Jane English

Jane English, born 1942 in Boston, Massachusetts , is a photographer, artist, and author who holds a doctorate in particle physics and is also a licensed hot-air balloon pilot and amateur radio emergency communications volunteer. She has lived in California and Colorado, and currently resides in Vermont.

She is best known as co-creator of bestselling translations of the Tao Te Ching and the Zhuangzi Inner Chapters, featuring her photography and design accompanying translation and calligraphy by Gia-Fu Feng, in the books Lao Tsu / Tao Te Ching, first published in 1972, and Chuang Tsu / Inner Chapters, first published in 1974, which she republished in several editions including gender-neutral versions in 2011 and 2014.

English has continued to create and publish books, wall calendars, notecards, art and more, exploring nature and consciousness through Eastern and indigenous thought, art, and traditions. Chungliang Al Huang has collaborated with her on several projects.

Early life Jane English grew up in a small New England town, in a colonial house built in 1765. Her grandfather was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, her father was an electrical engineer, and her mother was a homemaker and avid gardener. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Physics from Mount Holyoke College in 1964, and began pursuing photography while at the graduate school of the University of Wisconsin–Madison where she completed a Ph.D. in particle physics in 1970.

In photography she was following in the footsteps of her grandfather, Walter H. James (1873-1965), her grandmother Ida Rachel Butterfield James (1875-1966), and her great-aunt Lucy Ardena Butterfield (1871-1955). Their black-and-white photographs of New England towns, landscapes, and farm scenes were on the walls of her childhood home. Their negatives are now in the collection of the University of New Hampshire library, and with her brother Ben English, Jr., she edited a two-volume collection of their photos and journals, Our Mountain Trips, Part 1: 1899–1908, published in 2005, and Our Mountain Trips, Part 2: 1909–1926, published in 2007.

In graduate school a boyfriend introduced her to darkroom techniques at the student union, and together they exhibited their photographs and sold prints at art shows. She chose to work in black-and-white images for many years. She later wrote that photography was a welcome alternative to her experiences in graduate physics departments and laboratories, where she was the only woman at the time. While in graduate school she also explored the works of Alan Watts and did an encounter group weekend, and sought answers to her questions about quantum physics and consciousness.

Stillpoint While working at Lawrence Lab she had been invited by her housemate and "landlady" to visit "a meditation place in Los Gatos". That turned out to be Stillpoint, an intentional community in the Santa Cruz Mountains where she met Gia-Fu Feng. Feng founded Stillpoint in 1966 as an unconventional Taoist meditation center and clothing-optional commune, where he led personal growth and community planning sessions using techniques based on Gestalt therapy and encounter groups. He was 23 years her senior but, as she later wrote, they immediately felt a special connection. During graduate school she had been through two live-in relationships with fellow physicists, in which she felt like "an anomaly: a colleague, yet also a part of the group of girlfriends and wives", but this would be something completely different.

She became co-director of Stillpoint, and in January 1971 they also began their collaboration on the first of two bestselling books. Feng had decided to translate the Tao Te Ching by Laozi (Lao Tsu) for discussion at the Stillpoint daily meetings. There his drafts were contemplated and polished by Jane and other Stillpointers, for whom those sessions were much like an ongoing seminar in ancient Chinese philosophy, and it soon became clear this would be his next publication. That work continued as the community migrated from California to Vermont and then Colorado. Lippe threw herself into detailed polishing of the translation, working with Feng by mail, and carefully shepherded English's design through publication under the Vintage Books imprint. Meanwhile, as the Stillpointers wintered in Mineral Hot Springs, Colorado, English shot a roll of film in the nearby Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve from which she later selected twelve photos for their next book, a translation of the Zhuangzi (Chuang Tsu) Inner Chapters. and Chuang Tsu / Inner Chapters in 1974. In New York the prominent Willard Gallery exhibited photos and calligraphy from the first book. The national Time magazine described it as "the Tao Te Ching gussied up with photographs", but as Lippe later wrote "until it was 'gussied up with photographs,' the Tao Te Ching had been around for 2,500 years and Time magazine hadn't bothered to review it."

When they negotiated the contract for the first book, Feng initially wanted it to be under his name only, with her receiving just a one-time fee for use of the photos. She insisted on being compensated and credited equally. This was not an easy position for a woman to take at the time, especially given their difference in age and status, but eventually he agreed. and Chuang Tsu / Inner Chapters would also become the bestselling translation of that book, selling more than 150,000 copies as of the release of the 35th anniversary edition.

Traveling teachers "The farther you go, the less you know" - Lao Tsu / Tao Te Ching

Later in 1972 the Stillpoint group settled in Manitou Springs near the foot of Pike's Peak, renting until 1973 when English and Feng used their royalty advance as part of a downpayment on a large house there. The community grew and thrived in and around that home until 1977, when it moved to a bucolic rural area near Wetmore, Colorado.

Esalen, Fysiks, and other quests Esalen and Green Gulch Farm In the summer of 1974 Feng and English were invited to visit friends and teach for a month at Esalen Institute. At the end of that month they separated due to ongoing tensions between them, and Feng returned to Stillpoint alone. Under state common law they remained legally married. In 2020 when an interviewer asked about her "ex-husband", English explained the correct term since Feng's death in 1985 was in fact "late husband".

Soon thereafter she participated in a gathering of physicists at the Lawrence Berkeley lab, called the Fundamental Fysiks Group, where she contributed to discussion of the implications of modern physics, especially quantum theory, in how consciousness and energy might be related. While there she again met up with Capra, who was also participating and would soon become involved with Esalen. Gary Zukav was the group's primary connection to Esalen, and drew on the results of those meetings at Berkeley and conferences he organized at Esalen as he wrote The Dancing Wu Li Masters, published in 1979.

Human Potential, Cesarean Born, and more From 1976 to 1978 she often stayed in Mendocino, California, where she helped John Heider and his wife Anne Heider establish the Human Potential School while continuing to pursue her photography. She had been friends with Anne since they were Girl Scouts and in private school together in Massachusetts. By coincidence, just before English met Gia-Fu Feng, Anne had learned tai chi from Feng at Esalen and modeled the postures for his first book, while John led encounter groups there under William Schutz.

John Heider's practice had since evolved toward a less confrontational approach he was calling the "Tao of Encounter". He detailed this evolution in two essay collections, Life on the Group Room Floor: An Introduction to Human Potential Theory in 1976 and Human Potential Papers: 1968–1997. His books The Tao of Leadership (1985) and The Tao of Daily Living (2000) recommend the Feng and English Lao Tsu / Tao Te Ching and Capra's Tao of Physics. Anne Heider would go on to earn a doctorate at Stanford University in 1981 and became a prominent conductor and singer in Chicago, focused on the spiritual aspects of classical music.

In 1977 English went on a solitary month-long meditation and vision quest at a cabin in the Mendocino woods. In 1978 while staying with Stillpoint friends Judith Bolinger and Chris Fessenden at their San Francisco home, English lost years of work when her darkroom in Mendocino burned down.

While living in San Francisco and Berkeley, she participated in the 1979 International Transpersonal Conference, exhibiting art inspired by the topic, and studied at the California Institute of Integral Studies where she also taught a workshop in 1981 titled Explorations of Physics and Consciousnes. After moving to Marin County, she co-organized the 1982 and 1983 Bay Area Tarot Symposiums, then attended the 1983 International Transpersonal Conference in Davos, Switzerland, and from there went on a personal ten-day vision quest in Basque areas of France and Spain. She frequently returned to Esalen to study shamanic practices under Michael Harner from 1983 to 1987. During that time she also founded a publishing business, Earth Heart. and in three books, Mount Shasta: Where Heaven and Earth Meet, with writer Jenny Coyle, Mount Shasta Reflections, with writer Renee Casterline, and Mount Shasta's Black Butte, with writer Bonnie Eddy.

In 1991 she also began designing and producing a Tao Calendar and notecards, featuring quotes and black-and-white photographs from Lao Tsu / Tao Te Ching and later from Chuang Tsu / Inner Chapters as well. At first she relied on halftone film purchased from the original book publisher because her negatives had burned in the 1978 fire, but as she acquired and mastered then-new desktop publishing technology she was able to digitize Feng's calligraphy and use it with new photographs as well. She continues to publish that calendar every year.

The Lao Tsu / Tao Te Ching with photographs had surpassed one million copies in sales, so she easily persuaded the publisher to release a twenty-fifth anniversary edition in 1997. It featured a foreword by Lippe titled "What Constitutes a Necessary Book?", commentary by Rowena Pattee Kryder, and an introduction by Chungliang Al Huang. The tipi at her home represented her continuing exploration of "indigenous concepts of Tao", some of which she describes in her 1999 book Fingers Pointing to the Moon. That book also includes a statistical analysis of tarot cards, more on cesarean birth, her background in photography, her paintings, her thoughts on science and consciousness, and other areas she had explored up to that point in her life. and where her brother Ben had been deeply involved with volunteer projects like the trail crew since the 1950s. served on the Town of Calais Emergency Management Committee, and worked with the Town of Calais to ensure radio communications coverage for all local services due to poor cellular coverage in the region.

She also volunteered at EarthWalk Vermont, its successor LetsEarthWalk.org, and similar programs "where children go to school out in the woods one day per week." participated in Calais Conservation Commission meetings, and exhibited her photography and other art at local museums, crafts fairs, and arts events.

The Tao of projects In Vermont she completed several book projects begun in California, including a reprint of her 1997 Chuang Tsu: Inner Chapters, a Companion to the Tao Te Ching in 2002, and two of the books about Mount Shasta in 2003 and 2004. She then embarked on new projects, beginning with a 35th anniversary edition of the Chuang Tsu book, published in 2008 with more new photos and an introduction by Chungliang Al Huang, as well as an audiobook version narrated by Huang released in 2014. while the new Chuang Tsu: Inner Chapters, a Companion to the Tao Te Ching was published by a small press, Hay House.

During this time her annual Tao Calendar was transformed with full color photographs, and as a small sideline in which she found deep meaning she began preparing and selling sets of yarrow stalks for I Ching divination, obtaining the yarrow from local fields, her own garden, and from Foster Farms Botanicals.

A Rainbow of Tao, published in 2018, includes a foreword by Chungliang Al Huang. It updates her autobiography, explains and illustrates her transition to color photography in Shasta and Vermont, and offers a "retrospective story" of her "journey with Tao". It introduces and discusses concepts of Tao in ancient China and in indigenous cultures around the world, as she attempts to grasp "its true nature — the fullness of all that is."

Publications