Red Pine (author)

Early life

In an interview with Andy Ferguson for Tricycle Magazine in 2000, Red Pine revealed some of the details of his early life. His father, Arnold Porter, grew up on a cotton farm in Arkansas. At an early age, Arnold became part of a notorious bank robbing gang that robbed banks from the south northwards to Michigan. In a shoot out with the police, all the gang members were killed except Porter who was wounded and subsequently sent to prison. Nevertheless, after six years he was pardoned by the governor of Michigan and released; an inheritance from the sale of the family farm allowed him to enter the hotel business and to become a multimillionaire. Arnold moved to Los Angeles, where Bill was born in 1943. Later the family moved to a mountainous area near Coeur D'Alene, Idaho. Arnold Porter became involved in Democratic Party politics and head of the Democratic Party in California, developing close associations with the Kennedy family.

Red Pine's early life was one of wealth and privilege. He and his siblings were sent to elite private schools, but he considered the schools to be phony and too wrapped in wealth, ego, and power. Eventually his father divorced his mother and subsequently they lost everything. While his brother and sister found it difficult to live with less money, Pine was relieved when this happened.

After receiving a draft notice in 1964, he voluntarily enlisted and served a three-year Army tour in Germany. Pine served in Germany for three years as a medical clerk, which paid for his college education at UC Santa Barbara where he obtained a degree in anthropology. When he encountered Buddhism, the tenets were quite clear to him and he understood exactly what it was about. Following graduation, he went on to graduate studies in language (Chinese) and anthropology at Columbia University, but dropped out in 1972 to go to the Fo Guang Shan in Taiwan, a Buddhist monastery. He studied for a year at Fo Guang Shan with master Hsing Yun.

After a year he left and spent the next two and half years at the College of Chinese Culture, a smaller, less crowded monastery outside of Taipei in the mountains, where he became a graduate student in philosophy. He took classes in Taoism, Chinese art, and philosophy; his future wife, Ku, was a classmate. Unhappy with academic life, he left to go to Hai Ming Temple, a monastery 20 km south of Taipei where he stayed for 21⁄2 years. Wu Ming was the head Linji Chan monk, Chiang Kai-Shek's personal master. Here he simply studied and meditated: "I had got hold of all these classic texts with both Chinese and English characters and I went through most of the sutras."