Notes Beside the Bamboo Window — Third Collection, Part 42

The elder asked me further about another passage from their writings: "The Brahma Net Sutra says: 'Every living being has, in some past life, been one's own parent — to kill and eat such a being is to kill one's own parent.' If this is truly so, then a person could never marry at all, since his wife or concubine might be his own parent; a person could never keep a servant or maidservant, since doing so would mean putting his own parent to labor; a person could never ride a mule or a horse, since doing so would mean riding upon his own parent's back." Neither the Confucian scholars nor the monks he consulted could answer this objection — what, then, should one say to it?

I answered: the Brahma Net Sutra's statement was made specifically to establish a profound prohibition against killing living beings, and this is the sole purpose behind it. Its meaning is simply that across countless eons of repeated rebirth, every single life one has ever lived necessarily involved parents of some kind — how, then, could one ever be certain that any given being was not one's own parent in some past life? The sutra merely raises the possibility that a being might be one's own past-life parent; it never asserts that any given being definitely is one's own parent. To seize on the literal wording in order to obscure its actual intent, and then extend a single example into a hundred absurd consequences, is a move the Confucian tradition itself would recognize and reject. Confucian ritual propriety, for instance, forbids marriage between people of the same surname — and so, when purchasing a concubine whose surname is unknown, one is required to divine the matter first. Should someone then object: "Since divination confirms she does not share your surname, there is surely no harm in marrying her" — one could, by the same twisted logic, equally argue: "Since one cannot know for certain whether the woman one intends to marry is or is not one's own parent from a past life, let us simply divine the matter, and if the divination confirms she is not one's own past-life parent, then there is surely no harm in marrying her either!"

The Book of Rites states: "One who is twice your own age should be served as a father would be served." And yet how many young officials today are carried in sedan chairs or driven in carriages, with attendants holding open their parasols and bearing their halberds — duties that, strictly speaking, ought only to be performed by children, and yet are performed instead by grown men, some of whom are older than the officials they serve! If this practice can proceed without hindrance in ordinary life, why should the Buddha's own teaching alone be singled out as impossible to put into practice? The marriage of men and women, and likewise the use of carriages, horses, and servants, are simply the ordinary, established customs of human life, in no way comparable to the horror of taking a living being's life. This is precisely why the sutra states only that no living being should ever be killed — it never once states that no living being should ever be married, or ridden upon, or put to service. To raise such an objection is nothing more than indulging in clever but ultimately empty and roundabout argument, in an attempt to undermine a clear and profound teaching of the great Way — how could such an attempt ever succeed?

Beyond this, their writings contain many other baseless and fabricated claims too numerous to list in full — among them, the assertion that after a person dies, the soul persists permanently, with no rebirth or transmigration at all. But if the soul truly persisted permanently in this way, why did the sage-kings Yu, Tang, Wen, and Wu never once deliver a single warning to the tyrants Jie, Zhòu, Li, and You? Why did none of the rulers of the pre-Qin, Han, Tang, or Song dynasties ever manage to mete out a single punishment to villains such as Li Si, Zhao Gao, Wang Mang, Cao Cao, Li Linfu, Yang Guozhong, Qin Hui, or Cai Jing? And if there truly is no rebirth at all, how could Yang Hu, styled Shuzi, have recalled his own past life as the son of a certain family? How could Cheng Hao, styled Mingdao, have recalled the location of a hairpin his own mother had hidden away in some past life? Stories such as Yang Ai transforming into a tiger, or Deng Ai being reborn as an ox, are recorded plainly and repeatedly throughout the Confucian classics themselves, far too numerous to list — and these foreign writers, being unaware of any of this, should hardly surprise us with the errors in their own claims!