Existence: A Story

by David Hinton

The meaning of life--as expressed in a single Chinese landscape painting: a new work of meditative philosophy by the renowned translator of the Chinese classics and author of Hunger Mountain. Join David Hinton on an exploration of the entire nature of reality--an ambitious project for such a compact book, and even more amazing when you see that this cosmic journey happens all within the exploration of a single Chinese landscape painting. The painting calledPeaceful-Distance Pavilionby Shih-t'ao (1642-1707) is, like other paintings in that genre, mostly space: one tiny figure, accompanied by an attendant, looks out over a vast landscape of mountains and clouds. But start looking into that space and, with the right guidance, what you end up seeing is profound. David Hinton is the perfect guide. He uses his knowledge of Chinese philosophy, poetry, art, language, and writing system to illuminate this painting's message, which is ultimately the story of the glorious dance between nothing and everything, between emptiness and existence. It's an enthralling journey that can change the way you look at the world, a journey for which David is a wise and eloquent guide."

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, China, Poetry, Art, Buddhism, Spirituality

152 pages, Paperback

Published August 9, 2016

About the author

David Hinton has published numerous books of poetry and essays, and many translations of ancient Chinese poetry and philosophy—all informed by an abiding interest in deep ecological thinking. This widely-acclaimed work has earned Hinton a Guggenheim Fellowship, numerous fellowships from NEA and NEH, and both of the major awards given for poetry translation in the United States: the Landon Translation Award (Academy of American Poets) and the PEN American Translation Award. Most recently, Hinton received a lifetime achievement award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Reviews

[Nikko · Rating 5 out of 5]

A couple months ago in the New York Review of Books, the great essayist Elliot Weinberger describes the author David Hinton as a "rare example of a literary Sinologist—that is, a classical scholar thoroughly conversant with, and connected to, contemporary literature in English. "

This latest work by Hinton demonstrates this with all the subtle power that the painting at the center of this work expresses. As short and focused as this book is, its a difficult book to summarize. Packed into this slim volume is an entire universe. The reader comes away with an almost tactile understanding of how the ancient Chinese calligraphers, poets, and landscape painters used their art as practice in the Ch'an sense. It demonstrates the relationship between thought and language. It shows the profound difference in view of time, space, reality that distinguish our modern-day thought processes with the ancients. While I have read lots of other books that talk about this, few left me with the real understanding of why this is and a taste of what that experience is like.

I read this in a day. This, like Hinton's other work, challenges the reader to break outside of our overly conditioned ideas which at times is not easy, but it is achievable and a very worthwhile effort.

This is an extraordinarily satisfying work and has left me this morning walking around thinking of little else.

[Steve Finegan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! If you're into Zen or Tao or Mindfulness or the mystery that is existence, do yourself a favor and read this gem.

[Leanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my second book by this author, after Hunger Mountain. I’m really interested in his work and it’s absolute mind trip to read him. In this case, he is looking at a famous Ming dynasty painting by scholar-artist Shitao and in looking at the painting, including translating the poem, Hinton uncovers a traditional Chinese understanding of being. Our being and the world and the world in our being. It’s incredibly evocative-- like reading a poem, it is world-opening stuff!

My big complaint is that this book-- just like Hunger Mountain-- conflates Zen Buddhism and Chinese daoism and it’s quite a problem because they are not the same thing and then you start to wonder about everything... it is confusing to mingle the terms and concepts to this extent without explanation.

As a translator I felt incredibly inspired and excited by the way he uses language. The Chinese thoroughly informs the English like a translation. --it’s incredible, I love him, and I want to explore
his translations next.

[retroj · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an enthralling deep dive into the mind of the Zen artist-philosopher. I came to this knowing a bit about Zen and almost nothing about Chinese landscape art or poetry, and came away from it in awe of this artistic tradition. Hinton treats his subject on multiple levels, from the broadest first impression to more and more refined and culturally informed, and integrates these levels of interpretation showing how they inform each other. However I didn't ever feel that he had gone on ahead into esoterica that I could not grasp. He laid a clear path into the heart of the philosophy with all the needed background for a western reader to follow. I will be looking to read more from David Hinton, probably this again some day, and will be recommending this book to anybody interested in gaining a deeper understanding and appreciation of Zen Buddhism, Chinese poetry, and art.

[Craig Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably going to take a break from reading Hinton after this: he circles back to the same points whether translating (The Awakened Cosmos), chronicling his nature hikes (Hunger Mountain), or, in this book reflecting on Chinese landscape painting. The basic points concerning the relationship between consciousness and the world around us are pretty much the same book to book and they're basically brilliant. The weaknesses are the same, too: a real tendency to oversimplify the "Western" approaches to language and science. If I'd read this before the others, it'd probably be five stars, especially because the illustrations are gorgeous, and I share his--and the classical Chinese painters' and poets'--love of mountains.

[Barry Wightman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Transformative. A deep meditation, a mindful walk through ancient Chinese painting and calligraphy, on what it means to be alive. Absence, presence. Dragon rustles. Change.

A book to savor, return to again and again in the coming years.

[Erika Kraus · Rating 5 out of 5]

I won this novel in the Goodreads giveaway! Mindfulness is thoroughly developed, and a strong sense of self is developed all from one picture. Amazing!

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Covers much of the same ground as Hunger Mountain.

[Grady · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a profound book, and I found it incredibly frustrating - surely my problem, not the book’s. On one level, it’s an interpretation of Shih T’ao’s obscure landscape painting, Broad Distance Pavilion, and, through that, an explication of Chinese landscape painting and thinking about the nature of existence. The painting shows a sage and a servant looking from a high point out over a clouded landscape to distant ridges; a poem on the right side of the painting describes being far away from a distant ruined home place and from court officials. As Hinton says,

There’s mystery everywhere in this painting because it isn’t a painting about someone gazing into a beautiful landscape, as it might appear. It is, instead, a painting about existence, about our open and immediate experience of existence itself. All of Chinese spirituality and art is grounded in this experience.

On another level, the book is 129 pages of the author explaining that ‘all is one’, with crucial nuggets on historical context and shafts of insight into Chinese linguistic and poetic theory appearing unpredictably. It’s not written from outside the tradition, assessing it (however sympathetically) analytically, but from within the mystic/philosophical framework that Hinton says is the key to understanding Broad Distance Pavilion. The book is composed of 16 short chapters, but they circle back on themselves, always returning to the same core concept - Presence and Absence/emptiness as shared components of the underlying fabric of Existence. This gives the book a meditative quality; it practices what it describes. I’m guessing it may be most accessible for a reader who has practiced Ch’an or Zen and finds it compelling.

I recently finished Oliver Sacks’ memoir, On the Move: A Life. In a late chapter, ‘A New Vision of the Mind’, he describes conversations with the elderly but still brilliant Francis Crick about a ‘neurobiological theory of consciousness’ - interesting to Sacks because of its depiction of visual awareness as a ‘series of snapshots’ that can, if the neurological machinery goes awry, create glitches in the way a person experiences the world. (I’m sure there are more direct paths to be introduced to this concept, but this was mine). Much of Existence: A Story is focused on the mystery of Being arising from and returning to Non-being, and on the meditative challenge of returning one’s mind - or perhaps better to say, keeping one’s mind in -the eternal pregnant moment in which Presence is about to arise from Absence, that condition being the essence of Existence. But I suppose one way to apply a neurobiological theory of consciousness is to say that we don’t actually know there is such a thing as Absence - there are rather limits beyond which material objects or changes are just too small or too quick or too slow or too large to be picked up by the ‘frame rate’ of our consciousness. In that sense, meditating on emptiness feels like listening very hard to pick up sounds on the edge of hearing - nothing wrong with doing that, but it isn't putting you in touch with anything more fundamentally real (or unreal) than regular perception.

Less abstractly, I have a parallel wonder about Hinton’s discussion about Chinese landscapes as a philosophical expression and practice of emptiness. I love big landscapes - and by that I mean actual landscapes, especially mountain ranges. When I’ve tried to sketch them (and I’m a total amateur), one of the aspects I’ve found most crucial is how to convey space - which is to say, distance, but, even better when terrain has contour, volume. That volume is magical to experience; it’s one reason I love snow, and fog, and mist, the way they articulate it - but volume in a landscape is never empty: in clear weather, it’s full of light and air. I’m sure some philosophers and artists experience that space as ‘empty’, but I don’t understand how an entire tradition could, unless most of the members are painting from a convention, not from the actual experience of big landscapes.

[Sem · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'd rather not add an unfinished book but this will serve as a reminder to never read another David Hinton - not translations, not 'philosophy' (in reality, word salad), not analyses of Chinese poetry, not reviews of his work, not introductions by him to the works of other writers, not mentions of his name, not photographs.... Nothing. Anywhere. For all time. In fact, if so much as a hint of the term 'existence-tissue' should reach my ears again I might, as Thurber said, slit it from guggle to zatch and feed it to the geese. I seem to recall having a rant here not long ago about writers who invent a term - possibly while stoned out - for an idea which would be just as well-served by more common-or-garden and less intrusive phraseology and then proceed to beat the reader about the head with it several dozen times - or, in this case, 161 - in the course of a very short book. In other words, and not to put too fine a point on it, I hated this and finishing it would cause me unimaginable pain.

[John Fredrickson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This 129-page book contains multitudes, which is meant as a strong accolade as well as a bit of a pun. Inside it, Hinton manages to capture and convey a very different way of apprehending reality from that which we westerners experience. It is eminently readable while still being quite challenging to comprehend, which seems contradictory, but is not.

Beginning with a painting by Shih T'ao, Hinton explores the nature of reality from a Zen/Taoist perspective while discussing the artistic practices of Chinese landscape painting and how the empty spaces within them correspond naturally to Taoist notions of emptiness and presence and the flow of Qi. Along the way he also gets into the various script styles of Chinese writing and calligraphy, and how the scripts used by some ancient poets also reflect and correlate with the emptiness and presence dynamics discussed.

This is a mind-bender of a book, but is very much worth the read. I will be reading it again.

[Thomson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lovely project that I philosophically support but stylistically couldn't quite get into. Hinton is a true scholar of Classical Chinese language and thought. He articulates some deep ideas about how a nondualist metaphysics manifests (and in turn is manifested in) classical Chinese forms of language, art, and culture. This was cool to me because it elaborates on a vague thesis I've long held: that Chinese culture and thought is in some inherent sense "vibier" and more poetic for reasons that trace back to language and founding philosophies, and that this characteristic is key to understanding the relation between East and West even today.

All that being said, the prose very quickly got dry and repetitive for me, to such an extent that I couldn't be bothered to even finish the book. Would still recommend checking it out if you're interested in the topic.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

For anyone who has read the Tao de Ching or is interested in Taoism or Ch'an (Zen), this book is a must read. Part philosophy, part poetry, part philology, this work dives through existence. Through painting, calligraphy, poetry, and more, Hinton explains and unveils the insight behind Lao Tzu's most famous work, as well as some of the insights that koans have to teach.

A mere 227 quick pages, you can read this book in a weekend.

[Andrew Wigdor · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s incredible that Hinton makes it crystal clear that the English language lacks the capacity to adequately represent (not that any language could, but you get what I’m saying) existence, and yet, he finds a way to get as close as one possibly can.

[David N. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hinton, a world renowned scholar of Chinese poetry and art, gives a thorough account of how a single work of art can be read as a meditation on some of the deepest aspects of Chinese philosophy. Wonderful book.

[Jeff Kilpatrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every chapter is a gem

[Jon Sallée · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading for students of Chan and Zen.

[Luke Horvath · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is an incredible movement of chi.

[Larry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have always enjoyed David Hinton's translations of classical Chinese poetry. But this exquisite book is of a different level. Using the interpretation of a single painting as a recurring starting point, the book is an excellent primer into classical Chinese painting, calligraphy, poetry, and a touch of philosophy, what they have in common and how they complement each other. Along the way, Hinton provides priceless insights into the way language and grammar affect perception, anthropomorphism, the challenges of translation, and contrasts between Chinese and European literary and artistic viewpoints.

I know that there are a lot of, shall we say, linguistic literalists who take issue with the accuracy of Hinton's translations. This book goes a long way toward understanding his strategies for interpreting a work, whether of poetry or painting. It's not a pronouncement of how to view and read Chinese art, but one very thoughtful person's deeply felt insights, and for this I found it to be the most thought-provoking work I've read in a long time. It's made me reconsider and deepen some of my own views of Chinese art.

Highly recommended to anyone interested in painting or poetry, Chinese or otherwise.

[A. Boissevain · Rating 3 out of 5]

Too ma y words

Too many words, but exquisite painting s
Hard to read on a Device. Taoism and Chan are not the same....

[Julie Barsamian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want to read this book again and again as if it was the first time