The Sayings of Kyou
by
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INTRODUCTION
On a summer night in New York in the year 1904, Dr. Joseph Stagler was awakened by a knock on his door. Reaching the door before his servant, Dr. Stagler opened it to find someone he recognized as one of his former students from the Free University of Brussels, Belgium a man who’s name I have not been able to confirm. The man was carrying a package under his arm: a stack of writings on paper made of some kind of vegetable stocks, tied together in two volumes, and sealed in brown paper. Stagler opened it and immediately recognized the text to be a dialect of Scottish Gaelic, and knew by the pages that it was very old indeed. He would soon learn he was reading the words of an Eastern thinker spoken thousands of years earlier, and that his name was Kyou. This night would mark the beginning of a venture that Stagler would pursue and obsess over the rest of his life. It would mark him as an idiot by some, an important discoverer by others (though he was never able to get the work published) and still more would accuse him of fabricating the story from little bits of facts in order to seek his own glory. What ever the truth may be, it was truly a fascinating find. Joseph Stagler (1829-1920), an Austrian born professor of literature, studied and taught in Brussels until he retired in Chicago, USA where he lived out the rest of his life. He was known by his peers to have an avid interest in Eastern thought and mysticism, which accounts for his fascination with the Kyou text. After the night he received the package, he later told his servant that at the moment the bell at the front gate woke him, he had been asleep in his bedroom. He had been dreaming about someone hastily jotting notes on small pieces of paper and handing them to him while a city burned in the distance. It was remarkably similar to the story of Kyou. Stagler considered this to be a premonition and a sign of great significance, a belief he maintained for the rest of his life. Even the most skeptical reader can understand how Stagler could take such a personal interest in the find after such an intriguing coincidence.
I've watched men drawn to battle
like moths into the fire.
I've also seen them drawn to the peace of silence,
like rain drops to the stream.
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About the Book
Sometimes life’s most profound lessons come to us not from books and formal study, but in a comment of a friend, or observed in one’s surroundings. For Sathi the friend’s name was Kyou (Kee-yo’) and his surroundings were that of a displaced drifter. Sathi first meets Kyou in a monastery somewhere in Asia. Kyou is a bit of a misfit and eventually is asked to leave the order. But during his time there, he makes an impression on the other monastics - especially Sathi. Sathi makes the decision to set out to find Kyou, and becomes his good friend and companion. He is so inspired by conversations he shares with Kyou, that he begins to write down thoughts expressed by his friend, which would become the collection of sayings that make up this book. What Sathi wrote down might have been lost forever if not for the accidental discovery of his grave during a gold seeking expedition thousands of years later. Lost and forgotten again for hundreds of years, now they have been rediscovered and translated fulfilling his desire that the thoughts of his friend might be known.
About the Author
Born in Los Angeles at the beginning of the Sixties, Reid Nofer was exposed to an array of arts and cultures. He holds the belief that each individual, being made in God’s image, has an inborn need to create and will do so, knowingly or not, in one manner or another. A musician and songwriter as well, he finds writing fiction to be his best outlet for creative expression. Though he has written several short stories and one full-length novel, he considers this to be his best work to date. Nofer currently works as a technical writer in Oxnard, California