Hui Shi (惠施) told Zhuang Zi: “The king gave me a special seed of bottle gourd. I planted it and got many extremely huge bottle gourds. However, the wall is weak and it breaks easily when I fill it with water. Therefore, it is useless although it is extremely big.” Zhuang Zi said: “It is a pity that you don’t know how to use a big thing. Why don’t you put a few bottle gourds in a big net and tie them around your waist as a float? You can then enjoy floating on the water surface. Why do you have to use it to store water?” Sometime you thought something is useless, but it is simply because you don’t know how to use it.
There was a famous fortune teller who can tell the fortune and disaster, life and death, by just a look at the person’s face. Many people avoided him because they fear to know their impending disaster or death from the fortuneteller. Lie Zi (列子) was amazed by the wizardry and he thought his master was not as skillful as the fortuneteller. His master said: “What I’ve taught you are the superficial elementary things. I haven’t taught you how to control your true feeling inside your heart. When you use superficial intelligent to interact with people, your emotion is easily read by people. Bring the fortuneteller and I will test his wizardry.” After meeting the master, the fortune teller told Lie Zi: “Bad news. Your master is going to die in less than 10 days. I saw black cloud over his face.” Lie Zi was alarmed and quickly tell his master the bad news. The master said: “Just now, I showed him more Yin than Yang, hence my face looked covered with black cloud. What he saw was my physical appearance after I hide the lively energy. Of course, he thought I am going to die soon. You may ask him to look at me again.” After the second look, the fortune teller said: “I saw his lively energy starting to emerge. He has great chance to survive.” The master told Lie Zi: “I showed him more Yang than Yin this time, hence my face looked livelier. Ask him to take a look again.” After the third look, the fortune teller was scared and said: “Your master’s face changes all the time. I can’t tell his future.” The master showed his face for the fourth time. In one look, the fortuneteller was totally terrified and ran away. He ran so fast that Lie Zi was unable to bring him back to see the master. At that point, Lie Zi finally realized he hadn’t learned much from the master. He went back home. He cooked and home-farming for three years, paying no attention to what happened in the outside world. He managed to unlearn all the doctrines ingrained in his mind, and return to purity of the heart. He was then able to remain equanimity and not disturbed by the surrounding. Everything is useful. It is a matter of how you use it. Emotions shown on the face can be useful too, for certain purposes, although your heart remain calm at all time. Facial emotions need not be associated to your true feeling in the heart. In other words, a fortune teller can be misled by facial emotion (色); sensing someone’s emotions by looking at his face can be inaccurate and misleading.
A family in the state of Song had a special cream to protect the skin from cracking during winter. The family used the cream for generations in cloth bleaching business. One day, a guy offered a hundred pieces of gold coins to buy the formula. He then gave it to the king of the state of Wu, and told him the military usage of the cream. The king waged a war against the state of Yue during winter. The soldiers of Wu were protected by the cream, but not the soldiers of Yue. Hence, the state of Yue was conquered. The guy who gave the formula to the king of Wu was heavily rewarded with a piece of land, a big amount of gold, and a very high social status. The family of Song only knew the limited usage of the formula, so they could only use it for family business. The clever guy expanded the usage and became hugely successful. But the use of usefulness is not necessarily a good thing; of course it is also not necessarily a bad thing.
Hui Shi told Zhuang Zi: “I have a very big tree, but it is useless. It grows by the roadside, but no carpenter cares to even look at it. Your philosophy is like the tree; it is very big but useless. Who would ever use it?” Zhuang Zi said: “Have you ever seen the fox and wild cat? They use their agility to sprint and hop, and manage to hunt for food. But they both die in a trap. A yak is extremely big, but it cannot catch mice. You have this very big tree but you are concern that it is useless. Why not you plant it at a garden? You can then rest under the tree. The tree is useless, naturally no one will chop it down and you don’t have to worry about it.” Being useless to others can be useful; the big tree and big yak are useless in one way but useful in another way. The fox and wild cat have great skill, but using the skill too often will bring disaster. You may not get hurt now using your cleverness to play with fire until one day in the future when you regret that you go too far. Learning something useful in order to use it may not always be good.
Nothing is absolutely right and nothing is absolutely wrong, but a diverse of things can be not-wrong at the same time, and a diverse of things can be not-right at the same time. All the laws, theories and methods have some inherent limitations. There are things that we can see, hear, smell, taste, touch and deduce with our brain (六识). We may then classify the thing as beautiful or ugly, musical or noisy, fragrant or foul, delicious or yucky, smooth or rough, logical or illogical, big or small, long or short, good or bad, precious or cheap (色和有名). The recognitions of the different divisions happen in our brains, and thereafter create various emotional disturbances. The naming is given by us, i.e. our doing to the Nature, for our purposes. The naming is flaw and has a lot of limitations. Originally, the various things exist together harmoniously as one big entity with no name (空和无名), and there was no conflict. We apply our cleverness to divide them as if they are supposed to be divided. For example, a group of people were living together harmoniously. Someone starts to divide them into beautiful versus ugly, and causes conflicts (within the group of people and also the mind of the perpetrator). The manmade division was the problem. There is nothing abnormal with diversity in the natural world. Conversely, manmade unity or uniformity is unnatural. A cup made up of shaped ceramic and empty space at the center is one complete entity; the cup will cease to exist if we take away the ceramic or the empty space. Different colors or sizes of rocks will only be referred to as a pile of rocks. Rock type A and rock type B will be just rock, and make no difference if we never desire (欲) to know how many are type A and how many are type B. We can leave them alone with no name (空) although there are differences (色); nameless encompasses all the names, and each name is a member of the “nameless” family. The nameless things (meaning no differentiation made although there are differences) and the various things having different names are the same things; having differences don’t necessarily need to have different names. (空不异色 色不异空 空即是色 色即是空。) With no differentiation (i.e. no naming, no name-calling), we can love ugly as well as beautiful, love noise as well as music, love foul as well as fragrant, love yucky as well as delicious, love rough as well as smooth, love illogical as well as logical, love small as well as big, love short as well as long, love bad as well as good, love cheap as well as precious. They are divided and named differently because of our desire (欲) to divide them; but the simple division or over-simplification is flaw because of our limitations. We are making mistakes. At the beginning of the Heaven and Earth, everything has no name (无名 天地之始也). Life and death, young and old, clever and foolish, clean and dirty, more or less, right and wrong, and a myriad of definitions are born or come into existence (in our brains) as different classes because of our subjective bias (有名 万物之母也). We then start to prefer life and hate death, prefer young and hate old, prefer clever and hate foolish, prefer clean and hate dirty, prefer more and hate less, prefer right and hate wrong, prefer good and hate bad, prefer beautiful and hate ugly. We are so not intelligent to let our emotion be negatively affected by our own desire (欲) to see the reality as divided and make our own interpretations. If we never make division and the subsequent preference, we will see no difference between life and death; the border between life and death is like a door which we walk right through from one side to the other. We should just keep on walking like we do every day. Instead of naming one side as “life” and the other as “death”, why not we consider them as one extended road with no name (不生不灭)? Then, there will be no good reason to prefer “life” and hate “death” anymore; we can embrace life as well as death. We are probably still alive in another dimension (which we cannot see or comprehend) although we appear dead in this world; our dead body is just an appearance, like a footprint. We don’t know whether there is really another dimension; it doesn’t matter. But it matters to us if we feel fearful unnecessarily. Death is not scary. We must not fear to live, and we must not fear to die (不怕生 不怕灭). If we give up on our lives, it only means we fear to live. Live as well as we can (eat well, sleep well, do what we like, love our family) although we are not afraid to die. Buddha lived until 80-year old during the 6th to 4th century B.C. when there wasn’t scientific medicine.
Sometime we think some substances (foods, drugs or germs) are bad for health, and we start to feel fearful. The fact is, everything is bad for health if we consume too much. Nothing will kill us if the amount is well within the safe level; even poisons and nuclear radiations will not kill us. Sometime we think some actions or behaviors (in the past or present time) are bad for our future, and we start to feel fearful. Similarly, nothing will kill us if the amount is not too much. Our over-analyses are not real; the facts are real but the certainties of bad consequences are not real. To let fear robs us of our happiness is extremely unwise. According to the Heart Sutra (般若波羅蜜多心經), we must learn to have no worry (心无罣碍), therefore no fear (故无有恐怖), if we want to be happy. There is nothing we must do or mustn’t do. Of course, if you are sure of the consequence, then it is a matter of whether you are able, willing and ready to face it.
RESILIENT KID 