In this episode, Red Pine (Bill Porter) and I discuss his most recent chapbook titled A Day in the Life, which includes his translation of two Mahayana sutras: “The Empty Bowl” and “The Diamond Sutra.” While the latter sutra is famous, the Empty Bowl has hitherto not been translated into English. Bill considers these sutras as a matching pair because both begin with monks going on their alms rounds as they engage in a discussion of two core Mahayana teachings: emptiness and compassion.
Bill Porter assumes the pen name Red Pine for his translation work. He was born in Los Angeles in 1943, grew up in the Idaho Panhandle, served a tour of duty in the US Army, graduated from the University of California with a degree in anthropology, and attended graduate school at Columbia University. Uninspired by the prospect of an academic career, he dropped out of Columbia and moved to a Buddhist monastery in Taiwan. After four years with the monks and nuns, he struck out on his own and eventually found work at English-language radio stations in Taiwan and Hong Kong, where he interviewed local dignitaries and produced more than a thousand programs about his travels in China. His translations have been honored with a number of awards, including two NEA translation fellowships, a PEN Translation Prize, and the inaugural Asian Literature Award of the American Literary Translators Association. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship 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. More recently, Porter received the 2018 Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation bestowed by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Port Townsend, Washington.
"The Unsurpassed Dharma of the Oceanic Samadhi"