The Path To Bodhichitta

You start where you are, the practice will meet you there.

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Location: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Snippets Of Light

Ever since devouring Like The Flowing River, I have fallen in love with Paulo Coelho's work. But only his nonfiction pieces. And so the next two books that kept me house bound for a whole weekend were The Pilgrimage and The Valkyries. The only book left was Manual of the Warrior of Light.

According to Wikipedia;

"The Manual of the Warrior of Light is a 1997 collection of Paulo Coelho's teachings summed up into one volume. It includes proverbs, extracts from the Tao Te Ching, the Bible, the book of Chuang Tzu, the Talmud and various other sources, and is written in the form of short philosophical passages.


This book is written as if it were an actual handbook for a supposedly Templar or Paladin warrior, the warrior however being a metaphor not for those who serve a certain lord, an ideal or the weak, but for those in pursuit of their dreams and who appreciate the miracle of life. The manual describes the challenges the warrior faces and solutions to the problems, including paradoxes (such as the section "sometimes the Warrior behaves like a rock" is followed directly by "sometimes the Warrior behaves like Water". Rock (stability) and Water (flexibility) are given as opposite metaphors in Taoism).

The book's content was first published in various Brazilian newspapers between 1993 and 1996. It was compiled in 1997, given a prologue and epilogue, and then published under its current title.

As stated in the book's summary, the Manual is for those who strive to meet their destiny and who want to ascend to a higher level of being."


I have been dying to read this book, but for some reason could never quite locate in any bookstore. Then last week, I was in Thiland's international airport and there it was. The one and only copy, snuggled in a corner. It was one of the rare moments when I didn't doze off during the flight home.

I finished half the book before the plane touched down. I would have read more if I didn't have to keep putting the book down to give my overwhelmed emotions some reprieve. Every now and then a little passage would speak directly to me - reassuring, guiding and chiding. Still fresh from my emotional turmoil last year, the words touched me a little deeper than it normally would.

This is one book that will travel with me for a long, long time.

1 Comments:

Blogger starlight said...

Thank you very much, Aart! For both visiting and sharing Coelho's blog. :)

8:19 PM  

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