好书共享-Turtle Feet

                   
 
刚刚看完一本不错的书 （实际上看书的时间很有限，但是每天忙里偷闲，久了也会看不少). 写的是一个钢琴家到印度西藏流亡地出家学习的回忆录。字里行间满了黑色幽默，我一个人常常捧腹大笑，笑过之后确是深深的思考。对生命意义的追寻是多么亘古的一个话题啊！可是寻错了方向也是很惋惜的。真希望小孩子快快长大学好中文可以跟我一起讨论交流读书心得。

书名： (A Memoir)Turtle Feet: The Making and Unmaking of a Buddhist Monk by Nikolai Grozni (Riverhead Books, 2008)

我想摘录书中的一些句子来跟大家分享：
"In order to understand something clearly, one must first give it up". (p.326) ( 我不完全赞同这个说法，不过对应上下文，这话说得还是比较贴切).

"Then suddenly it occured to me that the connection between children and their parents, between people and their countries, between believers and their gods, between humans and their home planet, between me and my body, between the I that perceives and the I that is perceived, is completely illusory, mind-made". (P.318)

"That was his way of showing affection. It was the best he could do--after spending forty years in a monastic institution filled with cantankerous, love-starved males whose only means of communication was debate." (p.303)

Reality was a conbstruct; because it was a construct, it never worked the way you expected it to; perpetuating this construct was the same as perpectuating sorrow; dissolving this construct was the end of the sorrow. (p.77)

I've never been to a country where nonsense is the norm. It is like a big joke -- life, death, rebirth, Englightenment - it all amounts to nothing, a play on words, a crazy puzzle that can never be solved. No wonder they came up with the idea of maya, or illusion, you know. In the West things are taken seioursly. Life is a serious matter. Eathing is a serious matter. Tomorrow is a serious matter. Here I can finally breathe: there is no pressure to stay alive! Whatever happens is okay. Dying is okay, begging is okay. I don't have to plot my life. I can sit back and actually enjoy it. (p.40)

这里有一段另外一本书里面的引文： "Circumstances don't amount too much, character is everything; there is no point breaking with exterior objects and things; you cannot break with yourself. (不太赞同作者的看法，又觉得作者有点自己攻击自己。因为我个人认为一个人的品行(character)很大程度是受了后天环境(circumstances)的影响，先天的因素和后天的环境都不可缺少。一个人通过努力是可以break with yourself (the innate self)的。 这实际上是专家们争论不休了多少年的nature vs. nurture 的话题－－扯远了.) --- Benjamin Constant, Adolphe quoted in Experiments in Ethics by Kwame Anthony Appiah.