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Current Reading Key Books
for Metanauts August 2004 Francois Cheng, L'Eternite N'est Pas de Trop ("Eternity is Not Too Much"), translated into English as Green Mountain, White Cloud. Francois Cheng is a member of the French Academy who has written several books on art history and literature in China. His novel has been compared to a romance of amor courtois, a Chinese version of Tristan and Isolde. It tells the story of Dao-sheng, a young musician in a traveling troupe, who falls in love the first time his eyes meet those of Lan-ying. Because she is promised to a powerful man of a dynastic family, the mere look gets him condemned to years of slave labor. Thirty years later, after having taken refuge in a monastery, Dao-sheng again seeks the woman he never forgot. He finds a serene woman who has suffered at the hands of her husband, and is now gravely ill. Adept in Taoist medicine and divination, Dao-sheng performs a final and ultimate rite of intimacy, a healing comparable to the "love-death" of Celtic legend.Excerpt from L'Eternite N'est Pas de Trop: When she hears these words Lan-Ying abandons the palm of her hand and lets Dao-Cheng rest his hand against hers. This is a moment of silent intimacy. The intimacy born in the touch of these two hands in perfect symbiosis is the intimacy of two faces approaching each other, or the intimacy of two hearts imprinting each other. The five petals of a flower when it blooms are like a glove that has been turned inside out, the flower reveals the secret hidden deep inside of it, it allows itself to be lightly touched by the warm light wind and gives itself to the passing butterflies and bees. Between these two hands whose fingers are intertwined, the slightest movement, the slightest fluttering of wings; the lightest pressure, creates a vibration that becomes wider from circle to circle. The hand, dignified tool for caresses, that caresses here, not just the hand of the other, it caresses the very caress of the other. Caressing each others caresses, the two partners fall into a state of drunkenness they have dreamt about since childhood, or even since a past life. Their veins are flowing together, irrigating desire and coming together to touch the very root of life. The lines of the hand that predict destiny, criss cross each other into infinity until they reach out all the way to the stars. (L'Eternite N'est Pas de Trop, Albin Michel, Le Livre de Poche, 2002, p. 70. Translation from the French by Joanna Harcourt-Smith) Resonating closely to Cheng's novel is the collection of talks by Thich Nhat Hanh, entitled Cultivating the Mind of Love. This book is cited in The Magdalene Connection and the Lexicon entry interbeing. It is unusual for Buddhists to speak about love. In fact, the concept of personal love is excluded from Buddhist philosophy at all levels, from the elementary practice of the Eightfold Path right up to the complex metapsychology of the Tantras. What is called compassion in Buddhist teaching (karuna in Sanskrit) cannot be equated to personal love because compassion is impersonal and non-attached to its subject. In relating his experience of personal love to the innermost teachings of the Buddha, Thich Nhat Hanh is pushing the envelope of Buddhism. With great finesse, he lets the evidence of personal experience point to the transpersonal dimension of human love. He encourages us to learn love through the mind, hence he can translate Bodhicitta, "the thought of enlightenment," into "the mind of love." This translation would be totally unallowable within the limits of conventional Buddhist teaching. Regarding the collection of talks in Cultivating the Mind of Love, Joanna writes:In 1991 I spent a month at Thich Nhat Hanh's retreat center,
Plum village, located near Bergerac in Southern France. My particular
research through life has been to discover what
connects
personal love
with spiritual awareness, so that through loving
each other personally we can reach the dimension of the Sacred. . Each
morning at the retreat TNH gave a talk expressing his particular slant
on Buddha Dharma. To my delight, one day he told the story
of his
personal
love for
a young Buddhist nun, and the next day he told the story of the growing seed
of compassion within his heart, the transcendent Bodhicitta that
grew from this personal encounter. Over the month that I was there he took
us through teachings that included
the awareness
of
transcendent ectasy
(in the Avatamsaka
Realm, a paradise world of exquisite beauty), and at the same time he asigned
great value to the love he shared with a nun many years before. In effect
I heard him say that at
the
heart
of personal love there is
Buddha wisdom, and vice versa. We encourage visitors to Metahistory.org to read these books and share with us your impressions. We also invite your recommedations and reviews of any books that you find relevant to the issues and initiatives of Metahistory Quest. Send recommendations to JL at Metahistory.org Thanks.
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