Tuesday, March 14, 2023
11:00 AM - 12:15 PM
Royce Hall 154

The search for solitude and the preference to spend at least part of their lives away from others has been at the core of Chinese civilization ever since it began 5,000 years ago. It has been an essential part of all three major spiritual traditions in China：Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism, and it continues to be so today. Bill Porter will give a slide presentation and talk about how solitude has permeated all China’s major spiritual traditions in China and how it is seen by the Chinese themselves as an important part of their society and civilization.

Bill Porter was born in Los Angeles in 1943 and grew up in Northern Idaho. After a tour of duty with the US Army, he attended college at UC Santa Barbara, where he graduated with a degree in anthropology in 1970. While attending graduate school at Columbia University, he became interested in Buddhism, and in 1972 he 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. In 1993 he returned to America, and he has lived ever since in Port Townsend, Washington, where he has supported himself as an independent scholar. Over the past forty years, he has published thirty books of translations and accounts of his travels in China. In addition to two NEA translation fellowships, a PEN translation award, the inaugural Asian Literature Award of the American Literary Translators Association, he has also been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

This talk is part of the class Chinese C138 - Travel Writing in Premodern China. Open to public.

Sponsor（s）: Center for Chinese Studies