Chinese Perspectives on Death. 2

Cont'd

Righteousness and/or justice appear to occupy the mind of most Chinese scholars. Apart from those already cited, there are many other Confucians who think the same eg. Sung dynasty Confucian thinkers Chan Leong (陳亮) and Ming dynasty thinkers Liu Zongzhou (劉宗周),  and Wong Fu Chi or Wang Fuzhi (Wang Fūzhī or Wang Fuchih) (王夫之) or Ernong (而农),  Chuanshan (船山)(1619–1692) a Chinese philosopher of late Ming and early Qing:
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Chan Leong, a patriotic poet of South Sung dynasty who advocated putting knowledge gained from studying the classical texts to practical use and who had a heated debates with another famous Chinese scholar Chu Hei,  says: "It's difficult for man to avoid death. The difficulty of death is precisely this. When the country is experiencing risk of the ninth stage of its positive pole(note" according to Chinese numerologist calculations, the positive 9 normally indicates the happening of droughts but here it refers to invasion by foreign ethnic groups), there will be a certain limited number who will resist enslavement by death but when the emperor's personal guards corrupt themselves and do not wish to know anything of righteousness, that would the the last straw.."「人固難于一死，而一死之難又如此。國家遭陽九之危，能以死拒擄者故有數，而禁卒內潰，人不知義，極矣。」(陳亮集，書趙永豐訓之行錄九). Thus it is not always easy to uphold righteousness by death. 

To Liu Zongzhou, (a famous Confucian scholar (1578-1645) belonging to the Mind School of Yang Ming (陽明心學) and Eastern Chekiang School ( 浙東學派 )in late Ming dynasty who held the belief that there is no knowledge which is not mediated through the human mind and that all knowledge can only be fully understood if put into practice), it is impossible to understand or assess life and death by their own nature. To him life and death could only be assessed from the point of view of righteousness. He says, "How can one crack the secret of life and death through analysis of themselves? Only from the perspectives of righteousness and advantages can one make clear distinctions and truly see whether life and death is worth talking about. If righteousness demands life, then live. If righteousness demands death, then die. There is only righteousness before one's eyes. There is no life and death before one's eyes."  「若從生死破生死，如何破得，只就義利辨得清認得真，有何生死可言，義當生則生，義當死則死。眼前只見一義，不見有生有死。」( Liu Zongzhou (劉宗周): Records of Meetings, The Complete works of Master Liu  劉子全書.會錄) and elsewhere he says,"If it profits the world to die, then die. If it profits not the world, what does it matter if one were to give up easily that still useful body?" 「 死而有益天下，死之可也，死而無益天下，奈何以有用之身輕棄之?」(The Year Book,The Complete works of Master Liu 劉子全書.年譜).

To Wong Fu Chi or Wang Fuzhi, (王夫之) aka 王夫之（1619年－1692)  而農，薑齋、夕堂，一瓢道人、雙髻外史，船山病叟，王船山先生, one of the three most outstanding Chinese thinkers in late Ming and early Tsing along with  顧炎武（1613年－1682年）aka 絳，忠清。寧人，蔣山傭。亭林先生,  another famous thinker, historian, linguist  and 黃宗羲 (1610-1695) aka 太冲, 梨洲, 南雷先生, an economist, historian, thinker, geographer, astrologist, educator, and "father of Chinese Enlightenment, life may be looked upon a little more than a vehicle for the realization of the principles of righteousness. If those principles cannot be upheld, there is little choice but to choose death. He says: "If power no longer comes from within one's own self and the trends cannot be reversed then though one's body may be humilated, one's life can be given away, one's country may be annihilated, one's will (resolution) can never be taken away." 「若其權不自我，勢不可回，身可辱，生可捐，國可亡，而志不可奪」 and 將貴其生，生非不可貴也；將舍其生，生非不可舍也。...生以載義，生可真；義以立生，生可舍」(Volume 2 , General Comment on Continuation of Jor's Annals of Spring and Autumn (王夫之 『續春秋左氏傳博議』卷下) and in another book, he says " When you are about to treasure life, it's not that life is not precious; when you are about to give up life, it's not that life can't be given up...when life is a vessel for righteousness, then life  can be precious; when you do the righteous to complete life, then life can be given up" 「將貴其生，生非不可貴也；將舍其生，生非不可舍也。...生以載義，生可貴；義以立生，生可舍」(Big Announcement, Volume 5. The Explanations of the Imperial Secretary『尚書引義』卷五. 大誥」)

Immmortality

To the Confucians, immortality does not involve immortality of the body at all, as in the Western Christian idea of resurrection of the physical body for the just or the righteous at the end of the world when Jesus Christ will come again to judge both the living and the dead. Nor does it involve the reputation of having generations of one's family serving as high government officials. It is something much more spiritual or moral. We may achieve a kind of "immortality" through the effects of our works in this mundane world done whilst we are still alive and another kind of immortality through the kind of words of value we leave behind before we die. In Sheung Kung of Zuo Zhuan (Tso Chuan, or zuǒ zhuàn), sometimes translated as the Chronicle of Zuo or the Commentary of Zuo, it is written: " In the spring of the following year, Mo Shu (Note: otherwise known as Shuk Zuan Pao (叔孫豹), a master scholar) arrived in Jin, Fan Zuan Tzu (Note: a Jin minister named Gai 丐) welcomed him and asked him, " It has been said in olden days "dead but incorruptible" (Note: immortality) , what does that mean? Mo Shu didn't reply. Zuan Tzu said: Gai's ancestors, prior to Yu dynasty was the clan Tao Tang Shi, in the Shia dynastic, it was the clan of Yu Long Shi; in the Sheng dynasty, it was the clan of Tuan Shu Shi; in the Chou dynasty, it was the clan of Tang Du Shi; In the Jin dynasty, the head of the Hsia Alliance was Fan shi. is that what that means?   Mo Shu replied: "According to what Pao (i.e. himself) heard, that is what is called "generations of government officials". That is not "dead but incorruptible"(immortality). In the country called Lu, there was a formerly a scholar called Bin Man Chung. deceased, but his words stood. That is what is meant. What Pao heard is this, at the top and the greatest is the establishment of virtue,  what follows is the establishment of meritorious works. What follows next is the establishment of words. A long time may have passed, but they remain. That is what is meant by immortality. If immortality means merely the protection of the name of the family or of the clan, so that there will unending respect by the world, there is no country without it. Immortality is not measured by the size of one's  official remuneration." 「二年春，穆叔如晋，范宣子逆之，問焉，曰 "古人有言曰 "死而不朽" ，何謂也？」穆叔未對。宣子曰："昔丐之祖，自虞以上為陶唐氏，在夏為御龍氏，在商為豕書氏，在周為唐杜氏，晋主夏盟為范氏，其是之謂乎！ 穆叔曰："以豹所聞，此之謂世祿，非不朽也。魯有先大夫曰臧文仲，既沒，其言立，其是之謂乎！豹聞之，大上有立德，其次有立功，其次有立言，雖久不廢，此之謂不朽。若夫保姓受氏，以宇宗祊，世不絕禮，無國無之。祿之大者，不可謂不朽" (Year 24 of Sheung Kung in Zuo Zhuan 左傳，襄公二十四年).

To Confucius, what we should be afraid of is not that we should die but that we got a bad name after we are gone. He said in Wai Ling Kung of the Analects (論語 衛灵公): "A complete ( perfect/ideal/model) man hates to disappear from this world without living up to his name" (子曰："「君子疾沒世而名不稱焉」and  that the most important thing a man should leave behind him is his name for being virtuous and not for how much worldly goods what he once owned. He said in Kwai Shi of the Analects : " King Keng of Chi had a thousand chariots. When he died, no one praised him as virtuous. Ba Yi Shu Chi lay under the grounds of Sou Yang, but the people are praising him even now'" (「齊景公有馬千駟，死之日，民無德而稱焉。伯夷 (Baiyi )叔齊(Shuqi) 俄于首陽之下，民到今稱之」(Note: Baiyi and Shuqi were respectively the elder and second son of the King of 孤竹, one of the kingdoms paying homage to the Shang Emperor. When their father died, Shuqi did not want to be the king because that was against the tradition that the eldest son should be made king but Baiyi would have none of it. For lack of any better plans, both of them escaped to the kingdom of Chou and conceded the throne to another of their younger brothers. There in Chou territory, they became friends with King Chou Wen (周文王) but when the latter received orders from King Chou Wu (周武王) to rout Emperor Zhou of Shang Dynasty (商紂王), they rode to King Chou Wen to urge him not to go ahead but when refused, and out of loyalty to the Shang Dynasty, they swore not to eat anything further given to them by the Chou officials and ate only grass and tree barks and eventually died of hunger at the foot of a mountain called Saoyang (首陽).) Hsu Kan (除幹) explains in the Discourse on Dying and Longevity in his Book on the Middle  (中論. 夭壽) what is meant by "immortality"." " Shun Song of Wing Chun (a scholar in East Han) ..thought that the ancient have already talked about "dead but incorruptible" (immortiality)...his body is gone, but his Tao or way persists, That is what is meant by immortality...  Of course, the body is something that will corrupt and disappear, whether one has longevity or not is a matter of a few tens of years; whether one has established virtue and righteousness (justice) is a matter of thousands of years. How can they be spoken of in the same breath? "「穎川荀爽...以為, 古人有言， 死而不朽...其身殁矣，其道猶存，故謂之不朽....夫形體固自朽弊消亡之物，壽與不壽，不過數十歲；德義立與不立，差數千歲，豈可同日言也哉？」

Han Ying (200 -130 BC ), a doctor at the time of Han Wen Ti (漢文帝) and later the teacher of the emperor Han King Ti (漢景帝) and a famous scholar of Jin Wen Jing (今文經), (a school of thought based on the then "recently" discovered version of the ancient Chinese classical texts in the Han Dynasty, specializing in the Book of Poetry (詩經), popularly known as Han Poetry (韓詩)) said in his Outer Text of Han Poetry (韓詩外傳):"Prince Pi Kan got killed to establish loyalty, Wei Sang got killed to establish his fidelity, Baiyi and Shuqi got killed to establish their purity. These four are examples to all scholars. how would they not love their lives. But because their righteousness is not yet established, their names not prominent, hence a scholar would be ashamed of himself, hence they got themselves killed to accomplish their conduct. From this perspective, low status and poverty are not the same of a scholar. What is a shame is when everybody upholds loyalty and they fail to follow, everybody upholds fidelity and they fail to follow, everybody upholds purity and they fail to follow. The three qualities being embodied by them, their they are renowned. never resting like the sun and moon. Will cannot kill them and the earth cannot bear them and even in the times of Kit and Zhou, they will not be sullied. It is not that they detest life and rejoice in death or hate wealth and delight in poverty. Where worthy principles involve their person as scholars, they will not be daunted."(「王子比干殺身以成其忠，尾生殺身以成其信，伯夷叔齊殺身以成其廉。此四子者，皆天下之通士也，豈不愛其身哉？為夫義之不立，名之不顯，則士恥之，故殺身以遂其行。由是觀之，卑賤貧窮，非士之恥也。夫士之所恥者，天下舉忠而士不與焉，舉信而士不與焉，舉廉而士不與焉。三者存乎身，名傳于世，與日月并而不息，天不能殺，地不能生，當桀紂之世，不能污也，然則非惡生而樂死也。惡富貴好貧賤也，由其理尊貴及己而仕，不辭也」

To LaoTsu, what is most important is not to lose one's true nature. He said in Chapter 33 of LaoTzu :" One who does not lose what he is will last and one who dies but is not gone possesses  longevity" (不失其所者久，死而不亡者壽:)

What do Chinese Buddhists think about death and immortality. According to T'ai Hsü Ta Shi 1890-1947 Master Taixu or T'ai Hsü Ta Shi ( 太虛大師))(1890-1947), a Buddhist modernist, activist and thinker who advocated the reform and renewal of Chinese Buddhism, the word "Life" (生命) is some living being (所謂生命, 就是活的生) and only those being with awareness/consciousness and knowledge are full beings (有覺知情識才是充足的生命) But death is not equivalent to the termination of life but when this life terminates, another life begins.According to the Buddhist view, "The human life, formed with five material and mental/spiritual skanda, will ceaselessly grows and develops, weakens, ages until it finally dies. That's why it is said: where there is life there must be death. But death is not equivalent to the termination of life. Rather, when this life terminates, another new life will begin. Thus it has been said: "This dies, another lives. Another dies, this lives." The two may appear to be unconnected with each other, In fact, it is a process of one leading to the other. Although the material part of human life dies, the spiritual part never dies, especially the part which forms the core of the spiritual subject(ego, or self), the king of all consciousness, the 8th consciousness (Note: alaya), which contains all the man's previous karmic causes, which leads to the karmic effect in the current life during which his conduct will form indelible karmic sees, stored in the karmic field (alaya) to be the principal cause of another new life, thus forming a man's three lives: past, present and future. " (由精神與物質等五蘊所組成的人類生命, 是不斷成長, 不停的衰老, 而終至死，所以說：有生必有死，但死並不等如生命的完結, 而是此一生結束時, 又開展另一新的生命。所謂："此死彼生, 死彼此生"，彼此間似乎互不相關，實際上彼此是繼往開來的過程.人的生命物質部分雖然死亡, 但精神部分卻永恆不死，特別是作為精神主體的八識心王，含藏着八過去所造的業因，引生現世的結果，再由現世行為形成不可磨滅的業種子, 儲藏放入識田中，作為引生未來生命的主因，遂成為過去，現在、未來三世生命). Thus from the point of view of Buddhist doctrine, only our physical bodies die upon our death. Another part of our "self", its spirit, will live on in the form of what they call "karma" (業) which will "seed" another life in the constant recycling of our karmic spirit  in the process they call samsara (輪迴),  whether as hungry ghost, asuras, animals, human beings etc, until we achieve nirvana when we become finally and permanently free from such recycling of our karmic spirit. If so, "immortality" is not a long life, not even a long spiritual life, which in the Buddhist perspective, is not necessarily "good" because if we did not have sufficient good thoughts, right thinking, and do sufficient good works in our current life, we shall continue to be subjected to that endless samsaric cycle of constant deaths and rebirths during which we may take on the form of various kinds of "beings" who differ from each other only in the amount of suffering they have to endure during the relevant stage in the samsaric cycle.

Professor Chan ends his talk with a brief note on how Zen (Chan) Buddhism proposes to help us terminate the endless cycle of deaths and rebirths through a form of enlightenment by grasping and perceiving the ultimate Buddhist truth directly, without the use of words. He cites the story of how the 6th patriarch of Chinese Zen Buddhism came to be selected. The story has it that one day, the 5th Patriarch Hongren (弘忍) called all his disciples in front of the main hall and told them and rebuked them saying that to people, life and death is always an important matter but all that they were doing everyday was to look for their own blessings(福田) instead of seeking to lift themselves off the cycle of death and rebirth in that sea of suffering and that if their individual natures were deluded, how it was possible to have "salvation" (世人生死事大，汝等終日六求福田，不求出離生死苦海，自性若迷，福何可救) and urged them to each meditate on what level of wisdom (智慧) they have achieved by looking  into their own heart or mind at their own wisdom and then to write a Buddhist song of praise (偈) to show him what wisdom they had achieved and that if they had achieved great enlightenment, then he would pass to such a monk his position as the head monk and that they must do so "immediately" because if they were to use their mind to think hard, that could only mean that they were using their mind to discriminate between things ie. they hadn't got the gist of the Zen method which is perception of the truth without going through the use of verbal distinctions in our mind. In his view, Zen required no book learning, only intuition and unreflected perception of the ultimate Buddhist truth, direct from the human heart and mind (明心見性). The word "智 " means "to be enlightened" (照有) and to understand everything( 明暸萬象) and the word "慧 " means to observe the void/the illusoriness/the emptiness of everything  and to thoroughly understand the nature of the ultimate truth( 觀空, 洞徹理體). In the end, he passed his robe and his bowl to Hui Neng (惠能), who had been charged with sweeping the floor of the monastery instead of to Shen-Hsiu (神秀), who had been teaching Buddhism to the younger monks. He did so because 神秀 wrote one poem, and hesitated for several days whether to present it because he was afraid of being accused of wanting power and after much mental struggle, he decided to post it up outside a room dedicated to the the Lankavatara 楞枷經 (one of the three items given to Huike (慧可), the first Chinese Zen patriarch) instead of giving it directly to Hongren. The song read "The body is a Bodhi tree, the heart a mirror like table. it requires constant sweeping Lest it be filled with dust" ( 身是菩堤樹， 心如明鏡臺， 時時勤拂拭，勿使惹塵埃). Hongren, the fifth patriarch read it and didn't like it and urged 神秀 to do another one but in the meantime told all the other monks to read it. But Hui Neng could neither read nor write and asked for it to be read to him by another monk. But once he heard it, he felt it was wrong and asked the other monk to help him write down a better version. His version is: "There never was a Bodhi Tree, Nor is the clear mirror a table, There's nothing. Whence the Dust?" ( 菩堤本無樹， 明鏡亦非臺， 本來無一物，何處惹塵埃.). He was made the sixth patriarch. So there's hope for everyone, including even the illiterate, just so long as we realize the emptiness and the illusory "permanence" of everything , everyone and all the phenomena we see, hear, touch, smell, taste. That's the beauty of Zen!