Red Pine

It was October. Leaving the Lafayette train station in the East Bay hills, it was only a ten minute walk until I was in the country. Sun-warmed blackberries lined the road and I ate not a few. I was headed to a reservoir and park not far from town. As I got closer, I passed an orchard where late pears hung on the carefully-spaced trees. A deer snuffled those lying on the ground, its burnt-sienna coat glowing against the golden grass.

I walked into the park, heading for a ridge above the lake where I knew I could find a spot in the woods to make my own for the afternoon. I wore a hat and carried a backpack in which were a light cotton rug, a few books and notebooks and my lunch. Mostly live oak with its prickly dark green leaves and a few pine, I needed the rug to make the ground habitable. It was a lovely place, though, under a very blue sky and the chiaroscuro light made by branches.

Like most office workers, on the weekends I was desperate to be outdoors and in wild places. There was some heartbreak in those years of the early 1990’s, too, as the person I most wanted to be with had disappeared into another relationship. But I knew several places to be alone and safe outdoors in the Bay Area, and I had Bill Porter’s books with me.

Bill Porter learned Mandarin in Taiwan. A student of Buddhism, and beginning to translate Chinese poets, he became curious about whether there were still hermits living in the mountains in China. In 1989, he acquired the funds to go look. Taking his friend Steve Johnson along as a photographer, they asked everyone they ran into. “Of course not,” they were told. The communists put a stop to religious practice. But then they were told about the mountains south of Xian. It turned out that these Zhongnan mountains were “hermit heaven.”

When I first read Bill’s book, I wished the prose had been more polished. I had read many of Cambridge-educated John Blofeld’s books on China and deeply enjoyed his delectable prose. Bill Porter’s was comparatively rough. Reading it later, however, I was struck by its honesty and unpretentiousness. He wrote nothing more or less than what he saw.

So, on that October day, I spread my lunch, hummus, bread and butter, red pepper, wet green grapes, a piece of chocolate and stretched out. A particular tree branch made a unique shadow across the page of my notebook as I wrote. I could hear the sounds of people picnicking nearby, but I was well-enough hidden in my forest “room.” It was hard to read in the autumn splendor, but I did a little.

In addition to Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits [1993], the result of Porter’s research, a friend had sent me The Mountain Poems of Stonehouse, translated by Porter. The book was beautifully printed, hand-stitched and bound by Empty Bowl Press [1986]. Bill Porter used the name Red Pine when he translated. He now lives in Port Townsend, WA, in a modest house with his wife Ku Lien Chang, and continues to write and translate. His belief that Zen Buddhism is more a way of life than a religion fueled his interest in those who live as hermits in order to practice.

Twice filmmakers have taken trips with Porter into the mountains and come out with a film. The first was made by Jack Estes in the late 1990’s, narrated in English, mostly by Estes. They visit many historic places with Bill explaining their significance. The second, made in 2014 by a Chinese crew, chronicled Bill’s visits to hermits, again in the Zhongnan mountains. This one is entirely in Chinese with English subtitles. Both films work to show us daily life on the mountain.

Porter states that his book Road to Heaven sold maybe 40,000 copies in the United States. But when it was translated into Chinese, 500,000 copies were sold. Most of the monks and nuns Porter meets know of the book. By 2014, the number of hermits in the mountains had tripled. 

But I kept coming back to Stonehouse. He lived from 1272 through 1352 A.D., mostly by himself in the mountains. He didn’t write poems constantly, being preoccupied with his practice, growing millet, and gathering firewood. But when someone brought him some paper and ink, he sat down and wrote until the paper was all used up. “Do not try singing these poems,” he said. “Only if you sit on them will they do you any good.”

I don’t know what attracts me to Stonehouse’ version of reality so strongly.  I have long had an affinity for the directness and simplicity of Chinese poetry, and Stonehouse laid out his whole daily life in this series. You can open the book anywhere and find wonders:

   Forty-some years I’ve lived in the mountains
   Ignorant of the world’s rise and fall
   Warmed at night by a stove full of pine needles
   Satisfied at noon by a bowl of wild plants
   Sitting on a rock watching clouds and empty thoughts
   Patching my robe in sunlight practicing silence
   Till someone asks why Bodhidharma came east
   And I hang out my wash

Stonehouse was a respected Dharma master in the Chinese Zen Buddhist tradition. He was considered a great poet, but I do not know of any translations other than Porter’s. The poet W.S. Merwin says of these translations: “they’re not like any others. Love of language, love of tradition, accuracy and power of language. … I’ll be reading Porter’s Stonehouse translations for the rest of my days.”

And so, for a day, but not the only one, I was a hermit in a forest, viewing the world from under my hat. I was happy, my inner self bathed in the language, air and light of the manifest world. I could take my time about going back to the world of dust, as the trains ran until late. But twilight came early on those warm October days. I packed my things and went home.