Because of Love There Is No Worry, Because of Love There Is No Fear

With Buddhism, there has always been an insurmountable wall between me and it. So although I have read many Buddhist sutras, deeply agree with many of their philosophies, and benefited greatly from Buddhism, in the end I am still only willing to watch it from afar and cannot come to believe in Buddhism.

A Buddhist sutra says: "Through love arises worry; through love arises fear. One who is apart from love has neither worry nor fear." It also says: "What makes people dull and blinded is love and desire. When love and desire are severed, it is like severing a hand or foot that cannot be reattached." It further holds that "wife and children (spouse and children, meaning family) and home are worse than prison; prison has an end, but wife and children give no thought to being far away." Therefore Buddhism advocates "leaving home to practice the way," considering monastic life very "sublime."

Perhaps I am just one of those Buddhism says have not yet finished their worldly bonds—foolish and benighted, always clinging to love. In my eyes, love gives rise neither to worry nor to fear. On the contrary, the greatest realization of my life has been: "Because of love there is no worry; because of love there is no fear." Of course, I am but a single grain of sand in the sea; my view represents only my small self and is not equivalent to truth. As for the great banner of truth, let the great people carry it; ordinary folk, far from truth, can live more lightly and more happily.

Life always brings all sorts of difficulties, but as long as relatives and friends are always by one's side, never leaving, loving and cherishing one another, all difficulties seem as nothing. Were I without relatives, friends, family, and a partner, I would have no strength to face this life, at once short and long, alone.

Churchill said we are all ants, but the old gentleman hoped he would be a glittering ant. I do not have his ambition; I agree that we are all ants, but I only hope to be an ant accompanied by other ants. Whether I can glitter or not, let it be as nature wills: it would be nice to shine, but not shining is not bad either. Yet without the company of other ants, this life would be hard to endure.

Unhappy families do exist, so it is not surprising that some people in this world feel that having a family is like being sentenced to life imprisonment, that home is a burden, and that the suffering family brings is "worse than prison." But I am not such a person. My home has been happy the great majority of the time—or at least, personally, I have mostly felt happy about my family. So if home is "worse than prison," then I am more than happy to be imprisoned for life in this prison.

Leaving home is always very hard for me. In junior high, when I first left home to go to boarding school, I had great difficulty adapting. On my first night at boarding school, after evening self-study ended, I climbed over several graveyard hills and walked more than ten li of mountain path to come home in the middle of the night. When I arrived, my parents were fast asleep. I knocked and the door was opened; my mother held me, weeping bitterly, deeply grieved. The next morning my father rode his bicycle back to take me to school, comforting me kindly all the way and urging me to study hard. I have forgotten how I got through that period, but the memory of coming home in the middle of the night on the first day of school remains vivid.

Nowadays, leaving home to study is still very hard for me; this attachment to home does not diminish in the least with age. Every time I leave home I am reluctant to part. Although I can go home every weekend, I still feel it is not enough. Fortunately, my wife and child are doing all they can to comfort me, making the process of leaving home to study less painful.

My son is very much like me in this, so he cannot bear to leave his hometown to study in a distant place or a foreign country. I think this must be human nature: for most people, the warmth of family is irreplaceable, and I believe the vast majority of families in the world are filled with love.

From childhood I have always easily built friendly, even lifelong, bonds with those around me, which seems to be an innate instinct. To this day, my childhood friends, classmates from every age, and friends I have made basically still maintain good relations with me, with only very few exceptions. My relatives, friends, mentors, and classmates have also been good to me; at critical moments there is always someone to help. So strictly speaking, I have never encountered any truly formidable hardship. Heavenly help is unreliable; the most reliable is human help—the help of relatives and friends in difficult times.

I am very grateful for this arrangement of fate. My personal realization is that a person's greatest sense of security comes from the emotional bonds that relatives, friends, and family build with us, not from the wealth we possess. The stronger these emotional bonds, the greater our security and the easier it is to feel happy.

But it is not easy for a person to build such emotional bonds with those around them. Only those who are optimistic and cheerful, easygoing, broad-minded and tolerant, and who value feeling and loyalty can build such bonds. When I was in the countryside, I often heard villagers say that so-and-so was easy to talk to, easy to deal with, and generous with money; such people always have many friends, and their kinship relationships are always well handled.

I think these people are probably, like me, the "blinded" ones deeply drowned in love and desire. But if being wise means not falling in love, then let me remain a blinded person all my life—do not wake me up! Trading the title of wise person for love, I do not think, is a worthwhile deal.