Name John Blofeld Role Writer | ||
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Books Bodhisattva of Compass, The Chinese art of tea, Taoism, The Tantric mysticism of Tibet, My Journey in Mystic China |
Meeting the taoist immortals john blofeld
John Eaton Calthorpe Blofeld (Born Anthony, 2 April 1913 – 7 June 1987) was a British writer on Asian thought and religion, especially Taoism and Chinese Buddhism.
Contents
- Meeting the taoist immortals john blofeld
- Th et tao john blofeld
- Early life
- War years and after
- Personal life
- Selected works
- References

Th et tao john blofeld
Early life

Blofeld was born in London in 1913. In his youth, he happened to come across a small statue of Gautama Buddha and, without knowing what it was, he felt a great passion to possess it, and then privately offered it flowers and prostrated before it every night. Experiences like this led Blofeld to believe in reincarnation, and that he had been a Buddhist in China in a previous life. He was educated at Haileybury College, then Downing College, Cambridge University where he read natural sciences but did not complete his degree. Instead he left in his second year for travels to China. From 1932 to 1935 he lived in Hong Kong, teaching English at the Munsang College at Kai Tak Bun, Kowloon City
War years and after

Returning to Hong Kong in September 1937, he mostly resided in and traveled around China until 1949, visiting monasteries and all the sacred mountains and talking to Mongolian lamas, Zen masters, Taoist sages, and others. He lived for some time in Peking, and traveled through Asia (Tibet, Mongolia, China, India, and Burma) to visit the places where those religions lived within their practitioners. He talked to Taoist eremites (hermits), spent time in monasteries and experienced how alive the spiritual culture of China was in this period. Blofeld became a pupil of Hsu Yun but actually received training in Ch'an (Zen) meditation from Hsu Yun's pupils at a monastery near Kunming, Yunnan. He also received Vajrayana teachings.
Starting in 1937, he traveled around south China and southeast Asia, visiting Guilin, Hanoi, Kunming (where he spent ten months meditating in the Hua Ting monastery), and eventually returned to Hong Kong to resume teaching at the Min Sheng Academy. But after several months there, he returned to England in 1939, to enroll in the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, where he studied Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Malaysian. His academic studies were again interrupted, this time by World War II. After one year of studies, he enlisted in counterintelligence (otherwise he would have been conscripted without a choice of which service to enter), and was soon promoted and sent to the British Embassy in Chongqing as cultural attache, on the basis of his proficiency in Chinese.
When the war ended, Blofeld returned to England and, in six months, received a master's degree in literature at the University of Cambridge. In 1946, he flew to Hebei. He had a Chinese National Government grant to study Tang Dynasty Buddhism, and taught English at Shi Fan University.
Seeing that a Communist takeover was imminent, Blofeld fled Beijing with his pregnant wife. He then taught English in Hong Kong (1949-1951) and Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok (1951-1961). During these years he also visited Darjeeling to study with Nyingma teachers including Dudjom Rinpoche and Dodrupchen Rinpoche.
Blofeld worked for the United Nations (ECAFE, later ESCAP - Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific) (1961-1974), and then retired. In his later years, he conducted extensive lecture tours of America and Canada (1978-1980), and subsequently studied Chinese composition and literature.
His studies and his collected experiences with the sages and mystics of China are of special interest, because he entered this realm in an era before the Cultural Revolution which aimed at annihilating all ties to the old feudal Chinese identity.
His own view on the practices and beliefs he encountered was always marked by admiration of this lived spirituality. In the beginnings of his travels and studies, he was not very familiar with the native languages, and held a skeptical position against the shamanistic elements of those religions. But as his studies dove deeper into the complex symbolism of Asian thought, he developed a broader view, and became himself a deeply spiritual man. Blofeld mentored Red Pine in his translation work. According to Red Pine, Blofeld "was a very sincere Buddhist who practiced every night for several hours and loved what he did. I don't think he ever stopped learning."
Personal life
At age 34, Blofeld married Change Mei-fang, of whom he wrote, “She was half Manchu and half Chinese ... She was a woman of excellent character, intelligent and capable, but she was extremely argumentative! This goes to show that the old saying, 'Heaven punishes the guilty', is not just an empty slogan.”
His first child was a son, named Ming Deh (“Bright Virtue”), born in Hong Kong the year he fled the Communist takeover of Beijing. A year later, his daughter, Shueh Chan (“Snow Beauty”) was born.
He died of cancer at age 74 in Bangkok, Thailand. His ashes occupy a place of honor in a Chinese Guan Yin temple he had helped build in 1951.
He left a son and daughter who currently reside in Spain and Chesham. He has four granddaughters and a grandson.