When Sacred Chants Enter the Ear, All Worries Fade Away

“Outside Gusu City lies Hanshan Temple; at midnight its bell reaches the traveler's boat.” In that era with little noise, in the dead of night the ancient, melodious bell rung by the early-rising monks of Hanshan Temple, piercing the heavens and reaching the ears of a traveler lodging alone on a boat in a distant land, evoked nostalgia and melancholy that modern people can probably hardly experience anymore.

Likewise, we can hardly experience again the feeling of, “The bright moon over the Huai River chills a thousand mountains; in the dimness I return, unguarded by anyone”—that taste of savoring loneliness and loss alone in a cold, vast land.

Our brains are packed full; even underage children are already surrounded by flooding information and can no longer make much room for these emotions.

In fact, just as we need to draw various nutrients from different foods, we also need to experience various emotions from different environments. Food provides nutrition for our bodies, and emotional experiences can also provide precious nourishment for the growth of our minds.

Scientific progress has shattered the mysticism created by religion, and at the same time has done great damage to human romantic feeling. Pure science is rational and emotionless, but life needs not only reason; we also need emotion, need something non-rational.

At certain moments in life, the false can warm the heart better than the real. For example, when our beloved leaves this world, believing they still exist in another world, gazing at us across the distance, is more comforting than believing that death is like a lamp going out and everything ceases to exist. When about to breathe one's last, believing that life continues in another way is also happier than believing that from then on we have no further connection with this beautiful world.

So humanity should learn to stretch its comprehension of life and use imagination to make up for the insufficiency of reason. Now I like to maintain a neutral, non-rational attitude in all aspects of life. In my view, neutrality is an attitude that does not negate either side of things. It is hard to find things in the world that are absolutely right or absolutely wrong; most things have both reasonableness and unreasonableness.

So I am not a pure scientismist and do not believe science is omnipotent. At the beginning or end of a busy day, I will strike my singing bowl and enter another world. This sacred chant nearest to me, deep and melodious, ethereal and airy—as soon as it enters the ear, all worries can instantly leave the heart.

I have no religious belief, but just as the Buddhist sutras say, the human heart is like an ox that needs a rope to lead it so it will not run wild. I love letting this pleasant sacred chant carry me to roam in another world, a world unrelated to reason, belonging only to imagination.

Where two feet cannot reach, the wings of imagination can help us arrive; for lost family and romantic love, imagination can also help us make up for them. Without imagination, our lives would be nothing but fragmentation and incompleteness. We have experienced too many partings and deaths, lost too many loved ones and friends; those family bonds and friendships once so precious to us were ruthlessly taken away by the god of fate. Only imagination can fill the holes left deep in our hearts by all we have lost.

A melodious bell can bring the thoughts of a far-off traveler lodging on a boat back to the long-absent hometown; a cold bright moon can bring a lost lover back to our hearts; a sacred chant can carry us beyond the world's joys and sorrows into a realm of clarity. Technology and material things cannot help us gain such emotional experiences; those noisy sounds and anxious words cannot calm our hearts either. Only our innate, transcendently rational imagination can help us enrich our spiritual world.

No matter who you are, no matter how high your social standing (it may seem very high to you, but in others' eyes it may be dismissed; a person needs the courage to deny himself to escape the boundless sea of suffering), one day, when you have gone through hardships and tasted partings and deaths, you too will be like me: no longer superstitious about pure reason, but will use imagination to build a spiritual home for your inner self.

In places invisible to the naked eye, many very precious things still exist, and these require us to perceive and seek them with our hearts. But once we find them, we will be like having dug up an inexhaustible treasure—compared with this treasure, the visible material world is truly insignificant.

For this reason, those who have a spiritual home are blessed; their happiness is not affected by the restless outside world. No matter how turbulent society becomes, they can live peacefully and freely in their own spiritual home, and worldly troubles can be negligible to them.