The Power of Nothingness (English and French Edition)

This extraordinary book is the result of a collaboration between a mos remarkable Frenchwoman who, early in this century, became the first European to penetrate the Tibetan Mysteries , and the young Lama Yongden who became her adopted son, teacher-companion, and disciple and who is the primary author of this tale. Janwillem van de Wetering, well known both for his two very moving accounts of his own Buddhist training and for a sparkling series of detective novels, has provided a considerably fresh translation from the French. The story is about a lama's servant, a man of no intellectual pretensions, who finds his teacher murdered in his tent and presumably robbed of the precious jewel he wore around his neck. The loyal servant pursues the unknown murderer across Tibet and eventually to China. As Janwillem says in his introduction, this novel has all the elements (and more) of a classic thriller: "a murder, a criminal, a private eye...a hermit in a cave, a turquoise the size of an egg...Taoism...wolves, a good chase... a luscious widow...a Zen master..." and in the end, Enlightenment. But more than that it has a highly exotic background, a cast of very striking characters, and an atmosphere that will haunt the reader long after the tale is finished. it would be pretentious to say that this book "explain" Tibet, but it allows an outsider to have a sense of experiencing that land and its people on many levels, and thereby it becomes a spiritual adventure as much as a physical one.