Venerable Gangxiao: Buddhist Lecture on Contemplating Life

Contemplating Life

Today I'm going to ramble on a bit about life. Of course, life is a huge topic, so for a little monk like me to ramble on about it feels a bit out of place. And in front of all of you, it feels even more absurd—many of you are my parents' age, or even my grandparents'. Honestly, whether you measure by life experience or by learning, I'm probably guilty of showing off my sorry axe skills at Lu Ban's door here. But you have to bring your axe to Lu Ban's door if you want to get any better. So I want to thank Mr. Ye for this chance, and thank all of you for coming.

For most of us, life is honestly just a big blur, full of all sorts of things. I can't go three sentences without staying in my own lane—and I have to, because the moment I step outside it, I'm bound to make a fool of myself. If I tried giving you all a lecture on Marxism, there'd be holes everywhere—I've never even read Capital. As for Hegel's philosophy, that would be pure fantasy—I haven't read the Shorter Logic either... Of course, some people have more nerve. Like Venerable Shengxue at our academy: he once gave a talk on science that was full of holes—even I could spot the mistakes, so how could he possibly convince anyone? He went on about atoms and molecules, photons and leptons, and we were all laughing from our seats—what he said was flat-out wrong. To date, hundreds of particles have been discovered in high-energy labs. He didn't even know what photons and leptons were, let alone mesons, baryons, and the rest. Most of the audience, of course, were laypeople. The moment they heard a monk lecturing on science, they figured he must be brilliant—but really, he was just putting one over on them.

Then there's Li Hongzhi. He went around spouting Buddhist-sounding nonsense at people, but anyone who actually knows a little Buddhism could tell he was a fake the moment he opened his mouth. His *Falun Gong followers, though, thought he was amazing (after all, *Falun Gong practitioners know nothing about real Buddhism): a qigong master who understands Buddhist teachings? He's just making them up as he goes. Someone once asked me: if *Falun Gong is just heretical nonsense, why do so many university professors and other educated people believe in it? I told them there's nothing strange about that. A university professor is only an expert within his own specialized field. When it comes to Buddhism, even a professor is a complete layperson. To fool a layperson, all you need is a thin coat of paint over the surface. Honestly, my own understanding of Buddhism is also pretty surface-level—right now I'm just fooling all of you a little. If you walk away from this lecture feeling like you've heard something fresh, then I haven't spent my heart's effort for nothing.

Since I can't go three sentences without my own field, I can only talk about the Dharma. According to the Dharma, what fills human life, what everyone without exception has to face, is birth, aging, sickness, and death. From ancient times to now, from East to West, no one has ever been exempt. People can live a long time, but not forever (birth); lifespans can be stretched, but not infinitely. Everyone is born of parents, slowly grows old, and finally dies. Some people say they've never been sick. I say that means your life is incomplete—you should go out of your way to catch some little illness, or if you can't find one, fake a little to get a taste of it. Mr. Lao She wrote an essay called "Minor Illness," in which he says that being a little sick now and then is a rather interesting thing, a rather happy thing. Of course, serious illness is different.

There's a story about an old man who went to see a doctor for leg pain. The doctor asked for his medical history: had his legs ever hurt before he was fifty? No. How about at sixty? No. How old are you now? Seventy-one. The doctor said, "Men have rarely reached seventy since ancient times. Your legs didn't hurt at fifty or sixty—why would they not hurt now? What are you waiting for? Nothing to treat here." Of course, that's just a joke. It just goes to say that everyone has to go through birth, aging, sickness, and death—if you haven't, you've come to this world in vain.

The most basic teaching of Buddhism is the Four Noble Truths—suffering, the origin of suffering, the cessation of suffering, and the path. Some say: if you haven't fully tasted the Four Truths, there's no way you can realize the holy path. Why do we so often see things like this nowadays? An old woman who recites the Buddha's name—on her deathbed, auspicious signs appear everywhere, Buddhas and Bodhisattvas come to guide her home. This old woman can't even read. Meanwhile, some intellectuals can talk about Buddhism till the flowers fall from the sky, but when their time comes, they suffer terribly. Why? With cases like this, we can look at the life experiences of both. The old woman couldn't read, but she truly tasted the bitterness of life—she'd suffered every kind of hardship: from childhood she was a child bride, her husband died later, she raised the children alone as a widow, it was so hard, and then later her daughter-in-law was utterly impossible. Once you've really suffered, when a teacher tells you to recite the Buddha's name, of course you recite with everything you've got. Some young people today want to leave home and ordain, but why can't they cultivate? Because they don't know what life's suffering is.

Buddhism says the three realms are like a prison, like a burning house, pressed on all sides by suffering. A lot of people don't buy this. They say: I find life pretty pleasant! Sure, there's some suffering, but afterward joy and blessing come to balance it out—that seems fair enough. Living like that really would be like being an immortal. But I ask you: would you rather be an immortal for a little while, or forever? You're fooling yourself! When you're in the middle of your troubles, you don't feel like some immortal—when hardship comes, you wail to the heavens and curse the earth. Is that what an immortal does? Absolutely not! In the thick of your suffering, you think life is unfair. Afterward, you look back and think it was actually pretty fair. But what's the use of being wise after the fact—like Zhuge Liang always saying, "If only I'd thought of that beforehand"?

That's life. But what about the world? The world doesn't go through birth, aging, sickness, and death—it goes through formation, dwelling, decay, and emptiness. Life and the world being like this isn't exactly cheerful, is it? We can't help wondering: is there any way to keep life forever full of joy, to keep the world forever stable? Is there any place that's permanently full of joy? This isn't a question just for us today—ever since human beings appeared, it's been troubling people across all times and places. Great philosophers, great sages, great thinkers, ancient and modern, East and West, have all been searching for the answer.

When we were little, just after we were born, everything felt wondrous: Where did I come from? Why don't the stars fall down? Why did the old lady next door die? We wanted to figure out every last one of these things. For small children, parents are the first teachers, and parents know everything. Little kids worship their parents. There's a comic dialogue by Niu Qun and Feng Gong where a little boy brags: "My dad's so learned! He knows so many characters! He knows one! He knows two! He even knows three, four, five, AND six!" The dad only knows six characters, but the kid is bursting with pride. A little older, and the great heroes become the teachers. Elementary school kids say it all the time: "That's what my teacher said!" Whatever the teacher says is gospel truth.

So kids take these puzzling questions to their parents. Some the parents can answer, some they can't. For the ones they can't, the parents just say: "Go on, child, go play. When you grow up, you'll understand all these things naturally." Children are innocent and easy to fool—they really believe these questions will sort themselves out as they grow up, so they anxiously look forward to growing up. As they grow, some have the root-capacity to keep hold of the questions from childhood, always observing and pondering. When they're a little older and can study, they comb through every ancient and modern text, hoping to find the answer, hoping that once they've resolved these questions about life, their hearts can be at rest. These people don't pay much attention to worldly fame and profit. In the eyes of ordinary people, they're a little foolish.

Most people aren't like this. Even if they were full of curiosity about the world and about life as children, as they grow older, they get turned around by worldly affairs. I remember a book reviewing Wang Shuo called I'm a Hooligan, Who Do I Fear?, signed by Xiaosheng—but which Xiaosheng? Gao Xiaosheng? Liang Xiaosheng? Some other Xiaosheng? I have no idea. In the book, it says China has five thousand years of history, so any person can figure out human affairs on their own without a teacher. As you get older, you stumble through enough, and naturally you come to understand most worldly matters. This is exactly being turned around by worldly affairs. By the time you've grown up, you've completely forgotten the curiosity and confusion you had as a child. As a child you couldn't support yourself; by the time you can, you're too busy struggling to survive to have any spare moment for thinking about life. If you can't even think about it, you certainly can't choose what kind of life to live—you just go with the flow. If you don't have some special cause and condition, you'll never think about those childhood questions about life again.

Some people do have a little bit of cause and condition. For example, when they get sick and the pain is unbearable, a single thought arises: God, how could I have come down with this terminal illness? Back in '92 or '93, I got sick once and was hospitalized at Qingyang Hospital. There was an old man in the same ward, I don't know what his illness was, he was crying out in pain all day. At the time I was reciting the Commentary on the Diamond Sutra constantly, and the old man, between his groans of "ow," even found time to yell: "Little master, stop chanting that! Just hearing you chant annoys me!" There was nothing I could do. So when I was discharged, I had a few hundred yuan left in my pocket, so I gave it to the old man. Suddenly he stopped groaning, kept saying thank you, and wasn't annoyed anymore.

There's another kind of cause and condition: I'm a teacher, and some curious students come to ask me questions about life that I can't answer. That pushes me to recover the old dreams of childhood, to start chasing life's questions again. With these causes and conditions pushing me, I started thinking about life's questions once more. But even though I'm thinking about them, I haven't had a good teacher, and the more I think, the more troubled I get. If I had never thought about these questions, I could have just lived my life like everyone else does, and that would have been that. But now that I'm thinking about them, the more I think, the more there is. It's just like some of us practitioners: before I started reciting the Buddha's name, I didn't think anything of it. Now that I've started, the more I recite, the more discursive thoughts come up. Some people give up at this point: everyone else in the world lives like this, I can live like that too—why bother creating trouble for myself? When I'm not sitting in meditation, I don't have that many discursive thoughts. The more I try to sit still, the more thoughts arise—so why bother learning to sit? But that's not actually how it is. We have so many discursive thoughts in daily life that we don't even see them. Once we start learning to sit, the number of thoughts drops, until you can actually count them. When you count and see such a big number, you think the thoughts have multiplied, but really they've decreased. It's like the common saying: "When you've got too many lice, you stop itching; when you've got too many debts, you stop worrying." So many lice that you've gotten used to the bites—you've gone numb, you don't feel the itch anymore. So many debts you can't possibly pay them back, so you stop worrying. That's why people today say the debtor is the master and the creditor is the servant. Living like this is like a dead machine: as long as there's electricity, it just keeps chugging along. To put it bluntly, it's just muddling through life waiting for death.

Actually, as long as you're alive, you're naturally going to think—it's what makes us human. "I think, therefore I am"—that was Descartes, wasn't it? Maybe not, I can't quite remember. Anyway, it was some great philosopher. Really, though, it should be "I think, therefore thinking exists"—thinking can only prove that thinking itself exists. Human beings are inherently endowed with the capacity to think—so why do you spend all day thinking about random nonsense instead of life's big questions? If you thought about life's big questions, you could choose your own path in life. But we keep thinking about meaningless little things, treating ourselves no better than grass and trees, letting ourselves grow and die on their own. To put it plainly, that's giving up on yourself, it's being irresponsible toward your own life.

Let's look at the world: the moment you're born, aging, sickness, and death come one after another. Even if you're a big celebrity, a tycoon, even the president of a country, you can't escape death. But everyone is afraid of death! Through all the ages, the hardest thing of all is death. Is there anyone who isn't afraid? No! When Jesus was about to die, he cried out on the cross: "Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani"—what does that mean? "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" When Confucius was on his deathbed, he leaned against the door with his staff, tears streaming down, and sang: "Has Mount Tai crumbled? Have the beams and pillars given way? Has the sage withered away?" Anyone who claims not to fear death definitely isn't human!

Since everyone fears death, we ought to think about life, shouldn't we? Even if we do our best to resolve life's questions and end up with nothing—just a death in the end—that death isn't in vain, because at least we lived a real life. But what if you do find the answer? The moment you find the answer and break free of life's suffering, wouldn't that be a cause for celebration? And besides—long before any of us, there was Shakyamuni Buddha, who set the example for us all.

When you think about it this way, you realize that the first thing a person should do in life is to contemplate the question of life itself. Although we now have the idea that we ought to reflect on life, how should we actually go about it, and how do we resolve life's confusions? The great sages of all times and places have expressed countless views on life, but they differ from one another. So how should we judge right from wrong? Since we only get one life in this world, and we want to resolve such a major matter, we ought to be a bit careful and cautious. We mustn't lightly trust those great sages or take their judgments of right and wrong as our own. If I believe in Christianity, why do I believe in Christianity? If I believe in Buddhism, why do I believe in Shakyamuni? If I follow Marx, why do I follow Marx? Now that I've left home, I do believe in Shakyamuni. But science, philosophy, other religions—none of them is pure nonsense. So why should I believe in Buddhism? I also hope everyone will believe in Buddhism, but you would surely ask: why should I believe in Buddhism rather than something else?

You don't have to believe what I say, but you might take my words as a contributing cause, something to help lead you to meet Shakyamuni in person and let Shakyamuni tell you himself. Let me share a few of my own views for you to consider.

Let's start with science. The aim of science is to seek truth, and the methods it uses are experimentation, reasoning, deduction, and synthesis. But it starts with a prior assumption—that is, it proposes a hypothesis first, then runs experiments to see if the results match. What it produces this way is useful for living, but useless for solving the fundamental questions of life. For example, in physics there is a basic assumption: "space is smooth and continuous, and elementary particles move and interact within it." This assumption supports our entire edifice of physics, and so far no experimental phenomenon has been found that contradicts it. But we absolutely cannot rule out the possibility that space is not smooth—perhaps our current experimental tools simply aren't precise enough to detect any unevenness or non-uniformity in space. Then there's Einstein's theory of relativity, which also rests on a basic assumption: that nothing can travel faster than light. And as science has developed, it has become increasingly abstruse. Take Galileo, of course, who counts as a scientist. Beginning with him, the "why" questions of science were turned into "how" questions. In ancient times, people would ask why a stone falling from a height moved faster and faster, and they would answer: because the stone is like a horse in a hurry to get home. Starting with Galileo, no one asked why the stone kept speeding up; instead, they measured just how much faster one instant was compared to the next. How plain and ordinary his theory was. Take Madame Curie—still a great scientist—and you can't really tell her work apart from the ancient art of alchemy. People may not understand her findings, but no one fails to understand her methods. And today, not to mention the frontiers of science, we don't even understand the technology around us. Take the fax machine, for instance—we use it all the time, but very few can explain how it works. I can operate a computer, but if you asked me about its principles, you'd do better to ask a rock. Melatonin is nothing more than an ordinary health supplement, but slap the label "science" on it and people go crazy. Science keeps getting closer to people's daily lives, but farther from their hearts, and grows more abstract all the while. Take Geometry, for example. The moment you open it, it hands you a few "axioms." Axioms don't need proof; they're conclusions drawn from everyday experience that everyone takes for granted. But can everyday experience really be trusted?

Philosophy is mainly about thinking, thinking in great and painstaking detail. You can only say it's like crossing a stream by feeling for stones. Some people manage to find the right path, but most wander into dead ends, and even the best only make it partway and never reach the end.

As for art, it's pure intuition—pure emotional release, seeking only beauty and caring nothing for truth. There's a story: Bo Le was looking for a fine horse, and he walked and searched the human world but could not find a single perfect one. Later, he saw Xu Beihong's painting of a galloping horse and was overjoyed: so the perfect horse was here all along. That is the art of judging horses. When a painter draws a person, he makes the waist unusually long and says that's beauty. Artists are either drunk with life and lost in dreams, or else utterly mad. Take the great poet Liu Yong, for example—he was given an imperial order to write lyrics and spent his days idling about in brothels. Take Xu Wenchang, who went mad and mutilated his own body. Van Gogh, the same. The great figures are all much the same. Take Qu Yuan: after being demoted, he ran to the banks of the Miluo River, walking and singing as he went, and what he recorded later became the "Tianwen"—more than a hundred questions hurled at the heavens in a single breath. As he walked and sang, his manner was truly that of a madman. Then in the Tang dynasty came Liu Zongyuan, who took part in Wang Shuwen's reform movement and, after being demoted, wrote a piece called "Tiandui" (Heaven's Reply). The Qu Yuan who asked the questions was a madman, and the one who answered a madman's song must himself have been a madman. The most famous case is the man of Qi who worried the heavens might fall. This fellow Qi could be called the earliest astronomer. What were other people doing all day? Busy feeding their mouths! But he spent all day wondering what would happen if the stars fell from the sky. His thinking was far ahead of the ordinary person's—so far ahead that his contemporaries couldn't understand him, and he became a laughingstock with the phrase "the man of Qi worrying about the heavens." Of course, according to the Liezi, after being counseled by people from the four neighboring villages, Qi no longer worried about this matter. We know that modern astronomy began with Galileo, and Qi lived during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States period—thousands of years ahead of his time. Really, I think we ought to rehabilitate the man of Qi. People like these may have seemed crazy, but their lives were not lived in vain. We laugh at them, but the truth is, we're even more miserable than they are.

Art, in the final analysis, works on the level of feeling and perception, which is still a long way from resolving the fundamental questions of life. I don't need to say much about this—you probably know more about it than I do.

Islam—everything is heavenly revelation, bestowed from above. After the believers die, they will be judged by Allah. I see there are people of the Hui ethnicity among you; you know more about this than I do.

Christianity is also a matter of heavenly revelation. Everything was created by God. God loves everyone. After the believers die, they can go to be with God.

Here I'd like to slip in a few words on the side. Many Dharma masters say that the Christian God corresponds to the Great Brahma Heaven King (Mahābrahmā) in Buddhism, which is an extremely mistaken comparison. Christianity and Buddhism are fundamentally two different systems—that is to say, they simply do not lie within the same "coordinate system." There is no common basis for comparison, and they cannot be placed side by side. If you absolutely insist on placing them together, then you ought to set God on the same level as the Buddha. The Buddhist cosmos is the three-thousand great-thousand-fold world-system, the Sahā world, the three realms. The Christian cosmos is heaven and hell—its heaven and hell should be considered equivalent to our three realms. And yet our Dharma masters compress the Christian cosmos down, squeezing it into just one of the heavens of our Desire Realm—Great Brahma Heaven—reducing the entire three realms to Great Brahma Heaven. That is, of course, gravely mistaken. Of course, our Dharma masters and old abbots speak this way charitably; you could say they are trying to heighten Buddhists' religious pride. But to put it less kindly, that's a serious case of spiritual conceit (ātma-māna)! In the Sutra of Forty-Two Chapters there is the metaphor of spitting up at the sky; that's what we are doing when we speak about Christianity this way. If we say such things about Christianity, then Christians are sure to say the same kind of things about Buddhism—which is just going around in a circle and insulting the Buddha!

So much for foreign traditions. What about China? Take Daoism, for instance. It depends entirely on self-reflection, seeking to return to simplicity and authenticity, and in the end to attain immortality and exist together with heaven and earth. Confucianism also depends on self-reflection: inner benevolence and outer kingliness; live well in life, and die a peaceful death.

But the Buddhism founded by Shakyamuni says that we can each realize the truth for ourselves, that we can each be free of afflictions, that we can each put an end to birth and death. Everything is in our own hands—how wonderful that is! Marxism says it lets the people run their own affairs, but once the regime is seized, the people can no longer run their own affairs or make their own decisions. If you don't believe it, just take a look at The Voice of History. Given all this, why shouldn't we believe in Buddhism?