Heartstrings Across Horizons: Thus Spoke the Sage of Love

What if love were not a feeling to be possessed, but a path to be walked?Heartstrings Across Horizons: Thus Spoke the Love-Saint is the posthumous testament of Ge Ye (pen name of Tianxin Jushi), a Chinese lay Buddhist practitioner and "love-pilgrim" who chose romantic love as his medium of awakening. Compiled and translated by Rixin Jushi, this volume gathers four cycles of intimate love letters and diary-meditation (The Little Fish's Tear Necklace; The Gift of Love; Farewell Words on the End of an Affectionate Bond; A Stroll of Love), capped by the philosophical summation Confession of Love and the long poem Spring Overture.At once devotional and unsparing, these pages refuse both the glamour of romance and the safety of renunciation. The author writes of love as "complete self-forgetfulness in freedom," tracing a movement from passion to compassion, from I love you to I simply love. Drawing on Chan Buddhism, the Chinese lyrical tradition, and a mystic's clarity, he addresses questions that remain urgent for every reader who has ever tried to love without losing themselves: - What does it mean to give without bargaining? - Can eros become agape without killing the body's joy? - And when a bond ends, what survives-attachment, or love itself? For readers of Rilke, Rumi, Thomas Merton, and Thich Nhat Hanh, this book offers a rare voice from within contemporary Chinese spirituality: a lover who became a seer, and a seer who never stopped being a lover."I have always been simply a true lover, as if I came from love and return to love." - Thus spoke the Love-Saint.