The author’s perceptiveness is like a thin blade, cutting its sustained and silent course through questions of life and death, suffering and decline, before slowly being ground down to a soft gleam by Buddhist wisdom and philosophy. Like a stone polished smooth in the river’s current, macrocosm and microcosm unfold side by side, the grand scale of universal time flowing through a blade of grass touched by morning dew.
When addressing what is abnormal in his mother’s condition, the author writes with such depth and precision that he transcends any conventional standard of human behavior, leaving us with no objects on which to depend, no words sufficient to further decode what has already been put down. Yes, the human bodies in this text carry disease and madness, but they also seem to have left behind any association with the entanglements of speech in this mundane world.
I wonder how many Buddhist Sutras the author has perhaps recited, or copied out, gentle and fragile as poetry? And, what might be his purpose in writing such a book? Asking questions within questions, seeking the suffering within suffering, he draws himself closer to his own inner truth, even if only to catch a glimpse of the painful answers that lie hidden there.