Bill Porter

This is a documentary of a trip into the Sacred Mountains of China with Red Pine (Bill Porter) to meet Buddhist and Taoist monks and nuns who live as hermits and practice their religion. These are some of the people about whom Red Pine wrote in his book, Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits.

The film follows Bill’s adventures as a child of a bank robber, raised in a gilded household, who turned his back on American devotion to materialism and went off to live in monasteries and mountains in Taiwan. He pursued a fascination with Buddhism and poetry and traveled to remote regions of China to rediscover an ancient tradition of mountain hermits vital to Chinese culture.

25 years ago, American author Bill Porter (a.k.a. Red Pine) went to the Zhongnan Mountains to seek out modern Chinese hermits. His resulting book, Road to Heaven, was a touchstone for many westerners wondering what remained of Buddhist and Daoist asceticism in China. Now, for the first time, Bill Porter revisits Zhongnan to seek out those who seek from within, living quiet lives of deep devotion in some of the world's most stunning locales.

In the mountains and monasteries of China, four translators and writers recount the life and work of Tang dynasty hermit poet Han Shan (Cold Mountain).