Notes Beside the Bamboo Window — Third Collection, Part 46 (Final)

There was once a monk, plain and simple in manner, but foolish and stubbornly convinced of his own views — whenever he heard someone praise another person's good qualities, he would always give a faint, dismissive smile, as if to suggest that person was hardly worth such praise.

In time, this monk abandoned the monastic path and returned to lay life, living together with an old woman. After his death, he appeared to her in a dream and said: "Tomorrow I will return to the neighboring temple." The next day, someone brought a pig to be released at that very temple, and the old woman, recognizing this must be him, went repeatedly to visit and check on the animal. Word of this soon spread, and people from near and far found the matter remarkable, coming in a steady stream to see for themselves. The old woman, growing ashamed of the attention, had the pig transferred instead to the release-life sanctuary at Yunqi. But the sanctuary at Yunqi was cramped and overcrowded at the time, and a nearby mountain temple offered to take the animal in instead. Not long afterward, however, a disciple at that temple sold the pig to a butcher, who slaughtered it in a field.

Ah! Having already been reborn as an animal, he still could not escape the further punishment of slaughter — how could his fate have come to such an extreme? This is something we monks ought to take deeply to heart, engraving it upon our very bones as a warning never to forget.

I recently wrote my three-part response on the subject of Heaven, and a visitor came forward to challenge me further, saying: "If one may divine whether a prospective bride is or is not one's own past-life parent, and marry her once divination confirms she is not, then why should one not equally divine whether a creature is or is not one's own past-life parent, and kill it once divination confirms it is not? And if refusing to marry at all would cause the human race to die out, then would refusing to kill at all not equally cause the entire institution of ritual sacrifice to collapse?" The person who received this challenge had no answer, and reported it to me instead.

I replied: the ancients had a saying: "Divination exists to resolve genuine doubt — where there is no doubt, why divine at all?" The prohibition on marriage between people of the same surname is a great, unchanging principle recognized throughout history the world over, and so when genuine doubt arises about whether two people share a surname, one divines the matter. Killing living beings, by contrast, is a great and universally recognized wrong throughout history the world over, something that must never be done under any circumstance — where, then, is the doubt that would require divination in the first place?

That refusing to marry at all would cause humanity to die out is certainly a coherent argument. But that refusing to kill would cause ritual sacrifice to collapse entirely does not hold up at all — has this visitor never heard the Book of Changes itself say that "two simple bowls of grain may be sincerely offered," or that "the eastern neighbor's grand sacrifice of an ox is not as good as the western neighbor's modest springtime offering"? Ritual sacrifice, then, remains perfectly intact even without killing. And even if some particular sacrificial practice were abolished as a result, this would simply mean abolishing what genuinely deserved to be abolished — no different from abolishing corporal mutilation as punishment, or forbidding the practice of burying the living alongside the dead, both of which were themselves excellent reforms in their own time.

Ah! When I spoke earlier of divination, I was merely borrowing a present-day custom as a provisional analogy, meant only to illuminate a common blind spot through something familiar — and yet here is someone treating it as though it were literal doctrine to be applied without limit. This is truly no better than idle chatter offered over wine to lighten the mood, or a joking aside meant only for the stage. But should such careless words reach the ears of simple, unreflective people and lodge themselves in their hearts, the resulting harm would hardly be trivial — which is why one must always speak with genuine care.

The visitor raised yet another challenge: "Killing merely ends the physical body, while sexual misconduct directly severs one's own wisdom-life" — meaning, by this, that killing is somehow the lesser offense of the two. But he fails to realize: what is destroyed by killing is only the other being's physical body, while the very act of killing itself, arising from a single thought of cruel, murderous intent, already severs the killer's own wisdom-life in that very instant! How could this not be a matter for genuine sorrow?