David Hinton

Hunger Mountain

 

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 insights he's absorbed during decades spent translating the classics of Chinese poetry and philosophy. His broad-ranging discussion encompasses everything from the immediacy of mountain landscape to the origins of consciousness and the Cosmos, from mountain geology and weather to Chinese landscape painting and dragon legends, from parenting to pictographic oracle-bone script and on to a family chutney recipe. In writing that combines plain-spoken clarity with mind-opening lyricism, Hinton offers a spiritual ecology that is profoundly ancient and at the same time resoundingly contemporary. Your view of the landscape—and of your place in it—may never be the same again.

 

                  — from the book jacket

 

                                       Best Books of 2012 List (The Guardian)

 

Shambhala

 

 

Praise for Hunger Mountain:

 

A gorgeous book, a book of power, the very opposite of mystical. If you have a special mountain in your life, you'll read it with understanding; if you don't, it will make you want to get one!

 

                        —Bill McKibbon

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One of the best books about mountains ever written . . . Check it out!

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                        —NPR

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Hunger Mountain is a beautiful and compelling meditation on consciousness and the cosmos through a series of peregrinations around and beyond the intricacies of Chinese philosophy and religion: Animist, Taoist, Buddhist. East and West are joined here by an American poet who is one of best scholars and translators of Chinese classical poetry. The calligraphs are signs for the road, the “ climbs” are a practice rich with minute particulars of the natural world lit up by being itself. The erudition is staggering, the spiritual aspiration profoundly moving. I am reminded of Thoreau's Walden, of Basho's Oku No Hosomichi. In the mind of the poet all times are contemporaneous was Ezra Pound's famous quip and indeed they are. We join Hinton watching the same moon Tu Fu did 1,200 years ago from his perch in the Green Mountains in Vermont. And travel light years away from planet earth into our interior landscapes as well. I couldn't put this guidebook down, into the night, a diamond moon over my shoulder and suddenly it was radiant dawn. A unique and dazzling achievement.

 

                        —Anne Waldman

 

 

                  — from the book jacket