Article Added On: February 22, 2005 - over 3 years ago
Title: His 30-year obsession with a monk
Author: ROBERT J. WIERSEMA
Publication: The Globe and Mail
Publication Date: January 01, 2005 - over 3 years ago
Faith Groups: Buddhist
Themes: other

Abstract: "Our task is to bring about a profound and dramatic paradigm shift, in which the imagination embraces, at last, the idea of human family," says Gary Geddes, a retired university professor and author, who has traveled to Kabul, Mexico City and Guatemala in order to follow the path of a fifth-century Buddhist monk.

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

VICTORIA -- As he recounts in his new book Kingdom of Ten Thousand Things, the journey that took Gary Geddes to the ends of the Earth -- from war-torn Kabul in the days before 9/11 to modern Mexico City, from Guatemalan temples to a legendary cairn on Haida Gwaii -- began more than three decades ago in a small Vancouver office.

In 1973, Geddes, a writer, poet, academic and editor, was researching materials for Skookum Wawa, one of the first anthologies of writing about British Columbia, when he encountered Huishen.

The story of the fifth-century Buddhist monk, who is believed to have crossed from China to North America more than 1,000 years before Columbus, was fragmentary and incomplete, but for Geddes it was "a seismic shock."

"Something seemed to click," the 64-year-old Geddes says today, hiding out from the torrential rain next to the fireplace in a Victoria Starbucks. "Imagine sitting on this coast as a kid watching things wash up on the beach, including those beautiful glass fishing-floats all the way from Japan. Each object sets the imagination whirling, conjuring distances, origins. As someone who spent a lot of his spare hours as a child and young person on boats, it did not take much for me to imagine an ocean alive with other peoples."

Thirty years -- or 15 centuries, depending on your perspective -- later, the story of Huishen, and of Geddes's pursuit of him, has been published by Harper Collins Canada. The title refers to a traditional Chinese saying. "The Kingdom of Ten Thousand Things is a Chinese term for life itself," Geddes explains. "That fragile fabric stretched between birth and death." It's an appropriately inclusive title for a book that its bearded, bespectacled author describes as an "eccentric work," a m