Bulletin Autumn‧Winter 1993

CITATIONS The Rev. Shih Cheng-yen 'Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the w o r l d , which seems To lie before us like a land of d r e ams , So v a r i o u s , so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither j o y , nor love, nor l i g h t , Nor c e r t i t u d e , nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling p l a i n . ' f r om Dover Beach The words of Matthew Arnold would have struck a cord in young Wang Chin-yun's heart as she watched, i n alarm, her adoptive mother suffer the agonies of a life-threatening illness. The teenager was frightened, horrified, and felt utterly helpless in the face of such massive pain being inflicted on one so dear to her. Like the heroine in Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, she prayed to her god in her hour of need; she offered to cut short her own life in exchange for a longer life for her suffering mother. Her prayer was answered and Mrs. Wang recovered. Five years later, it was Mr . Wang's turn to be taken i l l all of a sudden and he died of a stroke. Young Chin-yun, bereaved but not in any danger of destitution because her father had been a well-to-do cinema owner, roamed the streets o f Taichung, Taipei, Taitung and Hualien in search of philosophical answers to the perennial enigma of life and death. She went to Tz 'u Yun Temple and asked the abbot the fundamental question, 'What kind o f woman enjoys true happiness?' The abbot, in his infinite wisdom, told her, 'She who carries a shopping basket in her hand.' Not what the British call a basket case, but a housewife of the traditional kind. This did not satisfy the longing of a soul yearning for commitment to some higher ideal and loftier goal, for the young lady who posed the question was nothing i f not 46th Congregation 15