap on a translation project, and when he heard about my rejection he said, ‘Hey, you have all these books by John Blofeld, why don’t you write to him and ask him what to do?’ So that’s what I did, and about a month later I got a letter back from him that said, ‘Send me ten poems.’ And I sent him ten poems. A couple weeks later, I get them back covered in notes. He said, ‘Send me ten more.’ And over the course of the year I sent him all three hundred poems, and I still have the aerograms covered with his notes on my translations.”
At the same time as working on these poems, Bill was supporting himself by teaching English for a couple hours a week and making maybe $300 a month. He had been courting a Chinese lady for about seven years, and eventually her parents agreed to them getting married. However, there were terms.
“It was gonna cost. They set some conditions. I had to have a wedding banquet. I had to stop living on the floor on tatami mats. I had to buy furniture. I had to buy a bunch of gold bracelets and rings. I had to take their daughter on a one month honeymoon to Japan. And listen, this was gonna cost about $5,000 and I was making 300 a month. So, I joined a group of three or four Westerners working for this Malaysian Chinese guy who was smuggling watches to Korea. I smuggled watches to Korea for about a year and made enough money to pay for all that.”
Was that dangerous?
“The boss said it wouldn't be a problem. This is before computers. We destroyed our passports every two or three months when they had too many chops in them and got new ones. The routine was as follows. Sunday night, fly to Hong Kong. Meet the boss Monday morning, fly with the boss to Korea, smuggle half the watches and leave half the watches in bond for the next morning. Tuesday morning, pick up the watches in bond and fly to Tokyo. Wednesday morning, fly with the second lot of watches to Korea. On Thursday, come back to Taiwan with $400. We went two to three weeks every month. Because we flew via Tokyo, my boss offered to give my wife and me free tickets to Japan for our honeymoon — just do half a run, go to Korea and then both of you can go on to Japan for your honeymoon. My wife turned him down and it was on that trip that they all got arrested and sent to prison. They got ten years, but they got out after three on presidential amnesty. The boss didn't go to prison and when I got back from my honeymoon, as a thank you for helping him, he gave me round tickets to Bangkok.”
At the time, John Blofeld was living in Bangkok and Bill arranged to stay with him.
What was he like?
“A tall fellow, must have been 6 ft 1, 6 ft 2. A shock of white hair. Obviously very well educated. He studied at Cambridge and then left England in 1937. He spent 12 years in Beijing and at his wedding the minister of education was his best man. Then shit happened in China and he fled to Bangkok. He sent his wife and children to London, and they mostly stayed there. The children would visit him from time to time.
He wrote some pretty extraordinary stuff about Buddhism and Daoism in China before Communism. In my mind I class him with Alexandra David-Neel and other early explorers who went to Asia and experienced Buddhism in a world that has now disappeared.
“He was a practitioner. I remember in the middle of the night when I was staying with him I would hear him chanting, guttural sounds. He did Daoism and Tibetan Buddhism.”
In his autobiography, The Wheel of Life, John expressed disappointment that he hadn’t gone further in his practice. Did you experience this when you were staying with him?
“He was a complex man. He liked to drink, smoke opium, practise sexual yoga. I don't think it was so much disappointment as it was him trying to walk through several doors at once.”
After getting married and having children, Bill supported his family by producing cultural programs for an English language radio station in Taiwan. He is probably best known today for Road To Heaven: Encounters With Chinese Hermits, which he wrote in 1989. The book covers a number of trips he made to mainland China to investigate whether the ancient traditions of Buddhist and Daoist eremitism had survived the upheavals of the twentieth century. Almost everyone he asked in both Taiwan and mainland China thought the search was hopeless, but eventually he met someone who recommended searching the Zhongnan mountains. There, he encountered a flourishing hermit tradition. Although Road to Heaven proved to the West that ancient Chinese religious traditions had survived, the real impact of the book was to be found in China. Road to Heaven was translated into Chinese, became a bestseller, and introduced a young generation of Chinese to this forgotten aspect of their culture. Since its publication, the number of hermits in the Zhongnan mountains has greatly increased. In a 2015 documentary titled Hermits, Bill interviewed a new generation of Zhongnan hermits, many of whom were familiar with his work.
In 1993, Bill and his wife moved back to America so their children could learn English. Before moving back, he worked in Hong Kong for a couple of years to work again on culture radio programs. Doing this, he was able to make enough money to buy the house that he continues to occupy in Port Townsend, Washington. Since returning to America, he has worked as an independent author and translator and received numerous awards for his work. Foremost amongst these are a Guggenheim Fellowship to support work on a book that covers 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, and more recently in 2018 the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation bestowed by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
More recently, Bill has been working as part of a team to establish a non-denominational meditation centre in Port Townsend.
“Our idea is that a lot of people would meditate if they didn't feel a certain resistance to joining a group or becoming a member of a religious organisation. So we've decided just to make a meditation hall.”
In a way similar to the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, the Port Townsend meditation centre is being designed by an artist with a particular interest in light and space. James Turrell has spent the last 30 years hollowing out a crater in Arizona to exhibit some of the ways in which light and space can be used in an artistic context.
“We want it to be the kind of a place where people can just come from dawn to dusk, they can go inside and meditate. And we'll have two floors. One will be the Turrell floor which, in his style, will have holes in the roof so the light can come in. Then in the basement we'll have a smaller meditation hall for the hardcore meditators who really don't want to be disturbed. We're seeing this as a way of raising the floor, not the ceiling, of spiritual cultivation in our area. So that people begin to see meditation as a friendly part of a normal life.”
If you would like to help fund the construction of the Port Townsend Meditation Center, you can do so here.
Thank you for reading part one of this interview with Bill Porter! In the Nüwa’s upcoming Sunday newsletter you will find part two, which covers our discussion about translation. It will also include a number of my personal recommendations for Bill’s books that I have read and loved over the years. Part three will be released next Wednesday and was, for me, the highlight of our interview. It covers an in-depth conversation about the nature of Buddhism, Daoism and how they exist today. It also includes the more personal turn that our conversation took towards the end, in which I asked Bill what he thought about enlightenment, solitude and teaching.
You can read part 2 here, and part 3 here.
Have a wonderful rest of the week,
Oscar
Excellent information and I like hearing Bill's experiences. I really enjoy his books.
Excellent stuff - looking forward to the next two chapters.