(9-96) I often chuckled about the fact that I have a teahouse here, telling some strange Chinese stories to red hearted Americans. It reminded me about a good friend of mine named A Cheng. He is one of the most talented writers in China today. His book was translated into many different languages. It made to the top of the best selling books in Italy, but didn't make much of a splash here in the US. He was a young man during Culture Revolution. There was no school, he didn't have a job. The economy was bad in the whole country. Many people were starving. He traveled to a rural place called Yun Nan (Beyond the Clouds). He started to tell stories to the villagers in exchange for food. He said, in a straight face, that one of the longest stories he told was "War and Peace" by Tolstoy. We all laughed. Imagine the yellow faced, hard working, probably illiterate and semi-starving China men listening to stories like "War and Peace".

This is what the Buddhists called "yuan". Yuan is what makes you and I relate in ways we can not explain. No, it's not fate. Though, you may say it's fate that I traveled ten thousand miles from Taiwan to here, and then spent twenty years to learn English, and then the technology is so happened that I was able to set up a shop here on the information highway and started to tell you stories. Fate in Western tradition is not controllable. Fate and free will are two separate things; but yuan is a combination of the two. The Buddhists define yuan as a cause. It is a cause that you can create. Though, many times we don't know what kind of cause we are creating. Every cause bears a fruit, or many fruits. The fact that you are reading this page is a fruit of the yuan I created. It may be unconscious when I first set up this home page. However, keeping it up is a hard and laborious effort.

One Buddha said: "You have to work for five hundred years (in previous lives) to be able to share the same boat. You have to work for one thousand years to be able to share the same pillow." I wonder how many years do we have to work to share the same stories here on the information superhighway.