Road to Heaven

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From Kirkus Reviews , May 1, 1993 Porter, who as ``Red Pine'' has written several studies of Eastern religions (The Zen Teachings of Bodhidharma, 1989, etc.-- not reviewed), now clambers over the Chugnan mountains of central China in search of solitary mystics and saints. The author sets out in the spring of 1989 with photographer Steven Johnson, and immediately runs up against Beijing's official line that hermits no longer exist in China. But of course they do, and by bumping from mountain to mountain and knocking on one monastery door after another, Porter ferrets out nearly two dozen examples of what he calls ``the happiest and wisest people in China.'' Some readers may balk at Porter's description, for while a number of the hermits--mostly elderly Buddhist monks, though a few are nuns, young, or Taoist--radiate bliss, others talk of loneliness or sorrow. And while some offer simple truths (``If you don't practice, you achieve nothing''), others bat away Porter's questions (`` `What sort of practice do you do?'... Chi-Ch'eng: `I just pass the time' ''), or slip from truth to truism (``If someone is drowning and you can't swim, it doesn't do any good to jump in yourself''). But this matters little, since the hermits are charming and, in any case, the bulk of Porter's narrative consists not of hermit-chat but of a loose blend of history and travelogue. Porter unfolds a dizzying panorama of cliffs and valleys, crumbling monasteries and canny abbots, all the while discoursing on the rise of Taoism, its encounter with Buddhism, the lives of past hermits, the outlines of Tantra. Lessons emerge: the value of silence; the need to balance inner practice with community service; the differing aims of hermits, with some of them questing after immortality, others seeking escape from illusion. As travelogue/history, cluttered; as ethnographic resource, unique--and as for those hermits, they're the salt of the earth. (Thirty-three b&w photographs) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The hermit's life is not all warm and fuzzy
Amazon.com Reviewer: A reader from Cedar Hills, Utah, October 16, 1999

Unlike most books on Taoism, Buddhism and Zen this book is not philosophically cute, it doesn't warm the mind, and it's photographs don't make you wish you were on the next plane to China. This book just is. It taught me that being a Chinese hermit is sitting on a dirt floor in a cold, damp, stone hut with a leaky roof and snow, not rose petals, blowing around outside. Where other books left me with images of silk robes, and sitting cross-legged on bamboo mats in beautiful pagodas, this book slapped me in the face with a muddy, wet rag. Even the pictures were in black and white and although the hermits radiated an inner beauty and peace, their surroundings looked so bleak and inhospitable. I got a bang out of their disdain and boredom with tourists, and I now respect these wise and wonderful hermits all the more for the physical harshness of their living conditions and the clarity of their minds. As it was with one brilliantly in-tune hermit: "While he was talking, the gruel boiled over, and the watchdog was invited in to clean it up". He then concluded his fascinating discourse with the author with these words, "I'm just a mountain man, you know. I just string words together. They don't necessarily make any sense. How about some hot peppers in your potatoes?" For my little, insignificant mind anyway, raw Zen and raw Taoism.