At the tender age of nineteen, after a long conversation about I-don't-know-what, a friend of mine (who happened to be an Episcopal priest--a quite unusual Episcopal priest), got up from his armchair and walked over to his bookshelves and pulled out a copy of the Tao te Ching (translated or, perhaps better, interpreted) by Witter Bynner. "A gift," he said, and the conversation meandered from there in another direction.
When, at my leisure, I began to peruse the pages of that book, my mind reeled: I found myself shaken to the core. The profundity of the poetry shattered the smug presumption of Western religious and philosophical superiority which, in my youth, had seemed self-evident. At that moment, Lao Tzu became an important milestone in my cosmopolitan awakening. The doors of perception had been cleansed. We should all be so privileged to have such friends contributing to our intellectual maturity.
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