Li Po (A.D., 701-762) lived in T ang Dynasty China, but his influence has spanned the centuries: the pure lyricism of his poems has awed readers in China and Japan for over a millennium, and through Ezra Pound s translations, Li Po became central to the modernist revolution in the West. His work is suffused with Taoism and Ch an (Zen) Buddhism, but these seem not so much spiritual influences as the inborn form of his life."

Having masterfully translated a wide range of ancient Chinese poets and philosophers, David Hinton is uniquely qualified to offer the definitive contemporary English version of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching. Like all of his translations, Hinton's translation of the Tao Te Ching is mind-opening, presenting startling new dimensions in this widely-influential text. He shows how Lao Tzu's spirituality is structured around the generative life-force, for example, and that this system of thought weaves the human into natural process at the deepest levels of being, thereby revealing the Tao Te Ching as an...

David Hinton, whose much-acclaimed translations of Li Po and Tu Fu have become classics, now completes the triumvirate of China's greatest poets with The Selected Poems of Wang Wei.

In his first retrospective volume of poetry in English, two of Bei Dao's previous books -- Forms of Distance (1994) and Landscape Over Zero (1996) -- are gathered together in one bilingual paperbook edition. At The Sky's Edge: Poems 1991-1996 marks a pivotal point in the poet's oeuvre, presenting the increasingly lyrical, meditative poems written in the years following his banishment from China in 1989. Translated into twenty-five languages, Bei Dao's work has long been appreciated internationally, but is just recently gaining a larger audience in the U.S. At The Sky's Edge becomes Bei Dao's...

Revered for millennia in the Chinese spiritual tradition, Chuang Tzu stands alongside the Tao Te Ching as a founding classic of Taoism. The Inner Chapters are the only sustained section of this text widely believed to be the work of Chuang Tzu himself, dating to the fourth century B.C.E. Witty and engaging, spiced with the lyricism of poetry, Chuang Tzu's Taoist insights are timely and eternal, profoundly concerned with spiritual ecology. Indeed, the Tao of Chuang Tzu was a wholesale rejection of a human-centered approach. Zen traces its sources back to these Taoist roots --...

The earliest and most extensive literary engagement with wilderness in human history, Mountain Home is vital poetry that feels utterly contemporary. China's tradition of "rivers-and-mountains" poetry stretches across millennia. This is a plain-spoken poetry of immediate day-to-day experience, and yet seems most akin to China's grand landscape paintings. Although its wisdom is ancient, rooted in Taoist and Zen thought, the work feels utterly contemporary, especially as rendered here in Hinton's rich and accessible translations. Mountain Home collects poems from 5th-...

Come along with David Hinton on a series of walks through the wild beauty of Hunger Mountain, near his home in Vermont excursions informed by the worldview he s imbibed from his many years translating the classics of Chinese poetry and philosophy. His broad-ranging discussion offers insight on everything from the mountain landscape to the origins of consciousness and the Cosmos, from geology to Chinese landscape painting, from parenting to pictographic oracle-bone script, to a family chutney recipe. It s a spiritual ecology that is profoundly ancient and at the same time resoundingly...