Cleanliness Is Next to Mindfulness
February 10, 2006
There’s a famous poem in Thailand about the amorous adventures of two men trying to outdo each other in terms of the number of women they can sleep with. It’s pretty light entertainment, but one of its most interesting passages is when one of the men is entering the apartments of a woman he’s enamored with. He opens the door and there’s a folding screen painted with a story. At that point the poem drops the story of the man and the woman, and goes into the story on the screen, describing not only the events depicted on the screen but also how they’re depicted. It turns out the woman herself had painted the screen. So as the man goes from panel to panel, he not only learns the story but also gets a very good sense of what kind of person she is by the way she handled the scenes, how she painted the characters. So even though you haven’t met her yet in the poem, by the time you finish the story in the screen you know her through her handiwork.