Notes Beside the Bamboo Window — Third Collection, Part 18

There are people in the world who happen to know something of a past life, though this is not necessarily the genuine "past-life knowing" power of one who has attained the Way — such cases have occurred repeatedly throughout history. A military commander named Yang once told me of something concerning his own late elder brother: at thirteen or fourteen, the brother suddenly began speaking in a northern accent, saying, "All my life I kept saying the south is good, the south is good" — then, spreading both hands, "To have come to this place in this life was fortunate, so fortunate." When asked what he meant, he replied, "I was a monk of the Red Temple in a certain place in Shandong." The elder Commander Yang, taking this for some demonic possession, wanted to beat it out of him, and from then on the boy never spoke of it again. Within the year, he died.

In ancient times, Chan Master Lingshu remained a monk life after life without ever losing his spiritual powers, while Chan Master Yunmen was a king for three lifetimes, and as a result lost all knowledge of his past lives. Was Yunmen's own wisdom really inferior to that of people today? Hence I say: an occasional flash of clarity about a past life is not the same as the genuine power of past-life knowing. Monks today have their every thought caught up in worldly concerns, cycling through entering and leaving the womb again and again — how could they possibly still remember anything of their former lives? One who truly wishes for this should instead urgently seek rebirth in the Western Pure Land.

Minister Lu, who lived to the great age of ninety-seven, was fond of longans, and as a result the price of longans in that whole region rose sharply. There was also an old man in my own hometown who outlived the minister by six years and was fond of steamed suckling pig. And two old women, one fond of drinking rice broth, the other of Sichuan pepper, both lived past ninety, and onlookers took to imitating their habits as well. There was also an old man who drank a cup of honey water every morning — if living long enough would guarantee his longevity, the bees themselves would soon run short of food!

Ah! Nurturing one's health is certainly something a noble person does not neglect, and yet life and death are governed by fate, as the sages have amply taught us. Confucius himself lived only to the age traditionally called "rare since antiquity" — was this because he had nothing proper to eat for his health? His disciple Yan Hui died young at thirty — was this because a single bowl of rice harmed his health? And yet there are those who reach eighty, ninety, even a hundred years of age while still peddling goods along the roadside, whose own gruel is never even reliably available. From this we may know that it was Minister Lu's accumulated virtue that extended his life — what did longans have to do with it! How much more true this is of the true, unending life offered by the Golden Immortal's own Pure Land teaching.

Someone asked: "Everyone knows that alchemical gold-making is a swindle, and yet people are constantly taken in by it all the same — why is that?" The ancient sages once said: "The wise are never deceived." Those taken in by alchemists must simply lack sufficient wisdom. Even so, while ordinary people cannot really be blamed for such credulity, it is genuinely lamentable that monks too are sometimes deceived by it. Ordinary people treat wealth as their very life, and cinnabar's supposed transformation into gold has beguiled even emperors with the alchemists' claims — so it is understandable that laypeople fall under its spell, but how could a monk fail to remember the Buddha's own words? Among the Buddha's eighty-four thousand rays of light within his white brow-mark, a single portion of that light is more than enough to sustain his disciples throughout this Age of Dharma Decline in full — what need, then, for alchemical refining?

There was an old monk in Suzhou who, wishing to fund the restoration of a temple hall, recited the seven scrolls of the Lotus Sutra daily along with ten thousand recitations of the Buddha's name, praying for his alchemical project to succeed quickly. He was swindled again and again, yet never repented of the pursuit, saying: "If I give up now, the true immortal will never come to me." Holding fast to this resolve without ever turning back, his sincerity only grew firmer over time — and yet in the end he achieved nothing at all. His wish to restore the temple hall was, admittedly, a good intention, but such a hall could not be built for less than ten or twenty thousand taels of silver, and to wait for alchemical gold before beginning the work was itself badly misguided!

Ah — had he turned the very intensity with which he sought alchemical gold toward seeking the Way instead; had he spent what he gave to the alchemists in service of genuine spiritual teachers everywhere; had he turned the sincerity he poured into rebuilding a temple hall back upon his own innately pure, primordial Buddha-nature spanning countless past ages; had he dedicated the effort of his seven daily scrolls of the Lotus Sutra and his ten thousand recitations of the Buddha's name toward rebirth in the Western Pure Land — then, without erecting so much as a single rafter, the true building of the temple would already have been complete. Instead he poured his heart into a task that could never succeed, and his utmost reverence into men who could never be trusted. What a pity!