David Hinton > Quotes

“Wherever the mind dwells apart is itself a distant place.”
― David Hinton, Classical Chinese Poetry: An Anthology

“If you aren’t free of yourself how will you ever become yourself?”
― David Hinton, The Four Chinese Classics: Tao Te Ching, Analects, Chuang Tzu, Mencius

“Gazing at the Sacred Peak

What is this ancestor Exalt Mountain like?
Endless greens of north and south meeting

Where Changemaker distills divine beauty,
Where yin and yang cleave dusk and dawn.

Chest heaving breathes out cloud, and eyes
Open dusk bird-flight home. One day soon,

On the summit, peaks ranging away will be
small enough to hold, all in a single glance.

Tu Fu”
― David Hinton, Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry

“We are the empty awareness (empty mind) that watches identity rehearsing itself in thoughts and memories relentlessly coming and going. Eventually the stream of thought falls silent, and you inhabit empty mind, free of that center of identity -free, that is, of the self-absorbed and relentless process of thought that precludes CONTACT in our day to day experience. It is here that you inhabit the full depth of immediate.

Chinese poetry gets back near the process of nature by means of its vivid image, and its wealth of images. The prehistoric poets who created language discovered the whole harmonious framework of nature. We should avoid “is” and bring in a wealth of neglected English verbs.”
― David Hinton, The Wilds of Poetry: Adventures in Mind and Landscape

“Tu Fu’s wandering through the thousands of miles of ancestor peaks was always the Tao/Cosmos open to itself- ancestor wandering itself and gazing into itself; thinking itself and feeling itself, lamenting itself, and celebrating itself, writing poems about itself.”
― David Hinton, Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry

“Keep up self-definition and you’ll never be apparent.”
― David Hinton, The Four Chinese Classics: Tao Te Ching, Analects, Chuang Tzu, Mencius

“In perennial Absence you see mystery, and in perennial Presence you see appearance. Though the two are one and the same, once they arise, they differ in name.”
― David Hinton, The Four Chinese Classics: Tao Te Ching, Analects, Chuang Tzu, Mencius

“There’s an ancient legend that infuses China’s Yangtze and Yellow Rivers with cosmological dimensions. After flowing east and out to sea, the rivers ascend and rarify, becoming the Star River (Milky Way), crosses the heavens westward and descends into western mountains to form the headwaters of the rivers, a return to earth and the cycle. China’s rivers were an extension of the Milky Way, creating a cosmological cocoon and nestles humans into the ten thousand things, and prefigures the idea that the stars as embryonic origins of chi.”
― David Hinton, Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry

“Rather than simply obey political power and implore the spirits to shape your fate in positive ways, the question of wisdom arises, and the empowerment that wisdom offers: act wisely and good things happen, act unwisely and bad things happen.”
― David Hinton, I Ching: The Book of Change

“While native cultures had inhabited the Maine woods for ten thousand years and left the ecosystem intact, white colonizers devasted it in a matter of decades. Enlightenment science was showing how false traditional cosmology was and replacing it in intellectual history by various kinds of post-Christian/scientific pantheism-most notably Deism, which had been the prevailing conceptual framework among America’s intellectuals…including America’s Founding Fathers. Deism considered art and science to the true religion because those practices engaged us with the immediate reality of the cosmos and that reality itself was the divine. There were various versions of pantheism among Romantic poets and painters, for who the natural world evoked a profound sense of awe, awe they could only explain as a kind of religious experience.”
― David Hinton, The Wilds of Poetry: Adventures in Mind and Landscape

“Dharma companions filling mountains, a sangha forms of itself: chanting, sitting ch’an stillness. Looking out from distant city walls, people see only white clouds.”
― David Hinton, Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China

“They are the most profound questions possible, really, for at their deepest level they allow no answer. They simply pose the unsayable reality of contact, which is all question and all mystery-a moment in which the mind’s orienting certainties fail, even the certainty of self-identity, leaving one open to the experience of sheer immediacy. It is the experience of a mind perfectly emptied of all content, all the received explanations and assumptions about who we are and where we are; and so, a mind open to the fundamental reality of the material Cosmos in and of itself, open therefore to these very wilds we inhabit day by day, however rarely we are aware of that existential level of immediacy.”
― David Hinton, The Wilds of Poetry: Adventures in Mind and Landscape

“Amid spring mountains, alone, I set out to find you.
Axe strokes crack-crack, and quit. Quiet mystery

Deepens. I follow a stream up into last snow and ice
And beyond, dusk light aslant, to Stone Gate forests.

Deer roam all morning here, for you harm nothing.
Wanting nothing, you know chi gold and silver all

Night. Facing you on a whim in such dark, the way
Home lost- I feel it drifting, this whole empty boat.

Tu Fu”
― David Hinton, Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry

“Facing Snow

Thin slice of ascending light, radiant arc
Tipped aside bellied dark- the first moon

Appears, and barely risen beyond ancient
Frontier passes, edges into clouds. Silver,

Changeless, the Star River spreads across
Mountains empty in their own cold. Lucent

Frost dusts the courtyard, chrysanthemum
Blossoms clotted there with solemn dark.

Tu Fu”
― David Hinton, Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry

“Honor is a contagion deep as fear,”
― David Hinton, The Four Chinese Classics: Tao Te Ching, Analects, Chuang Tzu, Mencius

“And so, there is nothing to practice because we are always already enlightened, always already Absence somehow open to the world.”
― David Hinton, China Root: Taoism, Ch’an, and Original Zen

“Just do what you do, and then leave: such is the Way of heaven.”
― David Hinton, The Four Chinese Classics: Tao Te Ching, Analects, Chuang Tzu, Mencius

“Try to improve it and you ruin it. Try to hold it and you lose it.”
― David Hinton, The Four Chinese Classics: Tao Te Ching, Analects, Chuang Tzu, Mencius

“Autumn Begins Autumn begins unnoticed. Nights slowly lengthen, and little by little, clear winds turn colder and colder, summer’s blaze giving way. My thatch hut grows still. At the bottom stair, in bunchgrass, lit dew shimmers. We”
― David Hinton, Hunger Mountain: A Field Guide to Mind and Landscape

“Exalt Mountain was one of China’s five sacred peaks, and in its popular sense, Exalt-Mountain Ancestor refers to the mountain as a deity. But given the cosmological ways Tu Fu describes Exalt Mountain, it’s clear he sees something quite different. That mountain cosmology begins here in this poem with Changemaker, which also sounds like a kind of deity. But it is in fact Tao, that generative existence-tissue that is the maker of change. In gazing at the mountain, Tu Fu is gazing at a dramatic manifestation of the wild Taoist Cosmos; he sees Exalt Mountain as a center-point where space stretches endlessly away north and south, where the divine beauty of all existence is condensed into a single dramatic sight by Changemaker Tao. But changemaker, the Tao, is not separate from the mountains. Instead the mountain is an intensification or distillation of Tao.”
― David Hinton, Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry

“Words go on failing and failing,”
― David Hinton, The Four Chinese Classics: Tao Te Ching, Analects, Chuang Tzu, Mencius

“Thoreau made two attempts to climb Mt Ktaadn in Maine and failed because the mountain was smothered in wind-blown clouds, though it almost seems he found the raw wildness of the place as daunting and impassable as the billowing cloud-cover. It was on the descent that Thoreau’s experience of existential CONTACT occurred: a moment where all the explanations and assumptions fell away…his failure left him open to absorb unexpected implications of his disorienting experience on the mountain…his reason became “dispersed and shadowy, more thin and subtil, like the air” as he faced “vast, Titanic, inhuman Nature…”
― David Hinton, The Wilds of Poetry: Adventures in Mind and Landscape

“In bare philosophical outline, meditation begins with the practice of sitting quietly, attending to the rise and fall of breath, and watching thoughts similarly appear and disappear in a field of silent emptiness. From this attention to thought’s movement comes meditation’s first revelation: that we are not, as a matter of observable fact, our thoughts and memories. That is, we are not that center of identity we assume ourselves to be in our day-to-day lives, that identity-center defining us as fundamentally separate from the empirical Cosmos. Instead, we are an empty awareness that can watch identity rehearsing itself in thoughts and memories relentlessly coming and going. Suddenly, and in a radical way, Ch’an’s demolition of concepts and assumptions has begun. And it continues as meditation practice deepens.”
― David Hinton, China Root: Taoism, Ch’an, and Original Zen

“endeavor’s nobility is ability, action’s nobility is timing. When you never strive you never go wrong.”
― David Hinton, The Four Chinese Classics: Tao Te Ching, Analects, Chuang Tzu, Mencius

“Standing Alone

Empty skies. And beyond, one hawk.
Between river banks, two white gulls

Laze, wind-drifted. Fit for an easy kill,
To and fro, they follow contentment.

Grasses all frost-singed. Spiderwebs
Still hung. Heaven’s loom of origins

Tangling our human ways too, I stand
Facing sorrow’s ten thousand sources.

Tu Fu”
― David Hinton, Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry

“In Ch’an, the process of thoughts appearing and disappearing manifests Taoism’s generative cosmology, reveals it there within the mind. And with this comes the realization that the cosmology of Absence and Presence defines consciousness too, where thoughts are forms of Presence emerging from and vanishing back into Absence, exactly as the ten thousand things of the empirical world do. That is, consciousness is part of the same cosmological tissue as the empirical world, with thoughts emerging from the same generative emptiness as the ten thousand things.”
― David Hinton, China Root: Taoism, Ch’an, and Original Zen

“Returning Late

Past midnight, eluding tigers on the road, I return
Home in mountain darkness. Family asleep inside.

I watch the Northern Dipper drift low to the river,
And Venus lofting huge into empty space, radiant.

Holding a candle in the courtyard, I call for more
Light. A gibbon in the gorge, startled, shrieks once.

Old and tired, my hair white, I dance and sing out:
Rickety cane, no sleep… Catch me if you can!

Tu Fu”
― David Hinton, Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry

“In meditation, you can watch thoughts emerge from emptiness and return back to that emptiness. This leads first to the realization that you are separate from those thoughts, which we normally identify with self.”
― David Hinton, I Ching: The Book of Change

“Dawn Landscape

The last watch has sounded in the Amble-Awe.
Radiant color spreads above Solar-Terrace

Mountain, then cold sun clears high peaks.
Mist and cloud linger across layered ridges,

And earth split-open hides river sails deep.
Leaves clatter at heaven’s clarity. I listen,

And face deer at my bramble gate-so close
Here, we touch our own kind in each other.

Tu Fu”
― David Hinton, Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry

“8th Moon, 17th Night: Facing the Moon

The autumn moon is still round tonight.
In this river village, isolate old wanderer

Hoisting blinds, I return to its brilliance,
And propped on a cane, follow it further:

Radiance rousing hidden dragons, bright
Scatters of birds aflutter. Thatched study

Incandescent, I trust to this orange grove
Ablaze: clear dew aching with fresh light.


Tu Fu”
― David Hinton, Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry