The Heart Sutra
The Freeness-of-Vision Bodhisattva enlightens all and saw through the five skandhas, which were empty, while living in complete transcendental wisdom, and, so, was beyond suffering.
2009
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Abi-Sword Teaser
Hong Kong filmmaker Andrew Lau has released a teaser for his upcoming television and film adaptation of Abi-Sword. View it here or on Youtube.
Riot in Frankfurt
Life Before Letters, Chapter 8: 1968
At the 20th Frankfurt Book Fair, my first Book Fair as part of the organizational team, I participated only as an observer. As a new colleague in the exhibition department, I was not directly involved in the work of the Fair, though here and there I did my part with smaller tasks and errands. I could therefore look at the events on the fairgrounds with a certain cool composure.
It was quite the opposite for Sigfred Taubert, who despite all declarations to the contrary was deeply affected in his self-understanding as director of the Fair, something which in my opinion a few years later factored into his decision to take an early retirement.
(more…)
The Doorbell
Life Before Letters, Chapter 7: Detours
Finally in the fall of 1966 the “Deutscher” was officially accepted into the family, and the engagement was celebrated. A palace was rented, a small one to be sure, but a palace nevertheless. Family members came from the whole country and from Norway and Sweden. For the first time in my life I wore a cutaway, a rented one, but a cutaway for real!
And then came the time in which my in-laws offered me a partnership in the company, but here I refused. My unsteady, forward-striving nature demanded that I determine my own fate. I wanted to go my own way, to seek out a career as a publisher and not to enter the harbor of security at the tender age of 27. My education at the Graphics Art Institute was soon to be finished, and I wanted to apply to a publishing house as a book production editor in order to provide for myself and my future wife.
One after another I applied to the Danish publishing houses of Munksgaard, Gad, Gyldendal, and Samlerens Forlag, but the salary that they offered me as a book production novice came nowhere near the sum that my in-laws had provided for my work in the bookbinding company. With a heavy heart I now looked south to my home country, to a threatening existence. Birgitte, my fiancée, was not enthusiastic – “For holidays perhaps, but forever?”
For me there was no going back. I placed an ad in the German Publishers Weekly in Frankfurt, and in the fall of 1966 with my secondhand VW Beetle I set off for the first time to the Mecca of all book people, to Frankfurt and the Frankfurt Book Fair.
There I was successful right away. I found a position as a production editor in the specialized medical publishing house of Georg Thieme in Stuttgart, with a reasonable salary that would make me independent and would put me in a position to support the family that I was about to start.
Stuttgart, on a sunny autumn Sunday in 1966 – I am lying on my Danish leather sofa in my apartment, brightly decorated with beautiful Danish furniture on Immenhoferstrasse, the middle of the Weinberg, and I feel awful. I have been feeling bad the entire morning and have no desire to see anything. I’m just hanging around, depressed; I don’t know why.
There’s the doorbell! I get up and open the door – nobody there. I press the buzzer for the house door down below, but no one is trying to get in. Finally I shuffle back and plop down on the sofa. I feel miserable.
There goes the doorbell again. Well, I think, somebody is pulling my leg. Once again there’s nobody at the door.
The same thing happens once more. And nobody who could have rung.
An inner tension, close to being torn apart. Nonetheless, this ringing doorbell arouses my curiosity. Am I hallucinating? I get up on a chair and unscrew the cover of the doorbell; I lie down on the sofa once again, but in a way so that I can see the doorbell.
I feel so depressed that I am nauseous. Once again the doorbell rings. I can clearly see the ringer beating against the vibrating bell.
Am I going crazy? I feel even more nauseous. I grab a candle, light it, climb back up on the chair, and put some soot on the body of the doorbell where the hammer strikes. I need to know – is this occurring in my head, or is somebody playing tricks on me? I also put a little soot on the doorbell button at the entrance to my apartment and on the one down below on the building door. Now I will know!
Once again I lie down on the sofa. I am sick as a dog. Then the ringer moves and it rings. I climb up – clear signs of the hammer on the sooty bell. I run down to the door – the two doorbells are untouched.
I am going to be sick.
I lean against the door of the apartment. It keeps ringing, the rings closer and closer together. I cover my ears.
Suddenly I know what is going on. I tear open the door of the apartment, and barge in on my neighbor, who is very alarmed when she sees the dismay in my face:
“May use your telephone to make a call?”
Read the rest of the story in Life Before Letters.
The Wooden Rifle
An excerpt from Life Before Letters by Peter Weidhaas
Chapter 6: Going Home Again
They say that life moves forward in seven-year segments.
My childhood, the period from birth to age 7, 1938 to 1945, I can call nothing other than “happy.” The war seemed to be an adventure. Thanks to my parents’ care, I didn’t suffer any need. The bomb attacks on Berlin up until 1942 were exciting events for a young boy, who several times stood alongside the shelter supervisor at the door of the air-raid shelter to get a good look at the lights from the so-called “Christmas trees,” artificial illumination that was dropped to light up the bombing targets.
Later, when my father had set up the family in a little house in Austria near the city of Braunau, I grew up in sun, garden and fresh air. Those years allowed the growth of a natural and healthy strength that I retain to the present day.
Those days held many wonders for me – the shots fired in our direction by the Americans during the last days of the war from the opposite bank of the Inn River, the nightly roaring of the American tanks, the goat that sailed through the air when a hand grenade exploded nearby, the low-flying fighter jets strafing children on their way home from school, the half-starved Russian prisoners of war who were driven in the thousands past our house into the woods nearby – as a child, I was amazed at all this, but did not take in its historical significance or human tragedy.
A friend of the family, a construction engineer and officer in the German army, visited my father often. The six-year-old boy, unconsciously infected by his parents’ conversations about the war and by the non-stop propaganda on the radio, stopped the “Uncle” dressed in civilian clothes at the garden gate with the cry, “Halt, who goes there? Password!”, all the while aiming at him with a wooden weapon, a simple club with a string attached. The “uncle” pushed the “rifle” aside, patted the boy on the head and warned him:
“Petie, never point a weapon at a person.”
With the cunning of an innocent child, I answered:
“But uncle, it’s only a piece of wood!”
“You never know,” he responded. “You never know whether such a weapon can shoot.”
He then asked me to put an empty bottle on the apple tree and rest a board behind it. I eagerly did what he requested with the clear knowledge that this experiment would be a catastrophic flop for the “uncle.” He took up a position about ten paces from the apple tree, slowly brought up my wooden rifle, and for a long time aimed at the bottle. Suddenly an ear-piercing bang broke the quiet, and the bottle exploded into a thousand pieces. Sorrowfully, he gave me my wooden rifle back. Later, after I had pulled a bullet out of the board behind the bottle, I took my rifle apart trying to discover the secret behind the shot.
Read the rest of the story in Life Before Letters.
