Kuan Yin stops by

Last year somehow Ti Kuan Yin Tea from Prince of Peace became my favorite tea, and then, in the fall, a Chinese student showed up for my Sunday afternoon Course group at St. Helena's church. She had just emigrated from China and was studying English at Columbia University. She had inquired from the university if they taught classes in A Course In Miracles, based on the ostensible logic that Helen and Bill had been professors at Columbia-Presbyterian, but evidently, much to her surprise, the Columbia did not. Eventually, she found my class in the Bronx, which suited her schedule.

About nine months before I met her, in the fall of 2016, she had started studying the Course in Chinese, and she came equipped with a Chinese and an English version of the Course. Early on, she stumbled across some difficulty with the translation, which all boiled down to a matter of content over form, of translating the meaning versus translating the words.

Fortunately, I was able to ask Chiao Lin Cabanne, the Chinese translator, and it turned out her response was exactly what I expected:

Dear Rogier

Ha! ha!  I can guarantee that my Chinese translation means exactly as you explained.

After years' experiments, the Foundation decided not to take "literal translation" approach. Many Chinese who doesn't have Chinese literary training expect the Chinese Course should be word-by-word exactly the same as the English sentence structure.

I usually don't respond to those questions. I know that their problem is not about the " words" but something else. l just encourage new students to follow whatever interpretation they feel comfortable with.

We have educational websites if she wants to know more.

http://www.acimtaiwan.info/

Chiao Lin

The student proved to be a quick learner and here was her response:

Thank you for your email ! And thanks for asking Chiao Lin !

When I read the text book again . 

           2 Nothing real can be threatened.

3 Nothing unreal exists.

4 Herein lies the peace of God.

And it's Chinese translation:

凡是真实的，不受任何威胁 ；

凡是不真实的，根本不存在。

上主的平安即在其中。

I love the Chinese translation. I am also have a strong feeling to regard the word  "herein" as the Chinese word  "当下＂

Thanks

 So, for a few months, we ended up doing ACIM classes combined with ESL for Chinese. The student always asked lots of questions, and we joked about it a lot because her one question would end up being ten. Somehow we stumbled upon Kuan Yin along the way, and I basically said that Kuan Yin in Western terms should probably be understood as either Jesus or Mary, the symbol of Compassion, and Love.

Before Christmas time we ended up reading the introduction to the Workbook. We had been talking about the idea that there is only one Mind, and one Holy Spirit, and one ego, but that we could each hear the Holy Spirit according to the conditioning of our hearing, be it in English or Chinese. Next, we stumbled upon these lines:

The only general rules to be observed throughout, then, are: First, that the exercises be practiced with great specificity, as will be indicated. 2 This will help you to generalize the ideas involved to every situation in which you find yourself, and to everyone and everything in it. 3 Second, be sure that you do not decide for yourself that there are some people, situations or things to which the ideas are inapplicable. 4 This will interfere with transfer of training. 5 The very nature of true perception is that it has no limits. 6 It is the opposite of the way you see now. (ACIM:W-in:6)

 And I saw her stumble over line three. She said, I have a question, and I found myself silently praying to have a simple answer so we would not stumble over translation problems, and what occurred to me was simply this: that the whole is 100% and that 99% is not 100%. Next, she said: maybe my question is not a question, but a statement: "It's like 99% is not 100%, only 100% is 100%." I shared with her that I had been thinking of it in the exact same terms, which was almost a live demonstration of what we had been discussing earlier, that the Holy Spirit speaks to each of us in our own language.

She recently came to visit for my birthday, and that's when she told me that at that time, she had had a strong experience of Kuan Yin being in the room with us during that exchange. This brought back to me that Kuan Yin was an important figure for me for a long time, because one of my early teachers (from ca age 15 to age 40), always had a little Kuan Yin statue on a chest of drawers in the living room of his apartment in Amsterdam. Finally, today, I suddenly realised that most of the last year I had been drinking Ti Kuan Yin, and it had become my favorite tea.

I've been reading a lot on Kuan Yin again, lately. I found this site, which offers some wonderful and concise information about Kuan Yin (She who hears the cries of the world), and it is very worth reading. It is fascinating to see how the Buddha Avalokiteshvara morphed into Kuan Yin in China and became an enduring symbol of compassion the world over. Clearly, for many, a female figure is often easier to relate to than a male so often times Kuan Yin is to Buddha or Avalokiteshvara as Mary or Mary Magdalen were to Jesus, symbols all of the Love of God, simply in whatever form is easiest to relate to, reflecting that basic teaching of the Course that the Holy Spirit will speak to us in whatever form is most readily acceptable to us.