Читать книгу Letters from Max - Sarah Ruhl - Страница 40

The play I sent Max was called The Oldest Boy. It is about a couple (a Tibetan man, and an American woman) who are told that their child is the reincarnation of a high Buddhist lama (or teacher), and that, according to tradition, they must give their child to be educated from an early age at a monastery in India. They spend the play trying to figure out what to do, how to let their boy go.

I thought of Max a good deal while writing the play. Even the title in some ways refers to Max—because I always found him to be the oldest youngest person. In the acknowledgments, I thank him for his teachings. The play is ultimately about teachers and students, and the cyclical transmissions that pass between them.

In traditional Tibetan Buddhism, after a high lama dies, his student actually looks for the teacher as a reincarnated child. Once the child is found, the student becomes the teacher of his old teacher. I read a lot of books while doing research for the play, and the books changed me. While reincarnation seemed like a fairy tale before my reading a suitcase full of books, I came to feel it as a real possibility, as likely as any other version of the afterlife that I’d been exposed to—the heaven of my Catholic childhood, or the void of my atheist teens.