About David Hinton
About David Hinton
David Hinton has published numerous books of poetry and essays, and many translations of ancient Chinese poetry and philosophy—all informed by an abiding interest in deep ecological thinking. This widely-acclaimed work has earned Hinton a Guggenheim Fellowship, numerous fellowships from NEA and NEH, and both of the major awards given for poetry translation in the United States: the Landon Translation Award (Academy of American Poets) and the PEN American Translation Award. Most recently, Hinton received a lifetime achievement award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.Keep reading to learn more about his books, including Hunger Mountain, Awakened Cosmos, and China Root. Visit his website at www.davidhinton.net.
Praise for David Hinton
“[Hinton is a] rare example of a literary Sinologist—that is, a classical scholar thoroughly conversant with, and connected to, contemporary literature in English.”
—New York Review of Books
“[Hinton] is a national treasure.”
—New York Sun
“Hinton’s music is subtle, modulated. . . . He continues to enlarge our literary horizon.”
—Rosemary Waldrop, from the citation for the Landon Prize, Academy of American Poets
“A national treasure . . . Hinton cracks open the cosmos and takes you into the depths of the mind.”
—Lion’s Roar
“David Hinton is fabulous translator. The work is luminous and transparent, and you can see the light of the original Chinese masters shining through. I give his books to all my friends.”
—John Tarrant, author of Bring Me The Rhinoceros and Other Zen Koans That Will Save Your Life
“Hinton is creating nothing less than a new literary tradition in English.”
—Bei Dao, author of At the Sky’s Edge and The Rose of Time
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New from David Hinton
The Selected Poems of Yang Wan-li
An expansive selection of poems from the last giant of classical Chinese poetry’s golden age, Yang Wan-li (1127–1206 c.e.), masterfully translated by David Hinton.A typical Yang Wan-li poem attends to immediate experience with profound clarity, and this attention usually leads to a moment of sudden awakening: a startling image or turn of thought, a surprising imaginative gesture, a twist of humor. As a government official, Yang undertook many long and arduous journeys that exposed him to both breathtaking landscapes and hardships of hunger, exhaustion, bitter weather, and dangerous rapids in stark gorges. It is in this crucible of tranquil beauty and existential danger that he forged a poetry of self-realization deeply informed by Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist insight. With nothing more than a crystalline attention to the present moment, Yang’s poems find enlightenment everywhere: in a fly, for instance, sunning on a windowsill. Hinton’s translations give a remarkably modern voice to Yang’s journeys through the perennial mysteries of consciousness, revealing for a new generation why his poetry has captivated readers for nearly a millennium.
The Carefree-Ease Record
In this radical new translation of a Ch’an (Zen) classic, discover the Taoist roots of “carefree ease,” the effortless joy of an enlightened mind in harmony with all of nature.This twelfth-century collection of one hundred kung-ans, or koans, is an essential text for students of Ch’an and Zen Buddhism. These miniature masterpieces of Chinese literature—brief records of enigmatic encounters between teacher and student—offer a unique way of penetrating directly into the essence of Ch’an teaching, and Hinton affords readers an opportunity to experience these koans in English like never before by returning us to the original understanding of its zany storytelling and profound wisdom. Paring away the later commentaries that are usually presented with these koans, Hinton lets the original stories shine on their own, revealing themselves as nothing less than poetic expressions of the awakened mind. A far cry from the transcendence of life-and-death that typifies the traditional Buddhist goal of nirvana, this awakening is distinctly earthy and grounded in the rhythms of nature, shaped by the centuries of Taoist tradition that preceded Ch’an. “Carefree ease,” writes Hinton, “is to move through life with the ‘profound tranquility’ of the Cosmos itself as it unfurls through its perennial transformations.”
This is the final volume in David Hinton’s momentous project to translate the three classic koan collections of Ch’an Buddhism. The other two volumes are The Blue-Cliff Record and No-Gate Gateway.
Orient
Join renowned author David Hinton on two walks into the wild beauty and archaeological ruins of the desert Southwest, where he maps the edges of consciousness and our place in the Cosmos.Walks in the desert and journeys through Ch’an (Zen) enlightenment. Meditations on the nature of perception and on the nature of ruins. Topographies of mind and of space-time. Poetry and prose. This talismanic book is all of these and more. It is the culmination of Hinton’s philosophical adventure, deeply informed by his nearly forty years of translating and contemplating China’s ancient poets, Taoist sages, and Ch’an masters. Like Henry David Thoreau and other great literary walkers, Hinton joins philosophical meditations with a keen eye for the slightest of nature’s details. In following these walks, we journey into wondrous and even ecstatic clarities about the nature of mind and existence itself.
Also available as an audiobook!
The Blue-Cliff Record
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.
The Way of Ch’an: Essential Texts of the Original Tradition
This landmark anthology illuminates the true story of Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism’s historical development in China.Here we have the essential source material in its own native understanding, free of the mistranslation and misrepresentation that has characterized it in the modern West. As such, The Way of Ch’an offers a revolutionary understanding of Ch’an as a Buddhist-inflected form of Taoism, China’s native system of spiritual philosophy. This authentic Ch’an was a radical and wild practice cultivating a deeply ecological form of liberation: the integration of mind and landscape/earth/Cosmos. Hinton’s accessible introductions guide us through texts that build from seminal Taoism through all stages of classical Ch’an—a tradition of zany and profound sages revealing Ch’an’s original form of awakening each in their own way. It’s a roller-coaster of voices and insights across thousands of years: The Way of Ch’an is a thrilling ride.
Wild Mind, Wild Earth: Our Place in the Sixth Extinction
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 and 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 those of 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, philosophers, and scientists. This offers marvelous hope and beauty—but like so many of us, Hinton recognizes that the sixth extinction is now an inexorable and perhaps unstoppable tragedy. And he reveals how those primal and 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.
Also available as an audiobook!
Bestsellers
Hunger Mountain: A Field Guide to Mind and Landscape
Come along with David Hinton on a series of walks through the wild beauty of Hunger Mountain, near his home in Vermont—excursions informed by the worldview he’s imbibed from his many years translating the classics of Chinese poetry and philosophy. His broad-ranging discussion offers insight on everything from the mountain landscape to the origins of consciousness and the Cosmos, from geology to Chinese landscape painting, from parenting to pictographic oracle-bone script, to a family chutney recipe. It’s a spiritual ecology that is profoundly ancient and at the same time resoundingly contemporary. Your view of the landscape—and of your place in it—may never be the same.
China Root: Taoism, Ch’an, and Original Zen
Buddhism migrated from India to China in the first century C.E., and Ch’an (Japanese: Zen) is generally seen as China’s most distinctive and enduring form of Buddhism. In China Root, however, David Hinton reveals how Ch’an was in fact a Buddhist-influenced extension of Taoism, China’s native system of spiritual philosophy that was grounded in an earthy and empirically-based vision. Hinton describes Ch’an as a kind of anti-Buddhism, a radical and wild practice aspiring to a deeply ecological liberation: the integration of individual consciousness with landscape and with a Cosmos seen as harmonious and alive.
Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry
What is consciousness but the Cosmos awakened to itself?This question is fundamental to the Taoist and Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist worldview that shapes classical Chinese poetry. A uniquely conceived biography, Awakened Cosmos illuminates that worldview through the life and work of Tu Fu (712–770 C.E.), China’s greatest classical poet. Tu Fu’s writing traces his life from periods of relative normalcy to years spent as an impoverished refugee amid the devastation of civil war. Exploring key poems to guide the reader through Tu Fu’s dramatic life, Awakened Cosmos reveals Taoist/Ch’an insight deeply lived across the full range of human experience.
Also available as an audiobook!
All Books
Existence: A Story
This is the story of existence, and it begins with a painting. Join David Hinton, the premier modern translator of the Chinese classics, as he stands before a single landscape painting, discovering in it the wondrous story of existence—and as part of that story, the magical nature of consciousness. What he coaxes from the image is nothing less than a revelation: the dynamic interweaving of mind and Cosmos, and the glorious dance of Absence and Presence that is the secret of that Cosmos.
The Wilds of Poetry: Adventures in Mind and Landscape
Henry David Thoreau, in The Maine Woods, describes a moment on Mount Ktaadin when all explanations and assumptions fell away for him and he was confronted with the wonderful, inexplicable thusness of things. David Hinton takes that moment as the starting point for his account of a rewilding of consciousness in the West: a dawning awareness of our essential oneness with the world around us. Because there was no Western vocabulary for this perception, it fell to poets to make the first efforts at articulation, and those efforts were largely driven by Taoist and Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist ideas imported from ancient China. Hinton chronicles this rewilding through the lineage of avant-garde poetry in twentieth-century America—from Ezra Pound and Robinson Jeffers to Gary Snyder, W. S. Merwin, and beyond—including generous selections of poems that together form a compelling anthology of ecopoetry.
No-Gate Gateway: The Original Wu-Men Kuan
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.
Desert: Poems
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.
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