John Eaton Calthorpe Blofeld (2 April 1913 – 7 June 1987) was a British writer on Asian thought and religion, especially Taoism and Chinese Buddhism.
[1] 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.
Returning to Hong Kong in September 1937, he mostly resided in and traveled around China until 1949, visiting monasteries and all the sacred mountains[6] and talking to Mongolian lamas, Zen masters, Taoist sages, and others.
Starting in 1937, he traveled around south China and southeast Asia, visiting Guilin,[7] Hanoi,[8] Kunming (where he spent ten months meditating in the Hua Ting monastery),[9] and eventually returned to Hong Kong to resume teaching at Munsang College in Kai Tack Bund, Kowloon.
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.
He had a Chinese National Government grant to study Tang dynasty Buddhism, and taught English at Shi Fan University.
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.
"[16] His first child was a son, named Ming Deh ("Bright Virtue"), born in Hong Kong the year Blofeld fled the Communist takeover of Beijing.