Childhood

It is dinner time.

Grandpa and I sit down as Grandma puts the dishes out. 

Big Yellow, the neighbor’s dog,

runs in from the front door. 

He is on time, 

always.

Putting his warm chin on my lap, 

he looks at me with his watery eyes.

We have our secret

under the table.

If I get caught up eating

for too long,

Big Yellow reminds me with his paw, 

tapping quietly.

Frogs are croaking 

in the watery fields outside,

calling me.

Finishing my last bite, 

I put down my chopsticks.

I chase after the fireflies under the stars,

and Big Yellow chases after me.

A year later

Every day, I walk home

alone

after school. 

Every day, Big Yellow sits

by a narrow log bridge.

How happy he is upon seeing me!

Together, 

we walk home. 

Another year passes

Across a big river,

Mother comes on her bike

to take me to another home.

“Bye, Grandpa! Bye, Grandma!”

With me sitting on the back seat,

Mother rides away on her bike.

Big Yellow runs after us.

“Go home, Big Yellow!” I cry out.

But he keeps on running, 

his tongue hanging out.

Big Yellow runs 

and runs,

until the big river blocks him.

The boatman kicks him away 

from our small ferry boat. 

On the riverbank,

he groans and paces, 

and becomes smaller and smaller

through my watery eyes.

 

[When I was little, the residents in our Chinese village kept their front doors open all

day. During meal times, my family would greet the villagers who were passing by with,

 “Have you eaten? Join us for a meal!” It was simply a courtesy. Rarely would any 

villager actually come in and sit down to eat with us; but, once in a while, someone

 would accept the invitation. Dogs and cats roamed free. Some of them were fed by 

multiple families, but their original owners were acknowledged by other villagers.]

(Also published in Mirror Flowers Water Moon, Fall 2020, page 14) 

A Tribute To My Father

February this year on my birthday, I video called my parents in China. During the call, my mother carried my father on her back to the couch closer to the screen so that I could see and hear him more clearly. When she put him down, his heavy bones landed motionless on the couch. Over the past twenty years of suffering from Parkinson’s disease, my father had gradually lost his flexibility and strength. My mother cheered up the occasion by talking about some of the “adorable” things that I did as a child. At age five, rain or shine, I walked fifteen minutes to a public bathhouse to bathe myself every day. It became my then daily ritual. Slowly, my father turned his head toward the screen, looked into me, and raised his hand to wave... A week later, he passed away.

I wondered about what kind of life my father would have enjoyed if he weren’t sick with Parkinson’s disease for two decades. He would’ve liked to travel, but he was bound to a walker and then a wheelchair for the last ten years. A few years ago, my brother took my parents to Beijing to have a specialist see my father. While in Beijing, they took a long train ride to the Great Wall. Finally, they were at the foot of the Great Wall, and my mother was so ready to climb along the wall while my brother accompanied my father, who was in his wheelchair watching. But my father began to shake violently with intense pain and they had to cut the trip short and return to the hotel.

My father would’ve liked to play erhu—a two-stringed Chinese musical instrument played with a bow—but he couldn’t hold it without shaking; he would’ve liked to present himself respectably, but he couldn’t stop drooling; he would’ve enjoyed food, but he gradually lost his ability to taste, to chew, and to swallow; he would’ve loved to go to the public bathhouse often, if not every day, but that too became impossible.

Back at home in China, my brother took care of the funeral arrangements. Our relatives all gathered. It made no sense for me to fly back due to the mandatory two-week COVID quarantine period after landing. My mother kept a three-night vigil alongside my father’s body at the funeral home. She recited Amitabha Buddha’s name without stopping and didn’t feel tired. I was told that my father looked very peaceful and even beautiful at the funeral home. I called my mother every day to see how she was doing.

“It’s hard to come back to an empty house without your Baba. Even the air is different. There is no longer a feeling of warmth,” Mother said. After taking care of my father for so many years, she still regretted what she hadn’t done to possibly prolong his life. Through the daily calls, I began to have clearer mental pictures of what they had gone through together. One night, my mother changed the sheets and my father’s nightclothes three times. They recently fell together when my mother carried my father out of the bathroom. Sometimes, my father held his need to get up or change in order to let my mother rest a little at night. A week before his passing, my father missed his cousin who lived nearby. My mother pushed him in the wheelchair all the way to his cousin’s, but he was not home.

I closed my eyes. How readily my emotions swarmed upon a mental image—my parents and maternal grandfather were standing outside the bus, on which I was heading to college in Nanjing. When the bus began to move, they waved goodbye. My mother followed the bus for a while, waving to me until I could no longer see her. Seeing me off at the bus station has been a “significant” recurring family event for many years. It is “significant” in the sense that the goodbye could be the last one, like the one from my grandfather, who a few months later sadly entered the hospital for the final time.

Six years ago when my mother had a medical procedure done on her stomach and my father’s mobility continued to worsen as his Parkinson’s disease progressed, I flew back to China to visit. After a sweet two-week visit, I was leaving again. On the day of my departure, my father surprised me by offering me a ride to the bus station. My mother didn’t think it was a good idea. Then he wanted to come along on my mother’s electric tricycle to the bus station, but there was no room. As my mother and I were about to set off, I heard a “Hey!” from behind. My father was standing behind the kitchen window waving. I smiled and waved back, holding back my tears. My father seldom expressed his feelings, but whenever he revealed his care, it would hit me hard on my soft spot.

In later years, when he became mostly immobile, my father saw me off while lying in bed. He would hold my hands and say, “When you come home next time, Baba may not be here.” To dam the flood of emotions whirling inside, I consciously kept that possibility in perpetual suspension.

During our last call, my father looked at me and sang the birthday song in his no longer clear voice. I sang with him. I told him how much I appreciated the monthly journals such as Children’s Literature and Science for Youth that he subscribed to for my brother and me to read when we were in elementary school. Every time a new issue arrived, my brother and I would fight to be the first one to read it. During the call, I told my father a story in the Children’s Literature journal that made my brother and me laugh hard for a long time. It was a story about two pigs taking turns to help each other get out of a deep hole in the ground, only to find one of them still remaining in the hole after repeated efforts. My father was quite amused by the story and laughed uncontrollably. Actually, I wasn’t sure if he was laughing or crying. I only saw tears rolling down his face.

For years, I have tried to clean up my past with my parents. I once apologized to my father for lashing out at him so cruelly when he biked all the way to my boarding high school and brought me some home-cooked dishes my mother made. In my depressed teen angst, I regarded my parents’ love as an insult to my existence. My teenager behavior may be understandable, but one incident five years ago still pains my heart today.

I came home to visit that year and heard that my father wanted to play ping-pong, but everyone thought it was merely a fantasy due to his physical limitations. I said I would take him to play. The next day, I pushed him in a wheelchair to the community center. With one hand holding onto the ping-pong table tightly and the other hand hitting the ball, he played with me. Soon, his physical disability seemed miraculously gone and he began to beat me in the game! I consider myself a pretty good ping-pong player, but I could barely keep up with him. An hour passed and he was still not tired, but I was. The next day, at the same time, we went again. My father amazed me even more with his physical stamina.

On the way home that day, something somehow triggered me. My old judgment of my father cast a shadow over me again. My mother’s words from many years back rang again in my ears: “The most painful thing in my life is having married your father.” On the third day, when my father came to my room and said, “Daughter, let’s go,” I said I was tired and pretended to sleep. After a while, when I came out of my room, my father was gone! My heart started pounding. My mother had just told me about the incident not long before when my father went out on his own and fell in the middle of the street, drawing a crowd and the ambulance. After frantically looking for him for a while, I rushed to the community center. There he was, peacefully watching others playing. He rolled himself there in the wheelchair! I let out my complaints and frustration through a suppressed voice. I don’t remember if we played that day or not. After that day, he never mentioned playing ping-pong again. His mobility decreased and his condition worsened with frequent shaking day and night.

The pain that I may have caused for my father then gnaws at me now. In the morning bowing practice, I contemplated the phrases used in Hoʻoponopono—an ancient Hawaiian practice: “I’m sorry; please forgive me; thank you; I love you.” Waves of tears swelled up in my eyes.

Upon hearing the news of my father’s passing, the residents at the DRBU-Sudhana Center joined me in the Buddha Hall to recite the Great Compassion Mantra twenty-one times. The Berkeley Buddhist Monastery held an online memorial service for him, which gave me a rare opportunity to reconnect with my friends from high school, college, and the other phases of my life on both sides of the Pacific. Two other students at Sudhana Center and I began to read the Earth Store Sutra every day. The sutra illuminates the deeper meaning of filiality through the great vows of Earth Treasury King Bodhisattva. Each day, we dedicate the merit of reading the sutra to all the parents of the past, present, and future, to world peace, and to ending the pandemic.

All these unexpected acts of kindness have gently strengthened me as I live through this human experience of losing a parent. As a mixture of emotions of gratitude, sadness, forgiveness, and compassion continue to ebb and flow, I feel more connected to my father now than when he was alive. Although he was not a Buddhist, my father learned to chant the name of Guanyin Bodhisattva after hearing me chant. It’s comforting to still hear him chanting in my ears, “Namo Guanshiyin Pusa.” The remaining wall between us—a wall that was built with judgements and defensiveness—continues to disintegrate.

My birthday call with my parents ended when another of my father’s seizure-like episodes began. Just before he was about to lose control of his physical movement, or possibly even his consciousness, my father managed to reach into his pocket and take out a small plastic-wrapped cake and extend it to me. My mother said while helping him, “Baba said happy birthday.” That birthday wish became our final goodbye. I hold in my heart that my father’s final birthday wish to me was his way of saying that he was happy that I was born and he appreciated that I was his daughter. I am grateful knowing that being a daughter is a lifelong practice, which will continue to nourish my core at the root level.

Every day during evening ceremony, I video call my mother and set my phone up with her onscreen in the corner of the Buddha Hall at Sudhana Center. She follows along with the ceremony, recites Amitabha Buddha’s name, and circumambulates in the secluded balcony where she long ago set up her altar at home. Every day on that tiny balcony, she makes an incense offering to the same one-foot-tall Buddha that she has been bowing to since I could remember as a child. Whenever we happen to pass by our digital screens at the same time while circumambulating, we glance at each other and share a gentle smile.

(Also published in Mirror Flower Water Moon, Spring 2021, p. 21)

Authenticity in Virtue

 [This essay "Authenticity in Virtue" is drawn from the reflections intrigued by the book, The World as Will and Idea, by Arthur Schopenhauer, a German philosopher. It was read in Comparative Hermeneutics class at DRBU]

Imagine living without the expectation to be virtuous; society doesn’t govern your behavior, friends and family only wish that you enjoy yourself freely, and you don’t hold the belief that doing good deeds is the path to Heaven or the Pure Land. In short, you are not burdened with the obligation to be a virtuous person. Are you still inclined to be a virtuous person anyway? By “virtue,” I mean genuine goodness.

In The World as Will and Idea, Schopenhauer states that it is foolish to expect a moral and ethical system to inspire virtue and nobility in humankind. He writes, “Virtue cannot be taught any more than can genius” (175). He goes on to state, “The will, considered purely in itself, is without knowledge and is merely a blind, irresistible impulse,” and that life, the visible phenomenal world, is “only the mirror of the will” (176-177). Then the true virtuous acts experienced in life must arise from free will. But before jumping to the conclusion that humans are innately good, it must be acknowledged that immorality also arises from the same will.

To borrow the analogy of the inner garden, imagine virtue as the beautiful flowers, and immorality as weeds. Using this analogy leads to a series of questions: How do I tend my inner garden under the influence or even dictation of a blind and impulsive will? Is the will subject to change? Can virtue be cultivated in the garden of will?


VIRTUE and WILL

Why do all sentient life forms, great or small, want to live? Have you ever observed ants? One time, the busy ants around an anthill caught my attention. They hurried in and out of the entrance frantically as if a supreme guest was due to arrive. The route set out by the ant hunter-gatherers stretched far. Out of curiosity, I walked off the road and followed their path, but I could not see the end of it. My eyes settled on one ant, which carried a large white shell, almost three times larger than its own body. Under the sizzling sun, that ant went up and down, unceasingly, over dry leaves and twigs (talk about a bumpy road!). It was truly a long journey home. Up and down...up and down...up and down.... I began to root for that ant while following along. Finally, home was close! As that ant approached the entrance of the anthill, no one was waiting there to applaud its admirable endeavor (though it was heroic to me). After the ant quietly disappeared into the entrance, I looked back at the trail. Several ants were approaching home, all carrying shells or grains much larger than their own bodies. Though there was no fanfare to herald their arrival, they were determined. What motivates the little ants to work so hard?

Schopenhauer would probably answer that it’s “the will to life,” which gives the ant the key to the actions of its body, and its body is just a condition of the knowledge of its will (32, 34). “What the will wills is always life,” and “life is nothing but the representation of that willing.” “The will to life” could mean an innate force that propels sentient beings toward their vital existence to the best of their knowledge or their instinct.

To use my own mundane existence as an example: If I am thirsty, I’ll look for water; if I am hungry, I’ll look for food; if I feel fear, I’ll flee or fight. I breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, in a rhythm that’s not agreed upon based on my conscious consent. In a sense, I am being kept alive. The “will to life” is in me, in you, and in all sentient beings. Do sentient beings run on separate wills to life? In other words, I’m led by my “will to life,” you by yours, and they by theirs? If this is so, the world would be a competitive, conflicting, and chaotic place with all the separate “wills” competing to run the show by controlling their respective “puppets,” a myriad of living forms.

True, there is no shortage of violence and hypocrisy in this human world competing for control, but virtue, or genuine goodness, also exists, even prevails in some places. There must be an innate pull in human instinct toward virtue. If a virtuous act is stripped of the karmic veil, the future rebirth fantasy, social norms, and mere rote courtesy, what is still left in it that would motivate us to be virtuous? To put it more plainly, would you lend a hand to a complete stranger purely for the sake of the stranger’s wellbeing? Why?

Years ago, when I traveled alone in central Italy, I boarded a train as the only passenger. Neither the train operator nor the conductor spoke a language I could understand. I asked nonverbally if I could sit in the operator's room upfront to watch the train tracks, they agreed. It was late at night when I was dropped off at a small dark station where there was not a single soul in sight. I could hear wild animals howling in the distance. Without being asked, the operator and the conductor both got off the train and made a long phone call communicating with my local contact to make sure that someone was coming to pick me up. Then they left.

Why wouldn’t they leave me without knowing I would be safe? They treated my safety as if it were their own. In their voluntary effort to help me, I saw no sign of any religious fervor or a rote gesture of courtesy, but only authenticity. That authenticity must come from “a direct intuitive knowledge, which can neither be reasoned away, nor arrived at by reasoning” (232). It has to be a deeply felt inner movement that’s beyond a view, an idea, or a sense of guilt or fear.

It’s very unlikely that I would meet the train operator and the conductor again, but their kindness, with no strings attached, will always stay in my heart. Stories like that consistently bring me back to the vision of humanity tending to a collective inner garden of virtue. Granted, there is no shortage of weeds, but the same applies to the flower seeds. Imagine that all sentient beings sow their flower seeds in this collective inner garden, and water them together. With all the attention continuously going to the growth of the flowers, a beautiful garden will take shape with all kinds of flowers flourishing, fragrance permeating the air, bees and butterflies hovering.

VIRTUE and the WEB of LIFE

What enables sentient beings to connect with one another? Schopenhauer uses a lantern metaphor to illustrate the relationship between a multitude of phenomena and “the will to life.” “Just as a magic lantern shows many different pictures, but it is only one and the same flame which makes them all visible.” There is only one will that manifests itself in “the endless diversity and variety of the phenomena” (79). If there is only one will to life, then all phenomena and beings must be interconnected in a way. That means to judge if an act is virtuous or not, we must assess it among all things in the web of life.

For example, I cannot say I’m virtuous by offering a hungry homeless person a sandwich everyday purchased with the money that I stole from another person. In Responsible Living, Dr. Ron Epstein tells a story about a Chinese-American woman who ran a lucrative business with her husband to sell barbecued poultry in San Francisco Chinatown, and meanwhile made respectful offerings daily at a temple for years, but still couldn’t escape her fate of being barbecued to death with her husband in a fire like fried chickens in their own apartment (Epstein 20). Therefore, true virtue must arise from the consideration of the whole web of life where all beings and phenomena are interwoven.

Then, does virtue have a limit? Someone might say, “I can only be virtuous to this extent or be kind to this many people in my own community. I’ve reached my limit.” Should virtue have a limit? Schopenhauer thinks not, for “according to the true nature of things, everyone has to regard all the suffering of the world as his own...as long as he asserts life with all his energy” (218). “Everyone has to regard all the suffering of the world as his own.” What a bold statement! Does “has to” mean any one of us has no other choice, but must pay attention to all the suffering as if they were our own?

Years ago, I visited a Chinese environmental filmmaker who was filming the plastic recycling facilities in a Chinese village (Film: Plastic China). The whole village was like a giant dump, with dead fish floating in a dark foamy river, the smell of trash and burned plastics thick in the air, and running water that was unsafe for cooking. In the piles of plastics processed at one family facility, I saw brands from Trader Joe’s, Safeway, and Whole Foods. How did they get here when these stores are located on the other side of the planet? After the plastics were washed, the dirty water went right back into the river. Some of the non-recyclable plastics were burned by the rice fields causing black smoke to rise high into the sky. In the middle of the village stood a tall billboard, which read The Center for Renewable Resources. The billboard boasted images of tidy facilities, green trees, and a beautiful blue sky. But the sky above the billboard was gray, and the village was overrun with garbage.

My experience in that village shook me deeply. Later, when I read about a whale found dead on Stinson Beach north of San Francisco, its stomach full of plastics, I cried in the quiet night. The pain was deep. I became aware that so much production, waste, competition and violence are due to our greed, not necessity. I began to think critically about material goods; where they come from and where they end up when no longer considered useful. How much harm has been caused during their extraction, manufacture, consumption, and discard? Even a single-use plastic straw could contribute to the death of ocean creatures. Thus, true virtue goes beyond friends and family in our own community, beyond the human-centered civilization or de-civilization, but must extend to all beings in the web of life.

CONCLUSION

If Schopenhauer is correct, virtue cannot be taught. It exists even when there is nothing to be gained by being virtuous. It exists outside of social or religious connotations and burdens because Schopenhauer’s virtue springs from his concept of will and “the will to life.” He interprets life, the entirety of the visible phenomenal world, as the manifestation of the will, a “mirror of the will.” All the true virtuous acts in the world must come from that will, not being imposed by teachers, religion, or other constructs of society.

The phenomenal world and virtuous acts that individuals perform within it are all connected under one will in the web of life. It is all in the same garden. Within this interconnectedness, can an individual be authentically virtuous or be virtuously authentic? Clearly there is no simple answer, but the inquiry into the authenticity in virtue itself may help humanity open up more to the potential of cultivating a collective inner garden of virtue and living in harmony with all sentient beings in the web of life.

(This essay was also published in Mirror Flower Water Moon (鏡花水月), Fall 2019, p.47)

Works Cited

Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Idea. Berman, David, editor. Berman, Jill, translator. J.M. Dent, The Everyman Library. 1995

Epstein, Ron. Living Responsibly. Explorations in Applied Buddhist Ethics -- Animals, Environment, GMOs, Digital Media. Buddhist Text Translation Society. 2018

Film: Plastic China, WANG Jiuliang, 2018.