~ Lionel Friedberg, Emmy Award Wining Filmmaker, USA

Her new book, “The Love of Centuries,” is filled with tenderness, with concern, with compassion. There’s great depth in what she writes. Her words carry messages of happiness, of the vastness of the universe, of glad tidings and of inner serenity. But there is pain and vulnerability in what she says too. She doesn’t place herself above and beyond the plane of mortals. She expresses human emotions with which we can all identify. Many of the poems in her new book were written when she was still very young. They display the susceptibilities and the fragilities of youth. They tell us of a land devastated by war and violence. They speak of sadness and loss. They express the full range of emotions we all experience as we discover the world around us.

The original language of most of the works in the book was Aulacese (Vietnamese), a tongue spoken in Âu Lạc (Vietnam), the land where Master Ching Hai was born. But the words make the transition to English most effectively. They carry a universal essence and they reveal common truths, all of them as relevant in our contemporary culture as they were when they were first written. What struck me as I read the poems was the very strong theme of compassion that ran through all of them. From childhood to adulthood, Master Ching Hai clearly embraced profound ethical and moral concepts. In the poem entitled “Please Wake Up!” she invites us to share her love for this magnificent planet… a planet now in peril and in desperate need of healing and repair. In “When You Said You Love Me,” she puts into words what true love really means to two people who care for each other. In “Words of a Piglet,” written when she was in her late twenties, she expresses feelings that uphold the sanctity of life – all life, for all beings – and those words tell us what it’s like to be an animal in a heartless, carnivorous world.

"The Love of Centuries" are the work that stands as a tribute to the elevated soul who wrote it. It radiates what this world desperately needs more of… LOVE.

~ Lionel Friedberg, Emmy Award Wining Filmmaker, USA