[...] The other day I was
visiting a town called Kamakura, where there's this huge statue of
Buddha. And when I saw it, I was so deeply moved that I started welling
up. It wasn't just Buddha's majesty and dignity, it was the sheer weight
of history and generations of people's hopes, prayers and thoughts that
broke over me, and I couldn't stop myself crying. It was as if Buddha
himself was saying to me, 'All human beings have their hardships to
bear, so never swerve away from the path you're on.'
Everybody
has a heart that can be be touched by something. Crying isn't
necessarily about sadness or meltdowns or being upset. I'd like you to
bear that in mind, if you would.
Naoki Higashida, The Reason I Jump: one boy's voice from the silence of autism, p125/126 (Sceptre 2014), translated by David Mitchell & Keiko Yoshida
