Oral history interview with Jane English

Oral history interview with Jane English

Jane English speaks of growing up in the Boston, Massachusetts area, attending Mount Holyoke College, receiving her Ph.D. in physics at the University of Wisconsin in 1970 and a post-doctoral appointment at the Lawrence Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley. She describes meeting and later marrying Gia-fu Feng at the Stillpoint Meditation Center, a spiritual commune in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Elizabeth Kent Gay, “Kenty,” whom Gia-fu had met at the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology in Menlo Park, California, offered them housing for the summer of 1971 in Kents Corner, Calais, Vermont, and she describes traveling there by caravan with other Stillpoint members, their daily outdoor Tai chi practice, exchanges with old-time Vermonters, and visiting with Trungpa Rinpoche at Karme Choling in Barnet, Vermont. She provides detail about the creation that summer of their best-selling edition of the Tao Te Ching, a collaboration of Gia-fu’s translations of the original text and Chinese calligraphy with her photographs, and about its publication. She goes on to describe parting ways with Gia-fu in 1974, living in Mount Shasta, California, and concludes the interview with discussion of her explorations into science and spirituality, and of her New England family heritage.

25 April 2016

AudioFile1970s-63

MP3

Audio Files

Calais (Vt.)

Barnet (Vt.)

Permission to publish material from the Vermont 1970s Counterculture Project must be obtained from the Vermont Historical Society.

Rowell, Leslie

English, Jane, 1942-

Calais (Vt.)

1 hr., 35 min., 6 sec.

Vermont Historical Society Library, 60 Washington Street, Barre, VT 05641-4209