Returning to Hong Kong in September 1937, he mostly resided in and traveled around China until 1939, 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 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 Munsang College in Kai Tack Bund, Kowloon. 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 Malay. 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, received 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." ==Personal life==