An interview with writer and translator Bill Porter/Red Pine

Part 2: Living in Taiwanese monasteries and mountains, and becoming a translator

This is a continuation of Part 1, in which I wrote about some of the life forces and history that brought me from California, to China, to discovering the Chinese travelogues and translations of Bill Porter (aka Red Pine), and finally, moving to the Pacific Northwest and meeting Bill. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Can you give us a brief overview of your kind of writing and translation career from when you first arrived in Taiwan to the present day?

Well, of course, when I went to Taiwan, it was not to write anything or translate anything. It was just the idea of, “I want to leave America and put myself in a new world.” And I'd been practicing meditation and hanging out with master Shou-yeh in New York and I thought, “living in a monastery would be great.”

A German classmate of mine at Columbia University introduced me to Chen Guo Ning, a girl he had met at Fo Guang Shan. While he was traveling around the world, he stopped in Taiwan and visited Fo Guang Shan, this monastery in southern Taiwan. And so Chen Guo Ning agreed to become my sponsor. In those days, if you were going to live in Taiwan, you had to have a sponsor, somebody who, in a technical sense, would probably agree to go to jail if you fucked up. So Annie Chen agreed to be my sponsor. So that's how I could go to Taiwan and live, and be a non-tourist.

So I went down to Fo Guang Shan, stopping, of course, for a few days at her father's place. Her father was the commander of the Taiwan Navy in Zuoying, just north of Kaohsiung. So I stayed with Admiral Chen, for a few days. And then his aide-de-camp took me in a limousine over to Fo Guang Shan, dropped me off, and introduced me to Master Hsing Yun. After an introduction, he handed me over to one of the senior monks there, Master Ding.

Ding Fashi, Xin Ding, that was his full name, but everybody called him Ding, Ding Fashi. He put me in a room behind a new shrine hall that they had just finished building with a huge, huge statue of Guan Yin in it. It seemed like it was 100 feet tall, but it wasn't. It was probably something like, oh, maybe, 30 to 40 feet tall. And behind the shrine hall there was a little opening and there were two rooms, and they gave me one of the rooms.

So I started life of the monastery, which of course did not include any writing or translating or anything like that. But at Fo Guang Shan, the regimen was, you know, you get up at, I think we woke up at 4:30, 5 o'clock, we start chanting for an hour, prostrations, chanting, in that shrine where I lived. And then have breakfast, and then people have their little chores of sweeping, cleaning up around the monastery grounds, and at 8 o'clock, classes begin. Because this was not just a monastery, it was a Buddhist college.

It's called the Eastern Buddhist College. And so we had classes throughout the morning. One of the classes was on the Abhidharma. I remember that especially, because it was so hard, because I had never heard of the Abhidharma before. Didn't even know what it was, but the class was going through the Abhidarmakosha, a famous Abhidharma text translated into Chinese.

And then the afternoon, after lunch, we would carry cement and rebar and other building materials for a couple of hours, because Hsing Yun was embarking on this huge construction project. He had big plans. I expected some work, but carrying cement and rebar wasn't the work I had in mind. I thought: chopping wood, carrying water; but you know, it's the same thing.

And then, usually after a couple of hours we would play basketball for an hour. Hsing Yun was very, very tall. It was really funny to see, because the monks had their robes on. And they would race, with their robes flashing back and forth. And Hsing Sun would just hang out under the basket, and his team would throw him the ball, and he would just lob it up there.

It was a Pure Land monastery, and I wanted to find out more about Pure Land, and they had a small library, and so I was able to get these texts. There was an English translation by somebody around a hundred years ago, and during my time, towards the end of my stay, in order to sort of do something in thanks, I translated the visualization of paradise sutra. This was a visualization text for meditation for the Pure Land. There's three basic texts and this is one of the three most famous texts used in Pure Land Buddhism, and so oddly enough I did actually make my first translation in the spring of ‘73.

And I really liked working on the text, oddly enough and translation—little did I know, this I was going to become my métier, but my sponsor Annie Chen said,

“Billy. No, you're staying at this monastery. Your Chinese is never gonna improve, why don't you come to where I work?”

She was the director of the museum at this College of Chinese Culture on Yangmingshan, just outside of Taipei. So I went there for a semester and studied philosophy, studied Taoism with John Wu, and then also the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead with Shi Youwei, who had been a student with Bertrand Russell in Harvard, and also with Alfred North Whitehead, and I was there for the Whitehead semester.

While I was there, this girl and her girlfriend always sat behind me and so we became friends, but after that one semester, I said: I'm not really here to to be in a college to go to take classes and stuff, so Annie arranged for me to go to another monastery about 20 miles south of Taipei. It was the personal monastery of Wuming, a master who was the head of the Buddhist Association of Taiwan and also the head Linji Zen monk. He had a Zen monastery up in the mountains near the ocean, but he wanted me in his own private monastery, to keep an eye on me, I guess.

Which was great, because they had no idea what to do with me, they'd never seen a Westerner in a monastic setting, so they just left me on my own. So I took part in the ceremonies, the morning ceremony and the evening ceremony. When I first got there they abbot took a stick and hit it on the ground on a rock, and said,

“You hear that? That means it's time to eat. If you have any other questions, just ask me.”

I stayed there about two and a half years and I never had any questions, I had questions but I’d think of the answer, and I thought: well if I'm gonna ask them a question, it’s gotta be something I can't answer. I never did get an answer to a question, but I did enjoy living there, because the place was mine. There was a bunch of nuns that took care of the abbott, who did all the cleaning and cooking.

The meals were great. I had never experienced vegetarian cooking before, I always had meat, but it was wonderful. Soon after I moved there, I started going away into Taipei on the local train, and I had to walk down this mountain through a bamboo grove into this little town called Shulin. Shulin means tree forest, or forest, basically. And so I would take this in the local into Taipei, took about 30 minutes and then walk about 10 minutes from the train station to this cafe, where I'd meet this girl who used to be sitting behind me in the college.

This cafe was started by Chiang Kai Chek’s Russian daughter-in-law. His son, Chiang Ching-kuo, had married her just to piss his father off because he had an argument with his dad when his dad started killing communists during the United Front. When China was fighting the Japanese, instead of joining with the Communists to fight the Japanese, China Kai Chek started killing the Communists.

Anyways, that pissed off Chiang Ching-Kuo, and he went to Russia, to Moscow, married this Russian woman and then came back eventually to Shanghai and when the nationalists left China, he brought his Russian wife with him and she started this cafe. So her Russian and other foreign friends, they could have a decent pound cake or good tea (Russian teas) and coffee, and it became the hangout of intellectuals and poets.

There was a poet that always stood in front of cafe and this was called a Wuxing Kafeidian, the Astoria coffee shop, and his name was Chou Meng-tieh, the dreaming butterfly. He was always dressed in rags, he had a big coat on, but it was always a bunch of rags that had been sewn together.

He had a book stand on wheels and it had nothing but poetry in it. It was all of these little volumes that people had self published or somebody had maybe published a couple hundred copies. And so he that's all he sold, was poetry. We became good friends because my wife, my girlfriend at that time, was good friends with Chou Meng-tieh, and they had four floors there, and at the very top floor, you didn't have to buy anything.

And so I would go there with with with this girl I met in college, and we would go over the texts and the texts that she decided would be good for me, which was the commentary on Zhuangzi, and the Taoist text called Zhuangzi—but there's this incredible commentary by the the most famous Ming dynasty Zen monk or any monk, Hanshan Deqing. Every Saturday I’d go there and spend a couple hours with Ku, going over this text, and that's when I really started learning classical Chinese more. The Chinese was beautiful, and it was good to see Laozi being explained by a Zen monk, who was also the most famous prose writer among Buddhists of the Ming dynasty.

Anyways, that's what I would do and so I started getting into these these texts and commentaries, so I was gradually acquiring skills. I didn't know what these skills were going to be used for but I was acquiring some skills. I never took any classes in anything. It would have been easier if I had just gone to a university of course, but that would have been terrible for my meditation practice.

Anyway, I did this for a couple of years and then eventually moved out of the monastery. The week after my father died a week I got a letter from him. He never wrote me. Suddenly he wrote me, and I got the letter a week after he died. And he said,

“You know you've been over there three years now, and isn’t it time you did something productive with your life?”

Just those two lines. That's all. So I sort of took that to heart and moved out of the monastery to this farming village. Again, Chen Guo Ning—one of her neighbors in Taipei had a farmhouse that they had reconditioned up on the mountain. A couple of these farmhouses, they were just old sheds that they had put toilets in, and so I rented this place up on the mountain, and ended up staying there 14 years, in Bamboo Lake, Zhuzihu, and that's where I really started translating.

A couple months before I moved out of the monastery, the abbot gave me a book that he had helped finance, the publication of the collected poems of Cold Mountain and he handed me one, one day and so I thought wow, you know I had read Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, and knew his guy Hanshan was somebody, but I didn't know I was gonna meet his poems and somebody was gonna hand me his poems, because I I didn't have any research talents to know where or how to look, or even why I should even look, but there was Cold Mountain given to me!

I just gradually started to translate these poems one at a time and oh, I guess I must have translated about 60 or 70 of them, and I was helping this Australian fellow, translating a martial arts text on Hsing Yi for him, and he’d come up once a week. I sent off a sample of my translations to Tuttle, a publisher of things Asian and they said, nah there's no market for this, you know.

I really didn't know what to do, and then this Australian fellow, said,

“You've got all these books by John Blofeld, why don't you ask write him a letter and ask what you should do with these translations you're working on?”

I said, “you can write an author?!”

The idea had never occurred to me, but, why not? Hmm. So I wrote a letter to Blofeld in England, in care of his publisher—but he was actually living in Thailand, so I got a letter from him there about a month letter, and he said,

“Why don't you send me some of these translations? Send me 10.”

So I sent him 10, and then a couple weeks later, I get those 10 back scribbled with his comments, and “send me 10 more.”

And so for the next year I would send him 10 translations and he would send them back to me with all these comments. Sometimes the comments were in English, but very often he just write his comments in Chinese. He really liked to practice his Chinese. So I did that for over a year and then this American happened to just knock on my door one day and he said,

“I heard you're working on Cold Mountain. You need a publisher.”

Because in those days there were very few Westerners who were interested in Chinese culture and who weren't part of the Vietnam war effort. Usually, there'd be a party every weekend at somebody's house, and so sooner or later, if you were in the Taipei area, you soon found out about the other Westerners in town, who they were and what they were doing. So this guy, Michael Connor knocked on my door and asked me if I needed a publisher, and I said, yeah!

I sent what I was working on to Copper Canyon Press here in Port Townsend, where I'm living now, and they agreed to publish my translations. And then of course I kept working on them, I probably spent another year after they accepted them, because Mike was looking at them and said,

“Bill, you know if you're translating the words, what you have to do when you're translating a poem, is you have to make a poem. You got to make better poems.”

Part 3