吾中生友

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For a couple of days, the notion haunts me，thrusting me into a long-forgotten eagerness of writing something, but the fingers kept groping blindly, unable to set down a proper note to start with. The title was fixed, and I looked it up in the dictionary only to find the Sanskrit original. Kalpa, which took the meaning of predestined fate (usually with a gloomy connotation), on Page 645 of the Modern Chinese Dictionary of the 1996 version, came so close to what I meant to convey, though once being attached to beatitude, it would have undergone some slight alteration of emotional outpouring.

Kalpa, the inevitable, inexorable, inescapable predestination.

Once I had a very, very pleasant discussion with a very, very intimate friend of mine on the translation of a very, very Chinese word into very, very idiomatic English. Eventually we almost reached consensus on predestination and rejoiced at it, feeling both inwardly and outwardly fulfilled by the completeness of the very cozy and shiny word. Predestination is neutral, however, abating the promising effect expressed by its Chinese counterpart, or the counterpart recognized by only a few of us, to the minimum of the two of us. With the not-so-good side emerging out of the sheer beatific bliss and posing a great threat to the tranquility of the mind, it came to an abrupt change of fate, as Aristotle would call it in the Poetics, revealing itself as a kalpa bearing significant underlying streams that kept running wildly about to undermine the strength of the life-waiter whose sole delight and sole occupation was to wait ceaselessly in this life.

Kalpa is just the skin, and beatitude the kernel. Without the skin, the kernel goes unprotected. Once we peel off the skin, we shall discover the very bright kernel lying inside, no longer rueful about the not-so-good skin, but relishing at the ever-so-good kernel.

Foe ever and ever, for generations and generations, the kalpa hugs the beatitude, just as the skin hugs the kernel. We are prone to take a glance at the skin and neglect the internal contents. What is required here is often patience and endurance, for it takes a considerable amount of time for the kalpa to ripen and come off, the beatitude exposed to the sunlight. Who knows if it is the end of the peeling and this is the innermost kernel or just skin to another layer of kernel further into the core, thus the kalpa and the beatitude taking turns to dominate. Human life is in a circle. We suffer, and we rejoice, and the former joy putting on more pressure to the latter inflictions as mush as the agony foreshadows forthcoming happiness.

Sometimes we have to wait, sometimes we have to struggle, but all in all, Jack will have Jill. We live for beatitude, and we die as a kalpa.