Know Yourself, Understand All Beings; Observe All Things, Explore the Mind
Knowing others is difficult; knowing oneself is truly no easier.
— Essentials of Governance of the Zhenguan Era
The Buddha said: He who leaves his family and home, recognizes his mind and reaches the root, and understands the doctrine of no-action, is called a shramana. Constantly practicing the two hundred and fifty precepts, pure in conduct, walking the way of the four truths, he becomes an arhat. An arhat can fly and transform, live through vast kalpas, and move heaven and earth. Next comes the anagamin. At the end of his life the anagamin's spirit rises to the nineteenth heaven and there attains arhatship. Next comes the sakridagamin. The sakridagamin returns once more and then attains arhatship. Next comes the srotapanna. After seven deaths and seven births, the srotapanna attains arhatship.
— The Sutra of Forty-two Sections Spoken by the Buddha
The highest fruition of Theravada Buddhism is the arhat—a practitioner who has realized his own liberation is called an arhat. But Mahayana Buddhism places two further fruitions above the arhat: the bodhisattva and the Buddha. After a practitioner attains arhatship, he returns to the world to guide beings, experiences worldly affairs, and further expands his own understanding; this is called walking the bodhisattva path. Having walked this bodhisattva path, a person not only realizes his own liberation but also understands and sympathizes with all beings; his spirit grows further, finally maturing to a state free of every obstruction, and then he becomes a Buddha.
A Buddha is the ultimate awakened one; he can understand all and forgive all—the greatest compassion in the human world is actually understanding and forgiveness. The only reason pain and resentment remain in the human heart is that one cannot understand all. If one could understand all, one could accept and forgive all; all pain and resentment would cease, replaced by pity for the hardship of all beings. In Buddhism this is called the arising of great compassion; when a person has great compassion, he naturally keeps the precepts, practices forbearance, gives in charity, and naturally enters the state of meditation.
Observation (guan) is the basis of understanding. Guan is both a Buddhist term and an aesthetic one. As a Buddhist term it means quietly contemplating the world and using wisdom to illuminate the principle behind all things, forming right view. As an aesthetic term it means the distinctive mental activity by which, in a disinterested state, a person observes, experiences, judges and scrutinizes the qualities of things. The two are basically the same.
If every day we can observe our own inner heart and also observe the whole world, exploring the minds of ourselves and others, we will deepen our understanding of ourselves and others, attain inner harmony and harmonious relationships, and gain more well-being. When young we urgently need to be understood; but after middle age, what we ought most to do is understand others, because we have observed the world for years, should understand some principles, and ought to be more mature in mind.
Psychologists hold that a person's habits of thought and behavior are already formed in early childhood. There is also an old Chinese saying: "At three you see the child; at seven you see the adult." Many relationship crises that erupt only in middle age have their roots in the two stages of ages 0-6 and adolescence.
If parents give a child enough love in early childhood and provide a firm emotional bond, the child will have a strong sense of security. If the parents then, during the child's adolescence, know how to yield and give the child room to grow freely, then that child is a lucky one, never lacking in self-confidence and enterprise. However hard the world is, he will have no fear.
I have always regarded myself as a lucky person, and in fact I am. In a comprehensive psychological test, my security score was 65.5 (out of 66), and my tolerance score was full marks. This shows that during my upbringing my parents gave me enough love and protection, and enough tolerance and yielding.
But not everyone is so lucky; some people badly lack security. The reason is that during ages 0-6 they did not receive appropriate parental care.
Parents who are especially fond of scolding and denying their children leave deep imprints, so that such children never learn to communicate correctly with others. Their habitual thinking pattern is confrontation and avoidance, because the wounds their hearts suffered before age six make them fear communicating with others; especially to critical opinions they respond physically. They take anyone who points out their errors to be, like their parents, there to deny and scold them. This causesobstacles in normal interpersonal communication.
Parents who refuse intimacy with their children leave another kind of shadow; their children feel unloved, and when grown, in intimate relationships they always suspect their partners of not loving them enough. So they need the partner to keep expressing love, to keep insisting that they are loved, before they can feel a little at ease. At the partner's slightest negligence, they feel they have lost that love. Tormented all their lives by depression and anxiety, they find it hard to trust a partner and hard to form lasting relationships.
Children denied and suppressed by their parents in adolescence spend their whole lives in constant self-reproach, striving to please others in order to win care and forgiveness. There are many other harms, each producing some kind of personality disorder.
Psychology calls these personality disorders; Buddhism calls them obstacles of consciousness. A single leaf before the eye blocks out Mount Tai. However named, these people inevitably develop some cognitive distortion; some distortions are very hard to correct, and they affect a person's lifelong happiness. Unless they marry a deeply loving spiritual master, they are hard to understand.
Children raised correctly begin, once they reach later adolescence, to forge ahead in their careers. But those with personality disorders remain trapped all their lives in their various obstacles, beset by setbacks, and rarely have smooth sailing in emotion or career.
This is quite similar to how many cancers form; in reality both belong to epigenetic variation. Most cancers arise when, early in life, somatic cells undergo a series of changes under environmental influence; over time those changed cells become immortal and keep dividing and proliferating, forming a tumor. Psychological obstacles and physical tumors are essentially no different; psychological obstacles also have a material basis and also trigger a series of biochemical reactions. Moreover, the immortalization seen in tumor cells seems also present in the psychologically disturbed; the neurotransmitters that make psychological disorders linger are hard to clear.
To the Dutch brain scientist Dick Swaab (author of We Are Our Brains
After Swaab discovered that homosexuality is caused by genetic variation and advocated tolerance toward homosexuals, protesters lined up outside his home, many wanting him to shut up. When he proposed that killing can be forgiven, it was even harder to win public understanding. But purely from a scientific standpoint, he may be right—though of course we always oppose any act that takes another's life.
If a person keeps exploring and keeps growing, he should no longer expect others to understand him fully, but should try to understand others. Because his cognition has already surpassed the great majority of people, he cannot be fully understood again. But he has the ability to keep learning and exploring, to understand and help others.
A shared duty of brain scientists, psychologists, psychiatrists, philosophers and religious thinkers is to explore the inner world deeply in order to promote mutual understanding; a peaceful world can only be built on the foundation of understanding and tolerance. Deeply attuned love between two people can likewise be built only on understanding and tolerance.
We never stop growing in this life, because our inner world still holds too many unknown mysteries. I am still exploring; perhaps until my dying day my exploration will not be finished. To my mind, knowing oneself and understanding others through observation and exploration is something both enjoyable and greatly conducive to inner peace.