Understanding Is the Foundation of Acceptance
As I have grown older, my temperament has become more and more easygoing. Perhaps because sex hormones no longer surge as they did in youth, or perhaps because I have seen more of the world, I have gradually taken everything more lightly. Fewer things irritate me; fewer things thrill me; my heart no longer surges as it did when I was young. Even toward life and death I have grown calmer; death no longer feels so dreadful.
Before the Qingming Festival in 2025, I went back to my hometown. I was in a hurry, and in the darkest hour before dawn I rode an electric bicycle from the village toward the county town. I had to cross a stretch of mountain road three or four li long, lined on both sides with graves. Many people had already visited the tombs in those days; after sweeping, some leave an eternal lamp burning before the ancestral grave. So ghost-lamp-like lights were scattered through the valley, and owls from time to time let out unnerving calls. The valley was eerie and genuinely frightening.
When I set out from home, my father insisted on coming with me to the county town, fearing I would be scared crossing the graveyard alone in the dark. The small hours were cold; my father is nearly eighty, and I did not want him braving the chill on the road, so I firmly refused. Crossing that burial ground alone, I was, admittedly, a little afraid—although I am a steadfast atheist. But after a minute or two I calmed down. At thirteen I had once walked home alone at midnight through the village graveyard from the town middle school, so I do have some nerve.
In that atmosphere it is hard not to think of ghosts, even if you are an atheist. As the saying goes, the more you fear ghosts, the more you see them. As I entered the graveyard I tried not to think about it, but the more I repressed it, the more the thoughts came. Finally I stopped resisting altogether, and began to observe those scattered eternal lamps, to look at the graves and tombstones, to imagine the dead buried below, and in my heart to converse with them. I even stopped the bicycle once, gazing out over the tracts of graves in the pitch-black valley, lost in thought.
Beside that graveyard I thought of the many late-stage cancer patients and some psychiatric patients I have known over the years—some have already gone to the other world, others still linger on the line between life and death. However brilliant or wretched their lives, in their final moments most of them clung to life; only a few patients I have known chose suicide.
I recalled the details of how many of them had been with me, and silently mourned them. If a netherworld exists, then on this pitch-black night, on this burial ground, I had as close as I will ever come to it. Here, I could speak with them. Regrettably, at forty-six, having crossed graveyards many times, visited a crematorium late at night, and sat alone in a morgue, I have never once seen a ghost. So no one emerged from the other world to talk with me; I could only meditate in solitude.
Once a theist told me that two ghosts always followed her, but that when she drew near me those two ghosts fled in terror. She said I was an arhat reincarnated from a temple, and that no “unclean thing” dared approach me; she used this to explain why I never see ghosts. But in her I observed the most classic clinical symptoms of a psychotic patient, so I could not agree with her—though I understood her thinking and felt for her.
Another patient, with lung cancer and schizophrenia, on her deathbed asked her son to tell me that I was the Medicine Buddha from a temple, and had him convey her thanks. The brains of such patients process information through a unique program that ordinary people cannot fathom.
For most people, the word “understanding” may be just a word. But for me it stands behind piles of literature, behind profound insight born of countless explorations of body, mind, and spirit. People understand one another so little that we say a kindred spirit is hard to find. Most people’s capacity for understanding is impoverished; they live in a very closed inner world, their thoughts already hardened, and they can barely truly “see” another person’s heart—let alone grasp the physical and mental suffering that others bear.
Standing beside the gate between life and death, I have seen the most helpless and painful side of ordinary humanity. I must deeply understand disease, and I must deeply understand others’ inner worlds; only so can I help them. The human world I have seen is a kaleidoscope, and ordinary people have shown me their diversity.
Even now I know only a limited amount about this diversity; there is far more to explore. Still, this experience has taught me how multifarious the world is and freed me from the limits of single-minded thinking. I no longer judge others or myself only from my own vantage; I often view the world and myself from others’ perspectives—even from a purely biological one.
If ghosts truly exist in this world, I would open my heart to meet and understand them. But perhaps, as some theists have told me, my level is still too low, so I have no chance to encounter them. At least until now I can only, as Confucius said of sacrifice, “sacrifice as if the spirits were present”—when mourning and honoring the dead, I can only conjure their voices and faces in my mind.
I am willing to accept everything. Even a thoroughly wicked criminal, on the basis of understanding how his inner world formed, I am willing to accept his human side. My duty is not moral judgment; my duty is to untangle the mysteries of human beings and to find ways to help others lessen their physical and mental suffering and reduce the incidence of harmful social events. I have walked this road a long way and far. The longer and farther I go, the lonelier it becomes, because there are truly fewer and fewer fellow travelers ahead, and so much still to learn.
Yet though I am alone, I do not suffer for it. The more we understand, the fewer our negative emotions; we no longer hate others so easily, and our inner world is no longer so easily disturbed. Understanding all sentient beings not only helps us forgive them, it also greatly benefits ourselves—it lets us live with greater equanimity and tolerance.