After leaving her parents, she went to Mount Wutai, since it was very close to their small city. She did not contact Ren Qingfei. She didn’t know which sacred Buddhist mountain he was on now, and she knew she hadn’t come for him, nor for anyone else. But when she knelt before the Buddha in a great hall, she heard her heart’s own voice: she was praying for Akikawa Yamaguchi, for the man who might be a thoroughly evil demon king, hoping he could safely weather this calamity. For the first time she prayed with a devotee’s fervent devotion, hoping that some mysterious power, whether from Buddha, from a Bodhisattva, or from God, could bestow physical and spiritual deliverance on Akikawa Yamaguchi. This was all a powerless person’s love could do.
The temple where she bowed was a nunnery. When she left the main hall, two seventeen- or eighteen-year-old Bhikshunis at the entrance caught her eye. They looked like they had just arrived from afar, their backpacks set at their feet beside the door of the hall. Since they were about to enter and pay their respects, they were outside straightening each other’s travel-worn robes. The older-looking one was dusting off the other’s monastic robe and said, “Did you dye this robe color yourself?” The small, quick-witted Bhikshuni said, “Yes. A lot of monasteries are all about this muddy color right now.” As she spoke, she glanced around, and when she saw Wu Aizhen watching her, she fell silent at once. They left their backpacks outside the door, straightened their robes, and went into the hall to bow.
On the way back to the hotel, Wu Aizhen mused: “A woman adorns herself for the one who delights in her” — for whom was the young nun dressing up? That muddy color, no matter how fashionable in a monastery, surely wouldn’t seem beautiful in the eyes of ordinary worldly people. Yet the little nun liked that beautiful muddy color and wore it. A renunciant shouldn’t make distinctions about such things, and although the young nun had not yet attained realization, she should have known that. But perhaps she simply couldn’t hide her innate love of beauty. Something about her open, innocent face and clear, bright eyes moved Wu Aizhen. What touched her perhaps was the spirited, vivacious unity of body, speech, and mind in that young nun — something that hadn’t grown hypocritical or rigid in the presence of precepts and the Dharma’s sacred halls, hadn’t become a slave to the precepts.
She recalled the first day she arrived at Mount Wutai and went to a temple to request a temporary monastic stay. That, too, was a nunnery. It used to have guest quarters for lay practitioners. The Bhikshuni who received her looked her up and down from head to toe. Under the old nun’s faultfinding, reproachful, suspicious “precept” gaze, she, a Buddhist laywoman, felt as if she had been stripped naked and at once saw herself as a sinner fallen in the world of dust. “No, we don’t accept temporary guests in winter. The lay guest rooms have no heating.” The old nun lowered her eyelids, tossed this cold remark at her, then went off to dust the offering table nearby. Wu Aizhen backed out of the reception hall in utter trepidation, afraid that the longer her feet lingered, the more they would defile this sacred forbidden ground of the Buddha’s gate.
The Buddha said to take the precepts as your teacher, hoping that disciples would use the precepts to purify body, speech, and mind. The precepts are not an end but a tool; the ultimate goal of upholding them is to attain samadhi, and through samadhi to gain the Buddha’s wisdom. The aim is not to turn oneself into a sanctimonious, rigid, mean-spirited, lifeless Buddhist nun, breeding more discrimination and attachment, self-righteousness, arrogance, wild pride, contempt, and self-conceit. She wanted to say this to the old nun but felt she had no standing to do so. The Buddha had passed into nirvana. The old nun did not have the good fortune of the Buddha’s direct disciples, who under the Buddha’s omnipresent blessing could faithfully accept and practice the teachings, and within the strict precepts of the sangha still feel hope and joy of liberation at every moment. The old nun had only the precepts and nothing else. No teacher, no ability to understand the sutras, no cultivation and realization, not even having seen in her lifetime a single model of bodily and mental liberation. As she aged, the number of years she had held the precepts became the only asset she could take pride in, the sole solace for her empty soul. If one had only the precepts and sincere faith, perhaps one could still move toward liberation.
But genuine faith in the Buddha is built on insight into the Dharma, not on religious idol worship. It rests on the foundation of “equality of all beings” — on magnanimity and benevolence, on regarding every sentient being as a Buddha from the heart. In such a person, there would certainly be a gentle, compassionate light arising from a mind of equality, a humility, mildness, and even an ethereal quality born of awe for the Buddhas’ and bodhisattvas’ quality of all-embracing love.
She recalled a Bhikshuni Dharma teacher named Yiqing, who had strictly observed the precepts and had passed into nirvana. Yiqing’s holy face, pure and wise eyes, had at first sight aroused in her deep respect and a sense of her own unworthiness. In her, she had seen a living embodiment of one who had attained samadhi through the precepts and generated wisdom from samadhi. But she saw no such thing in this old bhikshuni; she knew the old nun didn’t have it. The old nun had fallen into the trap of the precepts. From her faultfinding eyes, her rigid, mean-spirited manner, her offhand tone, one could see that the precepts had become a demon binding her body and mind, shackling her soul, and were now grinning hideously through her every external expression and in her cold, emotionless words.
At this thought, Wu Aizhen felt a touch of sadness. She was a lay practitioner. By the Buddha’s precepts, she had no standing to judge a renunciant. But that was her honest thought, and she had no intention of slandering or denying the merit of upholding the precepts. On the contrary, she wished to offer her sincerest prostrations to all the Bhikshus and Bhikshunis of this age who strictly observed the precepts! Buddhism needs the precepts; otherwise there would be no way to prevent the degeneration of monastics and the corruption of the sangha, and Buddhism could not long abide in the world. The historical persecutions of Buddhism were more or less connected to monastics’ failure to keep the precepts, and the Dharma also needs the protection of pure precepts. Yet all three studies of the Buddha’s teaching — precepts, samadhi, and wisdom — have their pitfalls, and this every student must understand. If one has only precepts but no samadhi or wisdom, the precepts become merely an asceticism that binds body, speech, and mind. But without precepts, someone just beginning to study the Dharma, whose body, speech, and mind are still lax, will never attain samadhi. And without precepts and samadhi, the “wisdom” derived solely from hearing and thinking will undoubtedly become mere philosophical speculation or crazy wisdom on the level of consciousness.
At this moment she also thought of a young Bhikshu she knew, who, unable to resist temptation yet keeping the precepts, was filled with remorse and had resorted to self-mutilation. His anguished expression had long lingered and haunted her mind…
Her eyes grew moist… How could she bear to harshly reproach these monks and nuns?!
If the Buddha were in the world, what would he do when seeing all this…? She pondered with tears, thinking: perhaps he would make the old Bhikshuni understand that not everything within the precepts is good and everything outside them is ugly, and that one should not grow proud and self-conceited because one can keep the precepts. He would make the young Bhikshuni understand that appreciating beauty is neither right nor wrong, but letting it loosen one’s self-restraint or lead to discrimination and attachment means straying from the path of cultivation and realization because of beauty. Perhaps the Buddha, with his unfathomable perfect wisdom and compassion, would teach and transform them — something Wu Aizhen could never fully fathom.
At noon, while eating in a small restaurant, a woman walked in, stopped beside her table, and asked the proprietress at the counter if she needed to hire help. The proprietress said there were no tourists in winter, business was very slow, and she didn’t need anyone. The woman then said she only needed her three meals covered; wages weren’t necessary. The proprietress still smiled and explained that she really didn’t need anyone — in two months the heavy snow would seal the mountain, there would be no tourists, and her little restaurant would close for the New Year anyway.
Wu Aizhen looked up at the woman. She was dressed very lightly, rubbing her hands together and breathing warm air into them, her right hand swollen like a red radish with several chilblains on it. She wore a thick scarf over her head, but Wu Aizhen could still see her long eyelashes and her loose brown hair.
She suddenly recalled that on her first day at Mount Wutai, she had eaten at a temple where a woman was serving the monks from a large basin. The woman was tall, with a rather small face but very fair skin, and beneath long brown hair she had sad blue eyes. At first glance Wu Aizhen had thought she was a foreign volunteer working at the temple. Because the dining hall forbade talking, when the woman served her, Wu Aizhen had wanted to indicate that she wanted just a little, but didn’t know how to express it. As the woman scooped up a large spoonful of rice and was about to put it into the bowl in front of her, Wu Aizhen smiled and waved her hand, then cupped her hand into a circle to mean “a small portion.” The woman understood at once and poured half the rice back into the basin. Her sad blue eyes shone with a friendly smile all the while.
Wu Aizhen called out to the woman who was about to leave: “Hey, young lady!” The woman turned at the sound, looking at her, uncertain whether she was being addressed. Wu Aizhen smiled at her and pointed to the stool beside her. The woman hesitated a moment but then obediently came over and sat down.
“Are you no longer volunteering at the temple?”
“Oh!” The woman seemed delighted that someone recognized she had volunteered there, and she laughed happily.
“In winter the temple has to save on coal, so they let all the lay volunteers go.”
“Are you looking for a job?”
“Yes. I want to stay on Mount Wutai a while longer but I’ve run out of money, so I need to find work. But it’s hard in winter — no tourists, businesses are very slow, some have even shut down.” As she spoke, the sadness in her eyes deepened and a faint sorrow surfaced.
“Don’t worry. I have a few friends in business. I can put in a word for you. After we eat, I’ll take you.”
“That’s wonderful! Thank you so much!” The woman beamed with delight.
“Have you eaten?” Wu Aizhen asked, looking at her lips, which were purple with cold.
“Not yet,” she said, a little embarrassed. Wu Aizhen ordered another bowl of noodles and a dish for her. The woman ate delicately.
“How did your hands get so badly frostbitten?”
“I work in the temple kitchen, washing vegetables in cold water every day. I never imagined Mount Wutai would be this cold. They just got like this the last few days.”
“Where are you from? I thought you were foreign.”
Wu Aizhen had already determined from the short conversation that she was Chinese.
“Suzhou. I look a bit like a foreigner. My ancestors have some English blood.”
“Oh! Eat up, the food will get cold in no time here, not like in the south.”
“Right.” She began to eat faster.
After eating, Wu Aizhen took her to see a woman friend of hers who sold Buddha statues and religious goods. She learned the woman’s name was Zeng Xiaoman. Her friend, with her big, booming voice, first asked Xiaoman a string of questions about her background. Wu Aizhen learned that Xiaoman had graduated from a normal college in Suzhou and could speak German and English. She had come to Mount Wutai on a pilgrimage and wanted a job that would only last three months.
When she was done, the friend said candidly, “Fine, you can work here. You’ll eat three meals at my place, and I have a little room in my courtyard I can fix up for you. But the pay’s not much — only three hundred yuan a month. You can just work half days and spend the rest of your time at the temples. You’re here to cultivate, do pilgrimage, and visit teachers — I can’t hog all your time.”
“That’s perfect, perfect.” Xiaoman was so happy she nearly bowed to the friend.
“It’s settled, then. Come over tomorrow.” Her friend looked like someone who would do anything for those she cared about.
Wu Aizhen patted her shoulder. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me! Every time you come to Mount Wutai you stir up something for me. I’m used to it.”
“See, your spiritual attainment depends entirely on the trouble I stir up for you. This is called helping you accumulate merit.”
“Oh, come on. Where are you staying now? You’ve been here for days and haven’t even said hello — only think of me when you need something. With a friend like you, I’m not lacking for chances to accumulate merit.”
“I have somewhere to eat and sleep, don’t worry about me, just take good care of her.”
“Relax.”
Wu Aizhen smiled and pulled Xiaoman out of her friend’s warm shop. Xiaoman’s face was frostbitten too, and with excitement her cheeks turned into two red, ripe apples, yet those once-sad eyes now sparkled brilliantly, shining with joy and gratitude.
Wu Aizhen first took her to a pharmacy to buy chilblain ointment. When Xiaoman learned that Wu Aizhen was leaving Mount Wutai the next day, she was reluctant to part and said she hoped to visit where Wu Aizhen was staying that afternoon for a chat. Wu Aizhen said she couldn’t in the afternoon — she already had plans to see a few friends — but she would be back at the hotel around seven in the evening and Xiaoman could come stay with her that night.
“Is that convenient?” Xiaoman asked hesitantly, afraid of disturbing Wu Aizhen’s rest.
“No problem. I go to bed late. We can just add a bed in the room.”
Hearing this, Xiaoman joyfully went back to the temple first to pack her things.
That evening, when Wu Aizhen returned to the hotel, Xiaoman had already been waiting for half an hour on a chair outside the service desk. Her luggage was simple: one medium-sized backpack with two shoulder straps and a small shoulder bag. Business was slow, so the room rate was half price, and adding an extra bed cost only ten yuan.
Xiao Man was a lively talker, her voice soft and light, rising and falling in cadences, now and then sprinkled with a low, silvery laugh. Lying in bed, Wu Aizhen first answered a string of Xiao Man’s practice questions, and then for the most part simply listened to her talk, as though listening to a lark sing.
“I’ve only been studying the Dharma for a few years—there’s so much I don’t understand. Hearing you explain it now, my heart feels much more at ease. I always thought a sacred Buddhist site would be full of eminent monks of great virtue, and Mount Wutai, the foremost of the four great sacred sites, is called the ‘Golden Terrace,’ so I’ve always wanted to come. But first, I had no money, and second, my unit wouldn’t let me get away. I was assigned to teach English at a middle school. The vice-principal there kept pursuing me, but I wasn’t willing, and whenever he got the chance he made things difficult for me. Last semester I simply quit. My parents don’t believe in the Dharma, and they don’t want me studying it either. I have an older sister who’s Christian—she believes very devoutly. My brother-in-law eats, drinks, gambles, and womanizes, and even takes drugs. They have a little boy. All day long my sister prays before the Lord; she’s completely submissive and patient with her husband, trusting that the Lord will help her, will make him change his heart, will make him a better man. But so far I still haven’t seen the Lord’s light shine upon their family, and she hasn’t found any happiness in her faith and prayers!”
Xiao Man fell silent here, as if recalling her sister’s misfortune.
“I think Christianity is a very pure religion. The minimum requirement for faith in any religion is ‘belief’—first you have to have absolute sincerity and confidence in it. But ever since human beings learned to lie, ‘doubt’ has become a deep-rooted habitual tendency in everyone. If in daily life you can doubt many things and many people, how can there be no doubt in a faith? When you say ‘I believe,’ that belief is already heavily discounted. A person cannot immediately throw herself wholeheartedly into believing something she doesn’t understand, never mind that God is so unfathomable—can’t be seen, can’t be touched. Perhaps your sister’s devout prayers are nothing but a kind of emotional anchor in her life. Everything has turned out badly and she has no power to change anything; maybe she just wants to seek a ray of hope from an omnipotent God. Or maybe she lets her feelings dwell temporarily in that loving, patient, benevolent God, so that her heart can find a moment’s comfort.”
“Maybe so. For my sister it’s an emotional anchor. She also wanted me to follow her and believe in Christianity. She said Christianity is a ‘religion of love.’ I read the books she gave me, but I felt the history of Christianity is simply a history of suffering, and my heart grew very heavy after reading them. To take on the sins and sufferings of sentient beings, Christ was nailed to the cross. He told people to be patient, to submit, to return to God through ‘love,’ to return to the kingdom of heaven. He told people to love their enemies. I don’t think I could do that. For someone who nailed me to a cross, if I didn’t hate him I’d already be remarkable. To then bring forth love from the depths of my heart—I believe I don’t have that, and I believe many people don’t have that kind of love. Christ is great; his ‘love’ makes me look up in awe and brings me to tears, but I can’t enter into him. His love is a divine love. Only he could endure such torment, such great suffering, without losing love. But when I’m among people with no conscience, people who don’t know gratitude, I lose my love in an instant, let alone under torture. I can’t be a disciple or brother of Jesus, because if I were, I would have to shoulder the ‘cross of love’ as he did. I also can’t be a beloved child of God, because I don’t have that great a love—I can’t bring it forth. I have too many afflictions, discouragements, disappointments, frustrations—and anger. And as for God’s creation of humankind, after all I still have too many doubts; I can’t just believe right away. More often than not I simply wonder whether God even exists!
“But the Buddha is different. The Buddha doesn’t demand that you believe anything right away. He says: come with me, learn some methods, and through these methods you will discover that your experience and views of this world and human life are mistaken—they are false marks. Through these methods you can obtain my wisdom, and through this wisdom you can lift the false masks off the myriad things of the world and see their true nature. At that point, you will have become me, you will be a Buddha. And every person, through methods suited to them, can ultimately realize Buddhahood—even the most evil people in this world are no exception. Human potential is boundless; everyone has Buddha-nature, everyone can realize Buddhahood.
“Of course, the Dharma also has the great loving kindness and compassion of the Bodhisattvas, but I believe that as my wisdom grows, compassion will gradually emerge. I won’t have to love so painfully, as though nailed to a cross. So I think Buddhism is a ‘religion of wisdom.’ Though it also promotes compassion and universal love, it is founded on wisdom as its cornerstone. It approaches love with wisdom; it is not simple submission, simple patience, or simple, one-sided self-sacrifice. Like the wrathful deities in Tibetan Buddhism—beneath a ferocious, demon-like face is a heart of compassion. To a Bodhisattva who has realized emptiness and is filled with wisdom, perhaps even ‘killing’ can be a form of love, just as parents striking a child can be love. Although Christianity also has the Ten Commandments, and the idea that ‘God’s commands are ultimately for the sake of love,’ I can’t simply start carrying out God’s will or immediately give rise to faith and love for the Lord. Christianity hasn’t given me a path from learning to unshakable faith, but the Dharma has. The vast ocean of Buddhist scriptures and the eighty-four thousand Dharma doors are all steps for me to obtain the Buddha’s wisdom, a path for me to reach the Buddha’s all-knowing state, to be liberated from birth, aging, sickness, and death, and to realize and enter the eternal life of ‘neither arising nor ceasing.’
“I don’t need to wait for Judgment Day at the end of the world, and I don’t need to ascend to heaven after death. I believe that a person who has obtained the Buddha’s wisdom can experience the joy of heaven in this very life. I once put it to my sister like this, but she said that believing in Christianity means you aren’t allowed to believe in any other religion.”
“I basically agree with your point of view. In the Dharma, obtaining the Buddha’s wisdom is the ultimate liberation, and compassion and wisdom are the two sides of the one essence of Dharma-nature. A person who possesses the Buddha’s wisdom is bound to have the quality of great loving kindness and great compassion. Moreover, in the cultivation and realization of the Dharma, the Bodhisattva path of the Great Vehicle places great importance on giving rise to ‘Bodhicitta’—practicing ‘for the benefit of all sentient beings’—which in fact also begins with ‘love and self-sacrifice.’ Because only by giving rise to this mind can one realize and enter the realm of the Dharmakaya and obtain the Dharmakaya wisdom. And among the myriad practices of the six perfections, the very first is giving, and the third is patience. Yet the Buddha’s Dharmakaya wisdom tells you from the very start: have no notion of self, no notion of others—that is, the receiver is empty, and the giver is empty. The same with patience: fundamentally there is no person who ‘suffers humiliation’; it is only because you cling to this ‘conditioned co-arising body’ as a self that you feel you’ve been wronged. The ‘Bodhisattva’s love’ built on this wisdom is a love of ‘no-self.’ If you then thoroughly comprehend the state of the dharma body Vairocana Buddha, in which all sentient beings are equal, the love established on this foundation of equality is the Bodhisattva’s ‘great loving kindness and great compassion.’ And this Bodhisattva’s love and self-sacrifice, grounded in the realization of emptiness, is never a simple act of carrying out or enduring, and it will never be placed on the altar of faith in this age simply because it is love and sacrifice. In every drop of a Bodhisattva’s love, there is a flash of wisdom, and there is the realized measure of emptiness as its foundation. Only in this way, in the act of loving self-sacrifice, does one not only make each person who loves feel joy, but also use the skillful means of wisdom to guide the beloved toward light and happiness.”
“You make it sound easy, but in practice it’s extremely difficult. I originally thought monasteries were very pure—a patch of Pure Land in the dusty world. But after staying long enough, I realized it’s even more complicated than secular society. Those monastics who have left the home-life are even more stubborn, more extreme, and more lacking in love than people in the world of dust.”
“Monastics leave the home-life for all sorts of reasons. While some do so to seek and spread the Dharma, it’s not as though the moment they shave their heads they become eminent monks of great virtue and attainment. Monastics also need to cultivate gradually; they need the understanding, tolerance, and even assistance of lay practitioners and devotees. But they manifest the form of a renunciant, and even if they haven’t yet achieved attainment through cultivation, they are still the ‘Sangha jewel’ on the level of phenomena, an object of refuge for Buddhist followers. On behalf of the Buddha, they proclaim the three refuges and five precepts; on his behalf, they transmit the scriptures and treatises, allowing the Buddha’s teaching to abide in the world in the form of the three jewels—Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. They are worthy of our respect and offerings.”
“Still, people do pay attention to the behavior of monastics. If a monastic’s every arising thought and every mode of conduct is far removed from their own doctrine, then Buddhism’s power to draw people in suffers greatly. But when we are plagued by emptiness, insecurity, exhaustion, pressure, and illness, how desperately we need the Buddha’s wisdom! If we could see in a monastic a state of tolerance, vastness, tranquility, peace, and purity—even if our body and mind gained only a moment’s peace from it—I believe we would give rise to boundless reverence and faith in the Dharma…” As she spoke, Xiao Man’s eyes gazed raptly at the ceiling, as if such a holy monk had appeared right before her.
“It’s not entirely like that. Just now you said that Buddhism is a ‘religion of wisdom,’ and wisdom can manifest in every person, regardless of whether they are lay or monastic, and regardless of their walk of life. The Buddha taught that none of the productive activities of this world are in conflict with the Dharma. Therefore, faith in the Buddha should not be built on reliance on monastics. The Buddha also said: rely on the Dharma, not on people. All the scriptures the Buddha expounded are showing you how, through the guidance of his wisdom, to comprehend and see the true nature of all the myriad phenomena of the universe. All his Dharma doors are meant to guide disciples toward becoming him—toward possessing the same merit and wisdom as he—so as to be liberated from afflictions, from the hardships of human life, and from the cycle of birth and death. So a person who truly studies the Dharma will not lose faith in the Dharma because a monastic fails to keep the precepts or a monastery is not pure, because none of that affects each person’s ability to benefit from the Dharma and achieve accomplishment within it.”
“But the image of monastics and monasteries always gives non-believers a handle and a reason to criticize Buddhism. They say, look at you Buddhist practitioners—and you call yourselves renunciants. My parents say exactly that. They even tore up the scriptures I was reading. They think the reason I still haven’t found a boyfriend is because I’ve been reading the sutras, and they won’t let me go to the monastery.”
Wu Aizhen was silent for a while in thought. Then slowly she said:
“Misunderstandings do exist; it all depends on how you face them and handle them. Even to accomplish an ordinary worldly undertaking in this world, a person must pour out a great deal of painstaking effort and sweat. What more, then, when what we are trying to obtain is the supreme, unsurpassed wisdom the Buddha attained over countless kalpas—wisdom that allows us to be free of all afflictions and fears, to enter nirvana, and to transcend birth and death. If we aren’t willing to give up a little, aren’t willing to put in any effort, how could we possibly accomplish that? But to put it differently, we must first be human beings before we can become Buddhas. Being human is the foundation for Buddhahood, and the entire practice can be fully integrated into every matter of the dusty world. Moreover, the Buddha’s wisdom can manifest in all things in the first place. Great Vehicle practice does not interfere with raising a family or working in the world. I feel the best approach for a lay practitioner is, aside from working and supporting a family each year, to set aside a period of time to leave the world of dust and choose a Dharma door for focused cultivation. If you don’t have that kind of condition, then actually taking a little time each day to practice a Dharma door and study the classics, and visiting some good knowing advisors on your days off, is also quite good. As long as you persist for a long time, you’ll see results.”
“My family’s attitude is just a prejudice. Really, it’s not that I’m not looking for a boyfriend because of studying Buddhism—I simply haven’t met anyone I truly like. And it’s not that cultivation has to be done in the mountains or a monastery; it’s just that the environment where I live is too exhausting. In that kind of environment and atmosphere, I can’t bring my mind to peace. I know my cultivated skill isn’t deep enough yet, that I can’t yet adjust my mind in the face of circumstances, so I had no choice but to flee to the mountains. I’ve come to really like Mount Wutai. Life here may be hard, but I’m very happy. There are doubts and confusion too, but more than anything, it’s a kind of stirring of my spirit, something that compels me to think. I love listening to the wind chimes under the eaves of the monastery halls; to me they sound like the pure sounds of Brahma from some remote stretch of time and space—clear, pleasing, with an otherworldly beauty. And the morning bell and evening drum, together with the soaring chant of the monks—in an instant I forget all the earthly toil of this world, and my mind feels washed completely clean. But if you hadn’t helped me now, I’d even be struggling to feed myself. After all, this world is realistic; a person can’t live entirely in contemplation. There are many obstacles and contradictions between reality and cultivation, and sometimes a person can feel so small in the face of reality. At times like this I always think of my sister’s prayers. Yesterday I knelt before the Buddha and prayed too, hoping he would help me find a job. Still, asking the Buddha is faster than asking God—up to now, my brother-in-law hasn’t changed at all, but I’ve already received your help today.”
“God is only one, and with so many people pleading, how could God manage to get to them all at once? But the Buddha has countless thousands of transformation bodies. However many people plead, that many transformation bodies can appear—no wonder help arrived for you so quickly.”
Wu Aizhen said this to Xiao Man, half-jokingly.
Xiaoman laughed happily again, her laughter like bells beneath temple eaves…
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