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Videoclip 17: Susan Whitfield: Traveller story
"This is a picture of a travelling storyteller. And if you think, you're travelling on the Silk Road for months and months and months at a time, when you arrive at a dusty little desert town, and you have your dinner and everything, then you want to go out and have some entertainment, now you go to the theatre, you go to a club, whatever, it was exactly the same, you would go along, you would listen to music, or you would listen to, watch some theatre, and one of the most popular entertainers on the Silk Road were travelling storytellers, and they would travel around with scrolls in their backpacks. You can see he's got a backpack full of scrolls, and the backpacks, the scrolls would have pictures on them which told the story. And the storyteller would sit on the floor and he would show the scroll to people around him.
Then he would talk and sing and recite and tell the various stories and a lot of these stories were Buddhist stories and they told for example, there's a famous story of a strong Buddhist believer, a young man, who goes away on a journey and he leaves his mother some money to give to the Buddhist priests to recite prayers so that he has a safe journey, and instead of giving it to the Buddhists, she spends it, on new clothes or something, and she then comes to a horrible sticky end before he comes back. She is killed and goes down to the very lowest regions of Hell where she is tortured because she's given this money which was meant for Buddhism, for her own benefit. And she's had spikes through her, and burning flames, and the whole thing, if you think of hells, Buddhist hells are exactly the same as our hells. Hells in every religion, people's imagination is exactly the same wherever they live. So she's going through all these things in Hell, and this story tells about her son, who tries to...to find people to help him to go down to bring her back from Hell. He keeps having to give money to Buddhism, to speak to people, and eventually he gets down to Hell."
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