Leaving the World Is Returning Home; Dwelling in the World Is the True Homelessness
Chinese Buddhists often use 'the world' (shi jian) and 'leaving the world' (chu shi jian) to describe the worldly realm and the realm beyond it. 'The world' actually means society and family; so-called 'leaving the world' or leaving the mortal dust means keeping a certain distance from society and family, not being influenced by them. If there is a greatest difference between Buddhists and ordinary people, it is only in outlook on life and values; otherwise, they are no more than a flesh-and-blood body that still needs to eat, drink, urinate, defecate, and sleep every day. Therefore, those who have left the world and those who dwell in it differ greatly in outlook and values, and the two can hardly achieve genuine spiritual communication.
There are also some people who drift between the two, mixing in the world while their hearts have already left it; I belong to this kind. One day my son asked me, 'Dad, when you are old and living alone, what is the thing you most want to do?' I told him: to shave my head and become a monk. In some Buddhist countries of Southeast Asia, a man becomes a monk at least once in his life; one is not considered an adult if one never has. To leave home is to experience a period of renouncing the world and learn to handle the relationship between one's inner self and the outside world; that is why people in many Southeast Asian countries have a high happiness index, gentle, sincere, and simple throughout life.
To my mind, this 'leaving home' should not be called leaving home but rather returning home—returning to the original spiritual home of humankind. When our ancestors moved from the forests to villages and cities, building complex social systems and establishing inexplicable systems of self-motivation, that was the beginning of our separation from nature, our true home, and also the beginning of our spiritual suffering.
Humans living in nature do not bear as much spiritual burden as people now living in great metropolises; or rather, humans living in nature may not even know what spiritual burden is. Only modern people living in big cities have exhausted spirits. If we review human evolutionary history and, from this broad historical view, look at people who commit suicide under excessive mental pressure, we will find them utterly inconceivable.
There is an old Chinese saying that 'a person's sorrows begin when he learns to read.' This saying is flawed: whether one has sorrows has nothing to do with literacy. In fact, in the 1950s and 1960s, the suicide rate among illiterate rural women in China was very high. When do life's sorrows begin? They begin with the birth of desire; when a person wishes to possess something or someone, his sorrows arrive. When his desires die away, sorrows depart.
I do not now encourage my son to develop desires; I only encourage him to develop hobbies. If he likes doing something, he should do it—not to win others' applause or envy, but only to while away a boring life. I always stress to him that his future should be happy and joyful; he need not be responsible for his parents' or his own face, only for his own happiness. I do not believe that in this society a person will easily starve, so I also do not believe he will go hungry. When he was four, I took him out to collect scraps and told him: if one day you are cornered, this is one of your ways out. In the face of hardship, one must be calm to the point that even if Mount Tai collapsed before one, one would not panic.
In fact, most so-called hardships are not hardships; only being crippled in hands and feet or stricken by serious illness counts as hardship. But this fleshly body, this colored shell borrowed from nature for use, must after all dissolve into smoke and return to nature. Our homecoming is this boundless universe, this imperishable nature—that is our permanent home.