Studying the Buddha, One Must Know the Harmful Side of Buddhism

Goethe called the "insight" in discussing art: "able to enter, able to encompass, able to penetrate." To encompass is to be unbiased; to penetrate is to be unobstructed; entering yet able to exit, one may then avoid being blinded by insight.

—Qian Zhongshu, Limited Views (Guanzhuibian)

Because over many years I have published a large number of articles on Buddhism on various platforms, in recent years people interested in Buddhism have continually found me through various channels, hoping to exchange ideas with me on Buddhism. I now write this essay to explain my own attitude toward Buddhism.

On the whole, my attitude toward Buddhism is one of critical assimilation. I differ from pure Buddhists, who have only reverence and no criticism; I also differ from pure scholars who criticize Buddhism, who have only criticism and no recognition; I even differ from neutral scholars who study Buddhism purely without practicing it. I am myself a practitioner of some Buddhist ideas; I have cultivated in temples, but I take a negative attitude toward the great deal of rubbish in Buddhism. Increasingly, I am unwilling to define myself as a Buddhist. My atheistic leanings make me closer to a Jain, but Jain thought is a bit thin, not as deep as Buddhist thought. So in my attitude toward religious belief I resemble a Jain, while in thought I am influenced by the Buddha and Nagarjuna.

Jainism is one of the non-Buddhist schools recorded in the sutras. In the Buddha's lifetime, Jainism was powerful enough to rival Buddhism; even today in India it still has millions of followers, most of relatively high social status. Jainism is an atheist religion; it believes reason is higher than religion, and holds that right faith, right knowledge, and right conduct are the fundamental means by which people are liberated from spiritual suffering. Its basic precepts are: "speak truth, act purely, be unattached, do no harm." Jainism also has "three jewels"—right faith, right knowledge, right conduct—and "five precepts": no killing, no lying, no stealing, no adultery, no greed for wealth. Jains advocate asceticism, achieving permanent spiritual liberation through ascetic practice.

Objectively, these Jain ideas are, seen today, all very correct. In a modern society where science flourishes and theology's influence wanes, such a deified, non-religious faith is more readily accepted. Many temples in China today are, in essence, actually closer to Jainism; some temples, especially Chan temples, gradually no longer teach the theistic elements of Buddhism.

Everything has its benefits and its drawbacks. Buddhism says: "May all beings deeply enter the storehouse of scriptures, so that their wisdom becomes like the sea." The Buddhist scriptures indeed contain a great deal of wisdom worth learning, but they are not without harmful spiritual opium. If a person studies the Buddha only by admiring the beneficial side of Buddhism and, because of this, ignoring the harmful side, he is very likely to be misled by Buddhism and fall into a state of prejudice.

Buddhists, when various circles criticize the harmful side of Buddhism, often offer all sorts of excuses, telling people to "rely on the bright side of Buddhism" and not "rely on the dark side." In fact, most of the Buddhists who say these words are themselves already immersed in the dark side and unable to extricate themselves. So I personally am unwilling to have much contact with paranoid Buddhists; respecting their faith and staying away from their clamor is the best way to get along with them.

My personal view is that if one is not going to study a discipline, then simply do not study it; if one does study it, study it comprehensively, study it thoroughly, and after studying thoroughly, leap out of it. Only by studying comprehensively will one have no prejudice; only by studying thoroughly will one not be obstructed by it. Once a person is immersed in some thought or belief, he easily becomes a paranoid. From my years of contact with Buddhists, Buddhists are even more paranoid than ordinary people; and the more devout the believer, the more paranoid. Take the current so-called "life release" activities: many Buddhists' release activities are not releasing life at all, but are actually killing and damaging the ecological environment.

In 2007 I published on Tianya Community my own interpretation of the Diamond Sutra. I was only 28 then, young and full of myself, thinking I was somebody, quite conceited about my intellect and comprehension. Later many Buddhists jumped out and reviled my reading of the Diamond Sutra as "slandering the Buddha." In the eyes of so-called right-believing Buddhists, "slandering the Buddha" sends one to hell. But how could an atheist believe in such an absurd existence as hell? So I never took their curses to heart.

But at that time I did encounter several masters of Buddhism who joined the debate; among them a middle-aged man of perhaps forty or fifty whose Buddhist cultivation I most admired. We both felt we had met too late. As I wrote, he kept patching my work and guided me to read many books—on Buddhist history, on ancient Indian thought, and on sutras I had not previously encountered. This teacher's erudition deeply won me over, and he was equally won over by my literary talent and my understanding of Buddhism.

Under his guidance I went from a so-called researcher of Buddhism to a researcher of the great Buddhism. No longer merely studying Buddhist philosophy, I studied the whole of ancient Indian philosophy and history, and the spread and development of Buddhism throughout the world; I even touched on Tibetology and Tibet's Bon religion, for all these are greatly related to the formation and evolution of Buddhist thought. Only with this grand historical perspective can one see more clearly what Buddhism is.

I read for four years for this. You should know that before this I had also read a great many works on Buddhism, had systematically studied anthropology and sociology, and had written two monographs on anthropology. So this subsequent four years of reading was by no means blind reading. Many of my own puzzlements about Buddhism were answered in this stage.

Especially, at that time my mother fell ill, and I suffered a heavy spiritual blow and began to sink into depression.

When I was in my twenties and first came to Beijing, I lived in Zhongguanyuan outside the east gate of Peking University, renting a room from a teacher in the computer science department. There I supported myself through business while reading and writing; more importantly, I met all kinds of idealistic young people. At that time my wish was to do what Sun Yat-sen, Chen Duxiu, and Hu Shih had once done—to transform China in thought and action. And I took a great deal of action; the articles I wrote then were no less sharp than Lu Xun's, and because of them I was a notable figure on some of China's earliest BBS forums.

Before the age of twenty, many of my actions were astonishing. When I was in the first year of middle school, our original class monitor misbehaved and bullied some weaker classmates, which aroused my indignation. At the end of an evening self-study session, I went to my head teacher's dormitory and told him that this monitor was quite unfit; I passionately denounced his various misdeeds and proposed that I take the monitor's post to restore class discipline. My head teacher, seeing a teenage boy with such boldness, was somewhat stunned. When he recovered, he greatly admired my spirit and told me to study hard, for I would have a boundless future. Two weeks later, the class monitor became me.

I was savagely retaliated against by the original monitor; throughout the three years of middle school he kept threatening to beat me, but this arrogant classmate, though he had beaten many people, did not actually dare to lay a hand on me for three whole years. I was very brave then; after he threatened me too many times, he enraged me.

Once, after our school flag-raising ceremony, the principal gave a talk. As he neared the end, I strode to the rostrum and said to the principal: "Principal, I have something to say." Then I took the microphone from the stunned principal and, before the whole school, denounced the gang of thugs who had threatened me, telling them loudly that I was not afraid of them. I was not even afraid of death, so if anyone dared hit me, I would fight him to the end. Perhaps this fearless courage cowed them; so although they did sneaky things behind my back in my schoolbag and bed, they did not dare provoke me to my face.

Probably because of this exceptional boldness, the school later elected me student union president. In my first year of high school I continued, as always, this fearless style, and as a result offended the principal's son; later he hired people to beat me. In a rage, I borrowed a kitchen knife from the school shop, found those tall, burly fellows who had beaten me, and slashed straight down. Those men never imagined my character could be so fierce that they almost knelt down begging me to spare them.

Because of this, I changed schools in my second year of high school. But in this new high school my personality was still just as pronounced. Once, because a teacher beat a student until my classmate's head was bloody, I led a group of male classmates chasing and beating that teacher all over the school. I also once mobilized the whole grade to demand collectively that the principal dismiss an incompetent teacher. I clashed with both the principal and vice-principal.

So you can see what a reckless fellow I was when young. Though I was wild in personality, my grades were very good; on my best exam I was second in the whole grade, the total score of the first being over a hundred points below mine. Once, in a joint exam of hundreds of high schools across Hubei province, I placed near the top.

Even after I entered university, my personality was just as fierce. Once I went to Tianjin to visit my present wife, then girlfriend; the ticket collector on the bus I was riding beat an elderly couple on board, breaking the old man's head. The old man wailed and threatened to report the collector. The collector said arrogantly: "Who saw me hit you?" No one on the bus dared speak. At that moment I stood up, holding an arm exerciser, and said to this fellow: "I saw it!" I forced the driver to drive to the police station, delivering this arrogant collector to justice.

So it is almost unimaginable that someone like me would study the Buddha, for this character is completely mismatched with the compassion and gentleness a Buddhist should have. Yet I was, from the age of seven, truly and verifiably nurtured by Buddhism. My grandmother was illiterate, but she was a devout Buddhist; she had scriptures copied back by others and insisted on memorizing them before she would let it go. She always begged me to teach her to recite the sutras, almost coercing and tempting me to do so. So when very young, I helped my grandmother memorize the scriptures by looking things up in the dictionary; often I had memorized them first while my grandmother could not yet remember a few lines.

My fierce personality was changed by my mother's illness. When my mother suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and lay unconscious in the hospital for many days, the moment I rushed home and saw my mother lying in the hospital bed, insensible, I—who had always been fierce—bowed down.

I was dissatisfied with my university and dropped out, giving up my degree, and ran off to the National Library to read. This rebellious act kept my mother in dread for many years. Earlier, because my personality was too strong, I had been willful and reckless on many matters, completely ignoring my mother's advice. Relying on my strong ability to survive and earn money, I did not care at all about my family's criticism; I was so rebellious that I did not go home for years, making my mother weep, longing for her son madly every festival. These memories welled up before me scene by scene, filling me with remorse. I hoped my mother would wake, giving me the chance to kneel before her and repent. But she was unconscious for more than ten days, and the hospital hung its critical-illness notice on her for twenty-three days.

During those days of her coma, I felt ten thousand knives stabbing my heart. I repented my faults, hoping I could make amends for the harm I had done her. The Buddhist scriptures I had read began to rise in my heart line by line. At such a moment I had to admire how profoundly this sage, the Buddha, had grasped the philosophy of life. The sutra says: "A person has many faults but does not know it himself; when his heart suddenly stops, guilt comes upon him like water returning to the sea, gradually becoming deep and wide." Beside my mother's sickbed, I wept, bitterly repenting every fault I had committed.

The next year, my mother, who had not yet recovered from the aftereffects of the cerebral hemorrhage, was found to have stomach cancer. From then on, on one hand I looked for places to treat her, on the other I studied medicine hard to care for her, and morning and evening I recited the scriptures and repented deeply. I do not know how many people, in such a state as mine, on a foundation of deep Buddhist knowledge, have practiced the Buddhist life for as long as ten years.

In this process, besides taming my own heart, I saw no miracle. But taming the heart of so fierce a person as myself—that is the miracle. I can now forgive anyone in the world; even if someone spat in my face, I can now laugh it off. Not because my heart became soft after studying the Buddha, but because I now know that when a person is not yet mature, he does many wrong things without knowing it; so I can forgive every act that harms me.

The spirit of tolerance is one of the important goals religious training is meant to achieve. Restraining one's own behavior is another important goal. Only when a person has conquered himself—conquered the greed, anger, and delusion in his own heart—can he restrain all his behavior without anyone's supervision. One day everyone will realize that the pain harming others brings to our own heart is far deeper than the pain of being harmed by others. So on that day a person will consciously restrain all his behavior and cause no harm to others.

The ultimate goal of Buddhism is to lead people, through various practices, gradually to realize the ultimate wisdom that ends suffering. Buddhism holds that life has eight sufferings: birth, old age, illness, death, separation from the beloved, meeting the hated, not obtaining what one seeks, and the full blaze of the five skandhas (when, for various reasons, the five inner organs boil over and grief, pain, and anxiety interweave). A person who studies the Buddha must ultimately learn the wisdom that ends suffering, catching in one net all the sufferings he will encounter in a lifetime, so that he is free of affliction from then on.

To this end, Buddhism proposes the six paramitas—precepts, patience, giving, samadhi, diligence, and wisdom—as the six paths of practice to reach this ultimate goal.

Precepts are the training of the rules, strictly not doing what the Buddhist precepts forbid. Patience means being able to endure when faced with all slander, bullying, and insult. Giving means helping others; Buddhism has many kinds of giving—material giving, Dharma giving, bodily giving, and fearlessness-giving—meaning that through material or spiritual acts of helping others one cultivates one's compassion. Samadhi is sitting in meditation; in the process, one first repents and reflects on one's faults (like Bodhidharma facing the wall), second thinks in stillness about the truths of life one does not understand, third gradually trains one's fiery temper to become softer and softer, and fourth gradually achieves a state in which self and object are both forgotten. Diligence means constantly improving oneself, and after reaching one level, moving on to the next; Buddhism holds that the elevation of one's spiritual realm is a gradual, step-by-step process, like climbing stairs, one step at a time, not giving up halfway. Wisdom (prajna) is the most important and weightiest of the six paramitas; it is the wisdom in which awakening and practice are one, attaining liberation and the Way. This wisdom differs from ordinary wisdom; it must be a wisdom in which knowledge and action are unified—not only understood clearly, but with every act done "according to principle and Dharma," not contradicting Buddhist understanding.

This very complete system of practice is the greatest feature distinguishing Buddhism from psychology and from other religions, and it is also Buddhism's most essential part. The Buddhist cultivated in the end should possess the four immeasurable minds: loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. Only by achieving loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity will one be free of greed, anger, attachment, arrogance, and doubt. These five minds—greed, anger, delusion, arrogance, and doubt—are collectively called the five poisons in Buddhism and are the root of all kinds of suffering in the human heart.

So I am not a mere researcher of Buddhist philosophy; I am a practitioner of Buddhist thought. What truly made me bow down was not the blow of a Chan master's shout, but the various deep sufferings I encountered in the human world. These sufferings once tormented me to the point that I longed for death; in the process of escaping them, samadhi and the wisdom that ends suffering arose of themselves.

If people were not attached to feeling and love and to various desires, how could they sink themselves into such deep suffering of life? People often come and reason with me about the right and wrong of Buddhism; I think it is all bullshit. Anyone who has not experienced the eight sufferings of life, and relies only on so-called chanting, burning incense and bowing, kowtowing and gesturing—even those who believe their own hallucinations, feeling they have seen the Buddha, the lotus throne, or Guanyin—none of them can comprehend Buddhism's truly profound meaning.

The Buddha is only in our own hearts; when we have conquered the various attachments and cravings in our own hearts, we ourselves are the Buddha.

What is the mortal world? It is the group of people woven together by blood ties, love-relationships, and various other affinities; in such a group there pervade love and hate, gratitude and enmity, and all manner of greedy desire. The French philosopher Le Bon said that once a person enters a group, his IQ rapidly declines, and herd psychology becomes the main factor dominating his behavior.

People always lose their pure original nature in the group; influenced by the various prevailing ideas of the group, a person easily becomes the slave of various currents of thought, losing the ability to think independently, losing his original heart, bewildered and exhausted. So if a person can detach himself from the group and maintain independent judgment, that is truly great good fortune in life.

This is why Schopenhauer said that people are like hedgehogs: far apart they feel lonely and cold, but close up each other's spines prick them. The existentialist master Sartre said: "Hell is other people." When Buddhists want to become monks and sramanas, they really hope to escape the compulsive interference to their own will brought by tangled human relationships.

If a person can detach himself from this boundless net of feeling woven by blood and desire, that is truly the happiest thing in life. Becoming a monk is as simple as many single people today choosing to be single. Why do many people who could be partnered choose to be single? Because they do not want to fall into the net of worldly relationships and suffer the torture of their own will being interfered with.

Ideal love, as Ellis said, is the love between two like-minded people, between two who highly recognize each other's outlook on life, values, and worldview. An ideal family is also one in which no one interferes with anyone else's will, letting each person maintain high independence and freedom. So in a family, a democratic style is very important, a tolerant spirit is very important, and most important of all is the unity of the whole family on values, and the fact that family members are not easily influenced by the outside world.

Such love and family are extremely rare. What if one does not encounter such love and family? Seeking others is less than seeking oneself; only by liberating oneself, cutting off desire and greed, not being influenced by love-relationships, and firmly being oneself. Such a person is easily criticized as too self-centered and too selfish. Faced with such criticism, there is no way but to thicken one's skin and remain unmoved.

Relatives and kin loving one another and living in harmony—would that not be enviable? The problem is that in this world, nine out of ten things do not go as we wish. We can strive, work hard, treat family well, and cherish them, but in the end whether they are satisfied is not something we can control. Desiring human beings are the most fearsome animals in this world. For desire, easily swelling under external stimulation, may have no end; only when a person finally understands one day that desire is a bottomless pit will its swelling suddenly stop. But most people belong to those whose desire is a bottomless pit, and understanding this is truly difficult.

When the train of desire stops, we can feel how light and peaceful this world is. Every blade of grass and every tree brings joy to the heart; happiness is before our eyes. So the person who can always laugh heartily is sunny; even if this person is not beautiful, not handsome, not rich, he or she is the most enviable person in the world.

I have practiced medicine for many years, and the people I meet most are cancer patients. Before this terminal illness that humanity still cannot solve, whether a wealthy magnate or a high official, all can only bow to the ground and accept fate's arrangement. In the past they had many desires and many achievements, but now their single desire is simply to survive, and all their past achievements—wealth or wisdom—are nothing much, useless before the laws of nature.

So when Ko Wen-je of Taiwan ran for mayor of Taipei, he said: "In a doctor's eyes, glory, wealth, and honor are nothing but a pile of dog shit." In a doctor's eyes, the various so-called achievements of the secular world are also nothing but a pile of dog shit. In life, only the people we love and the things we love doing are most precious. The rest is not worth mentioning. Mutually delighted love and a career we enjoy are the true motivations worth taking seriously for people to go on living.

For years I have been like a wild boar running across the wilderness; my personality is so independent, so daring to strive, so valuing practice over empty talk in my ideals. So I feel fortunate that, now thirty-seven, I mostly live the life I want, living in my own world. If I have not caused harm to my family, I would even give my life full marks.

Today many people study the Buddha without knowing what exactly they are supposed to learn. Some want to find psychic powers in Buddhism; regrettably, Buddhism has no psychic powers, and the Buddha repeatedly refuted them in his lifetime. Some seriously ill patients, seeking the Buddha only at the last moment, instead fall into the traps of swindlers who have infiltrated Buddhism. Some bewildered people go to Buddhism seeking a teacher for guidance, only to find the teacher himself sunk in greed, anger, delusion, arrogance, and doubt, teaching a plausible-but-false Dharma that sinks people into depression and weakness. Other teachers cheat money and sex; one of China's most famous Tibetan Buddhist lamas, Khenpo XXX, looks solemn in public, yet I myself have come into contact with female devotees he seduced—or one could say raped. Such a beast-in-human-shape teacher has done tremendous harm.

Everyone has a human side, a beastial side, and even a demonic side. Humanity and beastiality are at least real; demonism is self-deception after befuddlement. The Buddha awakened on the human path into a wise person in whom awakening and practice are one; he achieved spiritual liberation through reason, not through psychic powers.

Moreover, once spiritual liberation is attained, one should just go on living as before, raise the family one should raise—what business is becoming a monk? Now some monastics not only rely on devotees for food, clothing, shelter, and everything, but also, in response to China's filial-piety culture, build nursing homes in the temples and bring their own parents to be supported there, living off the contributions of lay devotees. This parasitic, unearned way of life is even praised by them as the act of a great man; it is truly a disgrace to the Buddhist world.

Before awakening one eats, drinks, defecates, urinates, and sleeps; after awakening one eats, drinks, defecates, urinates, and sleeps. The essence of life does not change at all; what changes is only one's own mind. But, as Schopenhauer said, the animal called human has only a little more consciousness than other creatures, yet precisely this little bit of consciousness makes people live far more painfully than other creatures.

In Buddhism, what Schopenhauer called "consciousness" corresponds to the two words "sentient being" (youqing). Sentient beings are a group living trapped in the sea of desire; precisely because they are obsessed with the sea of desire, their mind is always unsteady. The outside world is endlessly stormy; the only way a person can remain calm is to be undisturbed by the outside, living deep within his own heart.

Sometimes I browse forums like Tianya, watching a group of Buddhists and Christians or Daoists argue, each claiming their own founder was the teacher of the others' founders, even citing classics to bring out all sorts of heresies and forcefully proving their point. I imagine those who believe neither in Buddhism nor Daoism nor Christianity, seeing such arguments, would only murmur in their hearts: "What a bunch of idiots." Others use every means to far-fetchedly persuade others to believe in the existence of an invisible, intangible divinity. I cannot help sighing in my heart: studying Buddhism to become like this is worse than not studying at all.

Once, because of my atheistic leanings, I was collectively besieged by a group of theist Buddhists at Beijing Longquan Temple. When I post articles online, I am also besieged and reviled by countless anti-Buddhists, god-superstitious people, and low-level Buddhist believers whose religious emotions are so fiery they cannot accept any criticism of their faith. According to their curses, I would long ago have gone to the eighteenth level of hell. But with my fearless character, let alone the eighteenth, going to the thirty-sixth level of hell is of no consequence. A religion that preaches compassion producing believers so vicious—that is quite a miracle.

This is my personal view of religion, my own view of the Buddha. I know that most Buddhist believers do not agree with me, and some even hate me to the teeth. Luckily I now publish such articles only on my own self-media; I am tired of being entangled on public forums by a swarm of foul-mouthed fellows demanding that I admit error, correct myself, and apologize. I am also tired of exchanging the Dharma with various fellow Buddhist practitioners. So, all of you who come to discuss the Dharma with me: after reading this article, agree if you agree; even if you do not agree, just wave your hand and pass with a smile; do not disturb my peace and quiet. I acknowledge that you are masters and that you will attain the unsurpassed Way, but I am willing to walk the path of an ordinary person for the rest of my life.

Because in me there has always been a spirit that, however I try to change it, I cannot change—namely, seeking truth.