The Weeping Buddha

Set against the lush jungles and rice fields of South East Asia, and a dreamscape of half sunken boats in the back woods of Northern California, this is the story of three people. It is the story of Anna who possesses an extraordinary emotional depth and healing ability from which she is hiding; Pushpa, her daughter, left in Burma with a cruel and violent ex husband, she is the mistress of a bitterness that can fill oceans; and Michael, a New York environmental lawyer who has lost his soul in the bland absences and the grey wintertime slush of empty material success. Born in a poor family in rural Southeast Asia, Anna grew up relentlessly drawn to the mysteries of life and to following a deep calling that leads her from violence and turmoil to serendipity and grace. As the result of birth, training and heart wrenching trauma, Anna has an unwanted ability to weep for the suffering of the people whom she encounters. Wherever she goes, and despite her protestations, she is recognized as a modern day saint: one who teaches with tears instead of words, with kindness instead of concepts and humility instead of arrogance. Her escape from a brutal marriage sends her off into the world with limited resources and ill health requiring her to engage with people in ways she had never dreamed. Men and woman are drawn to her capacity to penetrate their aloneness with her feelings, and her deep connection with her own sexuality. For Anna, however, the veneration, the fame and the material acquisitions stand in sharp contrast to a deep sense of shame about her own failure to save her daughter from her conscienceless ex-husband. Eating away at her soul, this finally sends her into running and then hiding in the back woods of California, living in a rapidly deteriorating house that appears to be weeping. Michael has become everything he was supposed to be, but feels a deep loss and a gnawing sense that he has betrayed himself. Seeing an online news story about a proposed upscale housing project in the untouched redwood forests of Northern California, he is inexorably drawn to the forest grove of his childhood, now threatened by development. He leaves his external success behind as he follows what is vitally important to him inside. In the course of pitting himself against the developers, he encounters Anna, an extraordinary woman, haggard and darkly beautiful, camped on the side of a dreamlike river in the woods. This passionate confluence of their lives inspires all of them to try to correct what is has gone awry in their lives. Together they set out on a journey to rescue Anna's deeply wounded daughter from the thinly veiled cruelty and exploitation of her ex-husband living in Burma. It challenges Michael to leave the safety of the known world to follow what is most important to him, Anna to admit and accept the extraordinary person she is, and Pushpa to find what lives deeper in her than her anger and cynicism. In a high-risk mission of rescue, the characters are challenged to meet sexuality with sacredness, violence with forgiveness, and fame with humility.