沙漠无情 相逢是缘 (Part 2)

In the essay, ‘新龙门客栈’, I asked the question how did 玄奘 find the energy and determination to make the arduous journey to the West? I believe it was out of the great compassion (同体大悲) he had which empowered him not to see his destiny as a difficult challenge but as a mission to bring salvation to mankind. Perhaps it is this positive switch that had allowed him to experience joy (乐在其中) instead of suffering in his journey. 

It is good to see the recent success of the video game ‘Black Myth: Wukong’ and I would like to congratulate the game developer, Game Science on their smashing product. Wukong (悟空) literally means to understand the very deep Buddhist concept of ‘Emptiness’ (空), and Wukong also happened to be a disciple of 玄奘 in the fictional version of ‘Journey to the West’. I have watched some of the game scenes on YouTube and I must say the new monsters and demons are getting bigger, stronger and more ferocious than before. It is only a matter of time before Wukong and the other two disciples of ‘猪八戒’ and ‘沙曾’ couldn’t handle the problems at hand. I thought wouldn’t it be nice and useful to include new disciples to help alleviate the situations? There are many popular heroic demons in Chinese myths and one of them which came to mind is 白蛇 (白娘子), who lately appeared in the new animation ‘白蛇: 浮生’. 

Fans of Chinese myth may wonder about a common question, what is the difference between demons (妖/魔) and gods (神), or why are Darth Vader and Jedi so powerful and yet their characters are so different? According to the practice of 儒释道, the common point between the two of them is they both need to practise stillness (定功) in their spiritual cultivation, but the demons achieved stillness through ignoring or suppressing emotions while the gods achieved stillness through reconciling their afflictions and emotions with some form of ‘仁耻礼义爱孝忠’ to gain inner peace. This difference is akin to me blocking the noise from the road construction near my Buddhist centre with a pair of ear-plug instead of training the brain to accept and accommodate the noise naturally. If you blocked away all the external sound and emotions, one will enter the state of ‘无情’ when the practitioner will, up to a certain point, feel unbearably dull, dry, lonely and desolate like living in the desert, and it is very unlike the ‘乐在其中’ experienced by 玄奘. That is why many of them lost their cool and gave in to the urge to seek power, wealth and in the case of 白蛇, a romantic relationship, despite having over a thousand years of merits from spiritual cultivation.

In the music video of ‘白蛇: 浮生’ theme song, 白蛇 asks if it is worth her while to scarify her thousand-year cultivation for her love, 许仙? That is also the same question many audiences throughout the years have asked, many felt that 许仙 is not worthy of 白蛇’s devotion and the ending is a tad cruel to 白蛇. However, people who studied the philosophy of 儒释道 will understand the deeper meaning to the ending. The training of demons like 白蛇 is not complete; they are only peaceful on the outside but not on the inside, and therefore their external appearances and their original forms are different. That also explains why without compassion and acceptance, there is no assimilation and 白蛇’s good things in life eventually fell apart. 

At the core of ‘和而不同’ is the ability to assimilate different elements, just like how one can assimilate different items like a phone, a camera and a computer to make a smartphone. If we can assimilate only things that are similar, it is like ‘melting’ the phone, camera and computer into a lump of uniform but unusable object, a smartphone is smart and useful only if we allow each of the different components to play their unique functions. ‘和而不同’ has the effect of making ‘the whole greater than the sum of its parts’ and it allows us to have more good things in life. 

Again, let me take the case of the 乘风破浪 show to explain how good values can let us have more in life. Initially I was pleasantly surprised to see 赵梦 collaborating with Twins in the final show of that season because it is like seeing Joan Jett collaborating with Donny & Marie. From someone with a 70’s/80’s pure hard rock perspective, rock and pop can never mix, mixing is as sinful as betraying your close friends and family. By associating ourself to a particular genre or idols, one has developed a unique identity which we cling on to. Seeing one’s idol straying away from the original path will create a sense of being sold out by them. 

If fans of 乘风破浪 do not accept each other, they will jeer and attack each other, rock fans may call Twin’s music as children’s music while pop fans will call rockers wild and unruly. Then everyone will become scornful, refuse to see the show and attack each other on social media. The show can’t go on (no assimilation) and we will miss out on a lot of creative performances and go back to live in the dry and lifeless desert. With the good attitudes of ‘和而不同’, we will get to enjoy more things because we can engage (相应) them safely and see them positively as tools instead of seeing them as obstacles or betrayal. Otherwise, we can’t even have common things like road-going vehicles because bad drivers will be reckless and turn road vehicles into killing machines. In the more extreme form of immorality, we can’t even have 淄博烧烤 because people will dump the barbeque stick all over the places after they finished the food or use the stick to poke at others.

When we don’t have good moral foundations, we can’t have social media because we can’t effectively reconcile and engage the massive amount of information if we are more inclined to react (相应) to the negative news and perceive the good ones the wrong way. For example, some of us can get upset when we are hit with 2 ‘dislikes’ despite having 8 ‘likes’, this is not too different from rejecting something good that comes with 8 benefits but has 2 disadvantages; it is a sign that our brain’s search algorithm is skewed towards unpleasant things. I believe this is because people who can feel satisfied from having 8 ‘likes’ but 2 ‘dislikes’ is because they can feel the love of the 8 ‘likes’ and become confident; whereas the other group which also got 8 ‘likes’ and 2 ‘dislikes’, experienced arrogance instead of love, and the arrogance will make their minds focus only on the 2 ‘dislikes’ and got all upset and forget about the other 8 ‘likes’. This is what we saw in sports isn’t it? When they see fans cheering them, some sportsmen became arrogant and their game deteriorates thereafter. Selfish people will become arrogant when they are praised because they feel they are on top of others, less selfish people will become confident when they are praised because they perceive others are with them side by side.

The one concern which I have is that emotionally dramatic media content can accentuate the bad emotions in some of us and train their brains to become anxious and hard at relaxing. Medical professionals have discovered that our brains quietly learn things from the media even if we just watch and do not participate. For example, if we sit in a cinema to watch characters in movies doing dramatic running and jumping, the part of our brain that is responsible for running and jumping will also get activated dramatically even when we are sitting passively. 

According to my understanding of the theory of ‘太极拳’ and other Taoist health care methods, if we are constantly trained by these intense emotions, then chances are we will find it hard to relax our nerves and muscles. We may grip our tooth brush, pen and general tools tighter than we should, and we may over react emotionally to matters. Their muscles will tend to get tired and ache quickly because their minds can’t let go of the impression (着相) of stress and will carry forward the cumulative stress from task to task to compound the overall hardship. This inability to let go of impression can have far reaching consequences such as dancers and sportsman may confuse their movements, customer service personnels confused their tasks when they are attending to too many customers at the same time, investment officers find it hard to learn new creative investment schemes because their minds are still stuck with older products and factory engineers got lost in a sea of finicky details and procedures.

But I must say that intense media contents don’t always have the same effects on everyone, for example, I have observed over a long period of time how my own nephew who played hours of intense video games could break from the game when it was time for homework and studies without making a fuss. The impression or stress from playing the game didn’t seem to have disrupted his concentration, thinking processes or behavior too much.

I am now learning to appreciate fine traditional Chinese arts through the cultural shows produced by CCTV such as, ‘诗画中国’, ‘非遗里的中国’, ‘国家宝藏’ and ‘CCTV记录’. If media contents can train our brains to become tense, they can also coax them to relax through these artful and unhuried cultural shows. Modern forms of entertainment are inevitable due to the changing social structure, economic rhythm and technological landscape. It is in a disruptive time like this that we need to maintain a healthy mind and spirit evermore with the help of these cultural instruments. So now readers understand why I used to recommend those mild 70’s movies adapted from the novels of 琼瑶, and why I find mixing the elements of traditional performance arts of 唐诗逸, 朱洁静, 吴谨言 and 陈丽君 in ‘乘风破浪’ is both entertaining and liberating.

These performances have helped to open up new doors to the traditional philosophy that I am learning. Take for example 陈丽君, I was very impressed by her performance in 乘风破浪 but I did not know how to describe her awesome presence until I watched the variety show, ‘我们的歌-6’, where the participants described her performance as ‘弥漫着一股气 … 行云流水’. ‘行云流水’ is an important concept in Chinese philosophy because the properties of water are meritorious according to the ‘道德经’. The merits of water and ‘生生不息’ are often spoken in the same breath, an example of things that can last a long time (生生不息) are the sacred texts and sutras from ancient wise sages. These writings have lasted for thousands of years but our modern literature and pop music don’t seem to enjoy that sort of lifespans. The main reason I believe is because ancient wisdom liberates our hearts instead of exhausting them like pop and drama. In the ‘道德经’, it is said that 生生不息 comes from peace (清净), and good morals reduce friction and facilitate peace. 

It is perhaps for the same reason why couples who experience true love can be together for long time, and why Cyndi 王 said in the show that she can play the role of ‘甜心教主’ for as long as we like. She is obviously not exhausted by the role, there is something liberating or ‘生生不息’ about it, maybe because she places the needs of her fans above her own preference.
If she had taken those occasional harsh treatments from her mother and others in a selfish and negative way, she probably would have been too exhausted to move on and excel. Her inborn moral enabled her to be selfless and empathize with her mother instead of thinking of her own pain, and this selfless nature helped her deflected and detached from the blows directed at her. 

This ability to detach is like water in the stream which can slither past rocks and hindrances smoothly instead of sticking to them like glue; it is the ability to detach which enabled water to ‘收放自如’ or ‘随心所欲’ and shape-shift to take on various forms and bend around barriers. However, it doesn’t mean one should do whatever one wishes regardless of legal and ethics considerations, on the contrary, people who got involved in illegal and unethical activities are precisely because they can’t turn difficult corners in their lives. Detachment and selflessness liberates our hearts like ancient wisdom and make us ‘生生不息’ to adapt and thrive in all situations.

Thus, the awesome aura (气场) and the state of ‘行云流水’ of 陈丽君 comes from her training and a kind of righteous nature in her which enabled her energy to circulate smoothly like water to generate the strong magnetism which we called ‘aura’. Because she can detach, she doesn’t need to exert too much strength (不用力过度) to move about and wear herself out prematurely. Not using too much strength also made her movement smooth, precise and effortless. Finally, detachment allows her to adapt and play different roles in opera and even switching between male (小生) and female (花旦) roles. 

By now you may ask how can I reconcile the need to ‘accept’, as written in the beginning of the essay, with the importance of ‘detach’? These two are on the surface contradictory. The answer is, in order to accept or to have more, we first need to detach and morals facilitate detachment. As a rock fan, I used to wear t-shirts of rock bands such as Def Leppard and Iron Maiden. In the spirit of 和而不同, maybe I should also accept t-shirts with the images of Cyndi王 and 陈丽君 or all the other celebrities I have written before, I believe they will look nice. Think of a variety show with only a single artist like Kelly于, 赵梦 or 刘欣 in it, that would make the show rather monotonous. However, if we add more celebrities, the show will add on new dimensions; it will have hues, shadows and metaphors to show the sense of depth, colors to show contrast, different generations to express time and a bigger presence to create the sense of space. 

白蛇 may have sacrificed everything for 许仙, but it is also through such sacrifice that let her realised the importance of acceptance and compassion in spiritual cultivation. In the 儒释道 practise, 白蛇 being a senior 蛇仙 is only one step away from attaining the state of a heavenly dragon (天龙). Heaven is a higher dimension and that means dwellers there will have access to more dimensions as opposed to only three in the human realm. It is through having a bigger heart from practicing compassion and detachment that one can develop a more coherent brain to handle the added complexities in higher dimensions. So, in the end it is not difficult to imagine how the selfless love of 白蛇 enabled her to detach and break through to a higher realm where she gained extra dimensions to make the triple space-time fold of past, present and future and travel back to the Tang dynasty to protect 玄奘.