Trusting the Mind: Zen Epigrams

Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. From the translator's preface: This is a book of epigrams, epigrams that encapsulate the teaching the Buddha first transmitted 2,400 years ago when he held up a flower and Kashyapa smiled. They're that simple. The Chinese call them ming. Like the epigrams of ancient Greece, they consist of couplets that can stand alone or be linked together. And like their Mediterranean counterparts, they were inscribed, rather than spoken or sung. They were embroidered, carved, or written on all sorts of things: doorways, tombstones, ritual bronzes, even items of daily use like washbasins and writing brushes. Their salient feature was a few pithy phrases conveying something worth keeping in mind, and they usually rhymed. For example, taxes in ancient China were paid in silk, and this epigram was embroidered on robes: 'The silkworms suffered / the weaving women weren't pleased / any new taxes / we're all sure to freeze.' Ezra Pound took his motto from one inscribed on the washbasin of a king who lived 4,000 years ago: 'Make it new / new every day / and make it new again.'--Red Pine

About the Author :
Bill Porter, who translates under the name Red Pine, was born in Califoria and grew up in Northern Idaho. After a tour of duty in the US Army, he attended UC Santa Barbara and majored in Anthropology. He recieved his graduate degree at Columbia University and studied anthropology with a faculty that included Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. He became interested in Buddhism, and in 1972 he left America and moved to a Buddhist monastery in Taiwan. After more than three years with the monks and nuns, he struck out on his own and supported himself by teaching English and later by working as a journalist at English-language radio stations in Taiwan and Hong Kong. During this time, he married a Chinese woman, with whom he has two children, and he began working on translations of Chinese poetry and Buddhist texts. In 1993, he returned to America so that his children could learn English. For the past twenty years, he has worked as an independent scholar and has supported himself from book royalties and lecture fees. During this time, he has lectured at many of the major universities in the US, England and Germany where he has lectured on Chinese history, culture, poetry, and religion. His translations of texts dealing with these subjects have been honored with a number of awards, including two NEA translation fellowships, a PEN translation award, the inaugural Asian Literature Award of the American Literary Translators Association, a Guggenheim Fellowship, which he received to support work on a book based on a pilgrimage to the graves and homes of China's greatest poets of the past, which was published under the title Finding Them Gone in January of 2016, and more recently in 2018 the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation bestowed by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His translations include CATHAY REVISITED (Empty Bowl, 2019), A DAY IN THE LIFE (Empty Bowl, 2018), and P'U MING'S OXHERDING PICTURES AND VERSE (Empty Bowl, 2015).