John Blofeld - War Years and After

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 Chan (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, earned 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."