Books by David Hinton

A beautifully compelling and liberating guide to the original nature of Zen in ancient China by renowned author and translator David Hinton.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 shows how Ch'an was in fact a Buddhist-influenced extension of Taoism, China's native system of spiritual philosophy. Unlike Indian Buddhism's abstract sensibility, Ch'an was grounded in an earthy and empirically-based vision. Exploring this 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.In China Root, Hinton describes this original form of Zen with his trademark clarity and elegance, each chapter exploring in enlightening ways a core Ch'an concept--such as meditation, mind, Buddha, awakening--as it was originally understood and practiced in ancient China. Finally, by examining a range of standard translations in the Appendix, Hinton reveals how this original understanding and practice of Ch'an/Zen is almost entirely missing in contemporary American Zen, because it was lost in Ch'an's migration from China through Japan and on to the West.Whether you practice Zen or not, taking this journey on the wings of Hinton's remarkable insight and powerful writing will transform how you understand yourself and the world.

The books collected in this volume represent the first time since the mid-nineteenth century that the four seminal masterworks of ancient Chinese thought have been translated as a unified series by a single translator. Hinton''s award-winning experience translating a wide range of ancient Chinese poets makes these books sing in English as never before. But these new versions are not only inviting and immensely readable, they also apply much-needed consistency to key philosophical terms in these texts, lending structural links and philosophical rigor heretofore unavailable in English. Breathing new life into these originary classics, Hinton''s new translations will stand as the definitive texts for our era.Perhaps the most broadly influential spiritual text in human history, Lao Tzu''s Tao Te Ching is the source of Taoist philosophy, which eventually developed into Ch''an (Zen) Buddhism. Equally influential in the social sphere, Confucious'' Analects is the source of social wisdom in China. The Chuang Tzu is the wild and wacky prose complement to the Tao Te Ching. And with its philosophical story-telling, the Menicius adds depth and complexity to Confucius'' vision.

Revered for millennia in the Chinese spiritual tradition, Chuang Tzu stands alongside the Tao Te Ching as a founding classic of Taoism. The Inner Chapters are the only sustained section of this text widely believed to be the work of Chuang Tzu himself, dating to the fourth century B.C.E. Witty and engaging, spiced with the lyricism of poetry, Chuang Tzu's Taoist insights are timely and eternal, profoundly concerned with spiritual ecology. Indeed, the Tao of Chuang Tzu was a wholesale rejection of a human-centered approach. Zen traces its sources back to these Taoist roots roots at least as deep as those provided by Buddhism.But this is an ancient text that yields a surprisingly modern effect. In bold and startling prose, David Hinton's translation captures the "e;zany texture and philosophical abandon"e; of the original. The Inner Chapters' fantastical passages in which even birds and trees teach us what they know offer up a wild menagerie of characters, freewheeling play with language, and surreal humor. And interwoven with Chuang Tzu's sharp instruction on the Tao are short-short stories that are often rough and ribald, rich with satire and paradox.On their deepest level, the Inner Chapters are a meditation on the mysteries of knowledge itself. "e;Chuang Tzu's propositions,"e; the translator's introduction reminds us, "e;seem to be in constant transformation, for he deploys words and concepts only to free us of words and concepts."e; Hinton's vital new translation makes this ancient text from the golden age of Chinese philosophy come alive for contemporary readers.

A deep and radically original exploration of Taoist and Ch'an (Zen) Buddhist wisdom through the lens of the life and work of Tu Fu, widely considered China's greatest classical poet.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.Each chapter presents a poem in three stages: first, the original Chinese; then, an English translation in Hinton's masterful style; and finally, a lyrical essay that discusses the untranslatable philosophical dimensions of the poem. The result is nothing short of remarkable: a biography of the Cosmos awakened to itself in the form of a magisterial poet alive in T'ang Dynasty China.Thirty years ago, David Hinton published America's first full-length translation of Tu Fu's work. Awakened Cosmos is published simultaneously with a newly translated and substantially expanded version of that landmark translation: The Selected Poems of Tu Fu: Expanded and Newly Translated (New Directions).

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.

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.