Cherish the Other’s Affection

    It was towards sunset on a cool autumn day.

    Having just bickered with my husband, I stood irritated in a draught by the gate of the yard, letting my wet unkempt hair flutter fiercely over my shoulders. “Come over, you peevish

    girl!” said my husband walking out into the yard with a blow dryer.

    I could not very well resist but pull a chair and sit down compliantly. The blooming flowers of the yard presenting a riot of color before my eyes quietly dispelled all my grudges.

    I felt warmth coming off and on around my ears while the mist of vapor was dispersing.

    “ Perhaps, this scene will come back to you years later when you sit alone at sunset like this.”

    A tinge of melancholy was tangible in my husband’s voice,

    which broke the long silence.

    “ What about you then ?” I asked.

    My husband turned off the blow dryer and looked at me with smile. After adjusting the pose of my head he let the blow dryer work again. It was quite some time before he gave a reply: “Gone long before you.”

    His voice was so sure yet so calm. It suddenly dawned on me

    that taciturn as he had been all the time, there was regret deep in his heart. I was awe-struck like a mischievous boy brought face to face with the damage he had done.

    If after many years I was, as God would have it, left alone watching the glory of the flowers, would I have the heart to contemplate and figure out what there is now in my husband’s

    mind?

    The Buddha says: it takes five hundred years’ religious

    devotion for people to acquire a chance of sharing a boat and one thousand years of sharing a marriage bed. But how long is it to keep each other’s company in wedlock?

    How come that I tend to hurt the one I love most? It may be that he is the one who forgives me each time. However, it is precisely because there is no danger of being deserted that I have all along taken for granted.

    If it should eventually happen, how could I bear to look at the same splendid scene of flowers all alone …

     Date Stone

    Before I set out for the US, a former shomate of mine wrote me by airmail , asking me in all earnest to bring him some raw date stones . They were not heavy in weight , yet I was curiois

about their use .

    At Philadelphia , shortly before starting out for my friend’s

    place , I called him up . So when I got off the train at the destination , I found him already waiting for me at the station . It was about half a century since we last met , and we were now both in our declining years .

    After hugging each other , he asked me eagerly , “Have you

    brought them with you ?” I immediately fished out the date

    stones from my handbag . He fondled them in his palm as if they were something more valuable than pearls or agates .

    Obviously he was just as childlike as before . When I asked about the use of the date stones , he put them into his pocket and replied by way of fooling me deliberately , “You’ll understand

    soon .”

    It was really a becautiful mountain city . As we drove on , an expanse of rich crimson up and down the slop came into sight . In China a place like this would have been described as a maple city. After passing through several cols , my friend said pointing to a three-storied house amidst the mpale threes , “Here we

    are .” The car turned into a lawn and when it was three or four meters away from the garage , its door automatically opened as if it recognized its own master .

    The idea of an absolutely plain, unchanging, unchallenged description of morality, which will be acceptable to all forever, is probably a philosophical dream.

    Slight the impulse that made me take this turning at the crossroads, trivial and fortuitous the meeting, and light as gossamer the thread that first knit me to my friend.

    Philosophy teaches us to feel uncertain about the things that seem to us self-evident. Propaganda, on the other hand teaches us to accept as self-evident matter about which it would be reasonable to suspend our judgement or to feel doubt.

    The subhuman mindlessness to whish the demagogue makes his appeal, the moral imbecility on which he relies when he goads his victims into action, are characteristic not of men and women as individuals, but of men and women in masses.

    Sony began in 1946 in fire-bomed Tokyo department store with 20 workers and $ 500 capital.

    The man who felt he should have died at birth is remembered and respected long after his death.

    Suddenly a sharp cry was heard which seemed to make the plants tremble. The mountains and valleys echoed it , the wind arose and the water rushed on. I was so saddened and frightened that I could no longer remain ashore. So I went back to the boat, which was sent drifting to the middle of the stream. I let it drift till it stopped of its own accord.