The Cage Effect of Ideas

Goethe called the “seeing” in discussing art the ability to “enter, comprehend fully, and penetrate.” To comprehend fully is to be unbiased; to penetrate is to be without obstruction; to enter yet be able to exit is nearly to be free of the blindness that seeing itself brings.

—Qian Zhongshu, Guanzhui Bian (Limited Views)

In the Sutra of Forty-two Sections there is this passage: “To feed a thousand-billion Buddhas of the three times is not as good as feeding one who is without thought, without abiding, without cultivation, and without realization.” Because the Buddha left no works written by his own hand while he lived, whether this passage is actually the Buddha’s own words is doubtful (indeed, all Buddhist sutras are doubtful; too many were composed by later people under a sage’s name, just like the Chinese Huangdi Neijing—clearly written by an unknown later hand, yet attributed to the Yellow Emperor as a tiger-skin to borrow). If this was truly said by the Buddha himself, then he was a most lovable person. Read in light of the Diamond Sutra, this saying fits the Buddha’s original intent well.

Once an idea becomes dogma, abuses inevitably multiply. Many thinkers began with a wish much like the Buddha’s “seeking liberation.” Liberation was the goal; once that goal was reached, the idea should have been treated as a burden and cast off without hesitation. That is, the value of an idea lies in freeing people from the cages of wrong views, not in making the idea itself into another cage that encloses people from one cage into another. The scriptures express this with the “raft simile”: the Dharma is like a raft, ferrying people out of the sea of suffering to the shore of liberation; once across, one should not carry the raft on one’s back. From this angle, a person who is “without thought, without abiding, without cultivation, and without realization” yet can maintain an ordinary mind free of afflictions is indeed more fortunate than one who practices the Dharma austerely only to reach that state at the end. After all, in this world nothing is more enviable than inner peace and happiness.

This is quite similar to Qian Zhongshu’s view that one should “enter yet be able to exit, and so nearly be free of the blindness that seeing itself brings.” The famous anthropologist Desmond Morris, in The Human Zoo of his “Naked Ape” trilogy, vividly likens the various ideas, customs, and prejudices of human society to walls that people build for themselves; humans live inside these walls like animals in a zoo, constrained everywhere and with no freedom to speak of.

Most thinkers themselves are not authoritarian, but their followers play the authoritarian role—as with Nietzsche and Hitler. The reason is that the thinker uses his ideas only as a tool for his own liberation, while his followers take them as a magic weapon for liberating humanity. Truth carried one step forward becomes error; when an idea loses its individuality and moves toward uniformity, it becomes tyranny. However benevolent an idea’s intent, when its believers try to impose it on everyone and build an ideal state in human society with it, it becomes hideous, because the essence of such behavior is siding with one’s own kind and attacking others, not liberating human nature.

The freedom of every individual in society should be fully respected, and that freedom first of all includes the freedom not to have one’s thought and belief forcibly changed. To hold a belief andpromote it is to take an enormous risk. In my medical practice I have met colleagues who blindly trust some medical dogma and, ignoring the patient’s actual condition, insist on treating the patient according to their fideistic ideas; the result is that these patients are treated into ever worse shape. Sadly, some patients themselves, influenced by such doctors’ medical ideology, also blindly believe and obey, and many patients thereby die unnaturally.

A doctor who emancipates his thinking and respects reality can benefit his patients. A political group that emancipates its thinking and respects reality can benefit many people. A thinker who emancipates his thinking and respects reality can benefit himself and those around him. At Longquan Monastery I heard a monk tell his own story: after he left home, he once spoke with his family, and they told him that during the time after he left home they felt an unprecedented relief. Because before he left home he had interfered in his family’s affairs and tried to impose his own will on them, making them miserable.

This made me realize that if I too interfered with my family, using the various “ideas” I had learned to “liberate” my own family, I might likewise bring them enormous pain. Extending this further, if I used my own “ideas” to liberate others and help them achieve release, I might myself become a most disagreeable fellow. Intellectual violence harms others no less than swords and spears; otherwise the Crusades and China’s Cultural Revolution would not have produced so many wronged souls.

A friend once told me that when expounding one’s ideas one should maintain an attitude of “the speaker speaks, the listener listens.” If a person pushes his ideas like a salesman pushing a product, lobbying others to accept his views, that is truly unwise and inhumane. When we write articles and set forth ideas, we must be mentally prepared that some people will treat them as nonsense. In fact that is just how it is: every idea only resonates with a part of those who can resonate; to others it is worthless nonsense. If onepromotes this worthless nonsense and builds an ideal state on it, one may feel pleased oneself, but has one considered the feelings of those who oppose it?

My college counselor once said to me in a chat: You read so many books and absorb so many ideas, which clash with one another; how will you choose? At the time I could not figure out how to answer. As I neared forty, I understood the answer: forget everything.

This seems absurd—the purpose of learning ideas is to forget them, so why learn at all? Who would say otherwise? “Man’s sorrows begin when he learns characters.” A bookish person’s brain may hold an appalling amount of knowledge, but the rules and cages this knowledge constructs are enough to torment him. The best way to rescue himself is to forget these ideas and achieve what Qian Zhongshu called “entering yet being able to exit,” so that by embracing ideas he does not become a person who looks unbiased but is in fact terribly dogmatic.

In short, we should be masters of ideas, not their prisoners. As the ancients said: it is the person who carries forward the Way, not the Way that carries the person.