David Hinton's Articles on Lions Roar

Randy Rosenthal interviews award-winning translator David Hinton, whose new book, China Root, goes deep into the Taoist origins of Chan (Zen). For decades, David Hinton has been translating ancient Chinese culture into English. He began with the great poets—such as Li Po and Tu Fu—and then translated the four classics of Chinese philosophy: the Tao te Ching, the Chaung Tzu, Confucius’s Analects, and Mencius. He was the first person to do so in over a century, and for it he earned a lifetime achievement award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He’s also won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and fellowships from the Guggenheim foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. That is, he’s recognized as a national treasure. Reading his recreations of classic poetry and philosophy facilitates a deeply contemplative state of mind—they retain the density of ambiguity in ancient Chinese conceptual thought, and yet feel contemporary. But his more recent prose books, such as Existence and Hunger Mountain, are veritable revelations. Whether he’s focusing on a single Chinese landscape painting or a hike up a mountain near his home in Vermont, Hinton cracks open the cosmos and takes you into the depths of the mind. As the American Zen tradition ultimately derived from Ch’an, what does this insight mean for a contemporary Zen practitioner? In his books (all of which can be found at davidhinton.net), Hinton often includes ancient pictographs and ideograms to show how a Chinese character evolved, so that we can understand the word as a concept in context of Chinese thought. For instance, in his most recent book, China Root, he explains that the ideogram for ch’an—the transliteration of the Sanskrit word for meditation, dhyana—originally meant “altar” and “sacrifice to rivers-and-mountains.” As in, meditation is a place where one honors landscape—the wildness without and within. A main thematic thread running through Hinton’s books is the Chinese concept of Absence and Presence as the fundamental aspects of our reality. As he writes in his introduction to the Tao te Ching, “Lao Tzu says that Presence and Absence give birth to one another: they are one and the same, but once they arise, they differ in name. And there before they arise, where they remain one and the same tissue, is the Way beyond all differentiation.” For Hinton, meditation is about returning to this undifferentiated level of consciousness, to the “generative existence-tissue” of the universe. Just as mountain ranges arise and disappear, so do thoughts, and a meditator not only observes but participates in this process of constant unfolding. This mental activity, Hinton argues in China Root, is the fundamental practice of Ch’an Buddhism, which went to Japan and developed into Zen. I first became acquainted with Buddhism through Zen, with books by Shunryu Suzuki and Alan Watts, and visits to the Los Angeles Zen Center. But after years of practicing Vipassana and studying Theravada texts, I came to suspect that Zen has much more in common with Taoism than the Buddhism of the Pali Canon. Hinton’s China Root confirms this view. In it, he argues that when Buddhism came to China in the third to fifth centuries C.E., it was “so transformed by Taoist thought that, aside from a few institutional trappings, it is scarcely recognized as Buddhism at all.” Going further, Hinton writes, “In the end, Buddhism is only a scrim on the surface of Ch’an.” As the American Zen tradition ultimately derived from Ch’an, what does this insight mean for a contemporary Zen practitioner? During the days of post-election uncertainly, I gave Hinton a call to discuss this question and ask him more about China Root. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. —Randy Rosenthal Randy Rosenthal: You've been writing about Taoist concepts and translating classic Chinese texts for decades, but this book seems like a shift—a pivot toward Buddhism in particular. What was your intention in writing China Root? David Hinton: It's part of my ongoing exploration of deep Chinese culture and my translation of those cultural insights into English. First, I translated a lot of poetry, and then philosophy. And lately I’ve written a number of prose books. So it was natural that I would move on to Ch’an, because Ch’an is an integral part of Chinese culture. Ch’an, just to explain, is the original Chinese pronunciation of the ideogram that in Japan is pronounced Zen. We call it Zen because it came to America from Japan. The intent of Ch’an practice was to dwell as integral to the ongoing unfurling of the cosmos. This, with all its implications, is not really spoken of in Zen. Anyway, Ch’an really shaped the minds of all these people I translated. When I translated them, I inhabited their minds at a deep level, which let me see how Ch'an works from the inside. Finally, I was led into the Ch'an texts. It's a way of going all the way down into Chinese philosophical insight. It’s the most profound and distilled form of that insight. And it is also the deepest and most accurate account of reality that I know, of consciousness and cosmos and the relationship between them. And important to me: it doesn’t just give us an abstract philosophical system, but a way of living. So my intent is to make this system of insight available in English for anyone, and also to the culture generally—new ideas that can move Western intellectual history forward. I think especially of artists and thinkers who might use it to move their work into interesting new directions. That’s how cultures move forward, by incorporating ideas from other cultures. It happened with Zen and ancient Chinese culture in a big way in the fifties and sixties—though that was Zen only partially understood. And for Zen practitioners, China Root is meant to open a lot of original Ch’an insight that was somehow lost as Ch’an migrated to Japan and eventually to the West. I stumbled onto this when I was writing Hunger Mountain, a book about walking up a mountain near here [in Vermont] as a way to describe ancient Chinese insight as immediate experience. Mountain landscape is at the center of Chinese culture: the arts and Ch’an too. Anyway, I started thinking about the most important of koans, the so-called Mu koan: “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” In English translations, the answer is always “Mu,” which just leaves it in Japanese. And I realized when I read the Chinese text, that Mu is in fact a huge philosophical concept. Its original Chinese pronunciation is Wu, and I translate it as Absence—but not in any metaphysical sense. There is no metaphysics in Ch’an or ancient Chinese culture. It’s too big to really explain here, but Absence means something like the cosmos seen as a single generative tissue: hence, the cosmos as an “absence” of individual forms. Obviously, that changes the koan completely. I wrote about this a little bit in Hunger Mountain. But that surprising discovery led me to look at the koan collection that includes the Mu koan: the No-Gate Gateway (Wu-men Kuan; Jpn., Mumonkan). It’s the most widely used koan collection. I discovered it is full of foundational Ch’an concepts, and none of them had been translated. There are at least half a dozen translations, three or four by Zen teachers, and none of them mention those concepts, the whole conceptual structure of Ch’an. So back to your question, China Root is also intended to lay out that conceptual framework that seems to be missing in contemporary Zen. The framework that shaped the practice of ancient Ch’an: what I call “original Zen” in the title. Randy Rosenthal: Zen was in Japan for well over a millennium before coming to the US, so what is it that a contemporary Zen practitioner is supposed to do differently with this new understanding of the history of Zen? For example, do you expect Zen centers to change their translations of some of these concepts, or the meditation practice of zazen? David Hinton: Well, it takes the whole book to really describe how this all works. But simply stated, this book grounds Zen practice in landscape and natural process. This comes from Taoism, China’s native spiritual philosophy that evolved into Ch’an. The intent of Ch’an practice was to dwell as integral to the ongoing unfurling of the cosmos. This, with all its implications, is not really spoken of in Zen. It involves dismantling our ideas and certainties, the mental machinery that isolates us from the world around us. That’s pretty challenging. And as I write in the beginning of the book, it takes a wild and fearless mind to attempt it. I’m not an evangelist. I don't really care what anybody does. For me, it’s the adventure of ideas. It isn’t like this book is going to totally change what happens in Zen centers; it’s just adding these ideas into the mix, all the very deep philosophical grounding underneath meditation and koan practice. And that can change how you understand those things, for sure. Randy Rosenthal: Your unique translations of terms really resonate with me. For example, after I first read Hunger Mountain, I remember walking around the woods and feeling like I am “the unfurling of existence-tissue,” because that's the phrase that you use. Similarly, rather than translate the usual Taoist term of “mystery,” you use “dark-enigma.” Can you talk more about these terms and concepts? David Hinton: Yes, existence-tissue is the term I use for the cosmos seen as a single generative tissue, what Taoism and Ch’an call Tao. And that word dark-enigma—it’s been translated using a lot of vague terms, but it means something very specific in ancient Chinese. It means that existence-tissue cosmos, before we name it or apply concepts to it. Hence “enigma,” and the necessity of the dismantling of ideas, even language itself. As soon as we use words, the world is objectified and separated from us. So the intent is to inhabit that dark-enigma cosmos without the separation. To dwell...

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