Harmony: A Treasury of Chinese Wisdom for Children and Parents (This Little Light of Mine) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sarah Conover has written six books on world wisdom traditions and the spiritual education of families. Her interests lie in building bridges of understanding between people of differing world cultures and wisdom traditions. As a former high-school teacher, she strived to bring multicultural perspectives to her students by collaborating with other educators worldwide. She was the recipient of two U.S. State Department grants that brought U.S. teachers to the Middle East to initiate classroom collaborations between students in the two regions. Sarah lives in Spokane, Washington, where she teaches creative writing and Buddhist meditation.

Chen Hui majored in English literature and education at Hunan Normal University, in Chansha. She subsequently earned an MA in education from Harding University, in Searcy, Arkansas, and taught Chinese at St. George's School, in Spokane, before her recent move back to China.

Ji Ruoxiao is a professor of art at Sichuan Normal University, in Chengdu. She studied at Beijing's Central Institute of Fine Arts, and her paintings hang in the Chinese Art Museum, also in Beijing. The recipient of many honors, she was one of two Chinese artists whose work was chosen for the art exhibition at the Fourth United Nations World Conference of Women. She lives in Seattle and returns to Sichuan each year to teach.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Cóng qián, long ago, in the kingdom of Qi, there lived a man so worried and so anxious that he rarely slept or ate. While most people look up at the night sky and marvel at the shimmering, winking stars, this man, having seen a falling star just once, lived in terror of stars plunging from the sky. He decided never to look up at the stars again.

While farmers around him rejoiced when thick, gray clouds ushered in spring rain, the worried man looked at those same clouds, pillowed high into great peaks and canyons, and fretted that they would surely come crashing down upon him.

As time went on, he worried more and more that the sky itself would simply collapse. People around him laughed at his panic: "The sky has been the sky forever. How can it tumble down?" But no one could explain to him exactly why the sky would not fall down, and so he continued to worry.

"The sky is simply air," said one old man. "There is no place without air on this earth. Think about it: ever since you were born, you've breathed it in and out without any problem! Every day you live with it and walk through it. The air is all around you. It leaves the morning dew on your doorstep at dawn and sweeps away the day's heat with an evening breeze."

The worried man looked even more distraught. "But what about the sun and the moon?" he said, "If the sky is just air, full of nothing, won't the sun, moon, and stars drop out of the sky and land on us?" "The old man shook his head slowly, smiled pityingly at the worried man, and then looked up at the sky. "The sun, the moon, and the stars are like a brightness in the air. No harm will come from them," he said. "Why do you worry so?"

The man from Qi couldn't answer the old man's simple question. He himself did not know why he worried; he just did. Worry was his habit now, a part of him, like a shadow that followed him whether the sun shone or not.

So the worried man struggled not to think about the sun, the moon, the stars or the sky falling down, When the moon rose, huge and round behind the hills in the east, he turned away to keep from thinking about it dropping right out of the sky. When the sun reached its zenith—its highest point—in the daytime, he distracted himself with work, so as not to tremble with fear of the sun directly over his head. To keep from worrying, he made every effort to not look up.

One day, the worried man was forced to leave his village to conduct some business in a province far away. Wearing a peasant hat and traveling by foot, he avoided looking at the sky and stared only at the dirt road before him.

It had been a spring of heavy rain, and the road was muddy and in disrepair. On the first day, he came to a river that had overrun its streambed during the rains, carving away large chunk of road. The worried man saw clearly, for the first time, that the forces of nature could move great swaths of earth. He exclaimed aloud, "Not only can the sky fall, but the land, too, can collapse!" Although distressed, he forced himself to calm down and continue on his journey.

On the second day, he noticed a number of rocks piled by the side of the road. Looking up to see how the rocks had landed there, he found himself at the bottom of a recent, large mudslide. "Bù hâo le! It is bad!" said the farmer. “The earth falls down like the stars! The earth is collapsing! Nowhere in the whole world am I safe!" And the worried man turned around, ran home, and never ventured out again.