After watching Chinese Takeaway (Un Cuento Chino), I started thinking how this touching argentine movie is connected with the TSK vision.
Roberto, a middle-aged man, runs the small hardware shop in Buenos Aires he inherited from his father. A grumpy man with firm habits, Roberto despises his customers and suppliers, and rejects the advances of Mari, a sweet girl from the country, who is in love with him. Instead he spends his time clipping stories about the absurdity of life from newspapers and pasting them in a book; he also regularly visits the grave of his parents. Roberto’s self-imposed loneliness comes to an end when he impulsively takes in Jun, a young Mandarin-speaking Chinese who speaks no Spanish and who has come to Argentina looking for his uncle. Roberto must find a solution for dealing with his unexpected houseguest. This is in particular difficult because neither of them speaks the same language, and Roberto is absolutely not in the habit of asking anybody for help. But as time unfolds, it can be seen how Jun changes Roberto’s life. Roberto could never have imagined taking in a lost Chinese man, but it is this out-of-character kindness which teaches Roberto to start really living his life, and seeing those around him.
A lot of questions emerge from this story:
When knowledge is steered toward preestablished positions, is it possible a deeper level of communication? Is mind the victim of the rules of the order, or has mind some capacity to play with experience? What or who was in the center of the experience? Is it possible a knowing that goes deeper than polarity and contradiction? What makes creativity and knowledge available? Which qualities allow the merge of subject and object?
“New knowledge endows form with a spacious quality. We may be ready to see that our stories are not names for a fixed reality, but symbols of deeper knowing. This happens not by leaving lower knowledge behind, but by embracing it. This is the love of knowledge. When we arrive at this insight for ourselves, we see no limitations in our beliefs. We arrive at the freedom of no positions. Committed to the reality of our suffering, we may reject this insight, but even our rejection affirms knowledge. Like a spotless mirror, knowledge can reflect any image.†WIR pg 323