Marriage Dies

“Chinese don’t divorce.” Dante heard this from Jade and her relatives. Was divorce a tragic mistake? He knew many examples of okay divorce. His own parents included.

According to his understanding of Buddhism, it was his attachment to his ego that would cause him to end a marriage. The bad things he saw in Jade were just a reflection of what was inside himself. If he was at a higher state of enlightenment, he would look at Jade and everyone else with compassion because of the understanding that this whole reality he had constructed in his mind was empty. Emptiness is form. Form is emptiness. There is no such thing as good and bad. No such thing as a good wife or a bad wife. His monkey brain was deceiving him into believing that something could be gained from divorce just as it had deceived him by making him think that he should covet certain things in his marriage.

In Taiwan he had imagined himself to be so desirable. A rock star. An emblem of western licentiousness titillating the natives, stoking their desires. Any of those girls would be lucky to have him, Dante thought. Maybe self-deception was the root of his problems.

Regardless of what it said about Dante and his state of spiritual development, he got the divorce.