The Butterfly Healing: A Life Between East and West

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

The author was born a Chinese Christian, spent many years as a young
woman in an Ursuline convent in the States and in Asia, and is currently
a professor of East Asian philosophy and religion at the University of
Toronto. Although she has suffered through three different cancers and
many other devastating physical ailments, she has never stopped
questioning her spiritual beliefs. As she recounts in this memoir, her
life has been a continual struggle for healing of both body and spirit.

The narrative reflects the quest; it is choppy, disjointed, and
sometimes confusing as it flips around in time and thought. But we stay
with it because the journey fascinates as we travel through North
America, Taiwan, Australia, Israel, China, Japan, and many points in
between. Ching meets famous theologians and long-lost family members,
one of whom has been in a Chinese labor camp since the 1950s. Everywhere
she goes, she teaches, and studies, and relates lively discussions with
doctors and philosophers, family and friends. Among the themes and
topics that resonate throughout the book, are the importance of dreams,
hair-raising mishaps with Western doctors that lead the author toward
Eastern ways of healing, the link between illness and a person’s past,
and different religions and manifestations of spirituality.

Though badly scarred by her Western religion, Ching cannot accept some
aspects of Eastern Buddhism, including its attitudes toward women. She
is puzzled that Western religion is considered the more rational, since
so much of Western belief is beyond reason, and she seems to agree with
Asians who prize spirituality over religion “because it’s closer to
experience and more relevant to life.”

As Ching quests for an East-West accommodation she gives us the gift of
making us think.