The Strange Monk and His Prosperous Gospel
Text/Liang Ruichen
Xiang did not put the more than 20,000 lines of "Twelve Causes and Conditions" poem scroll on my desk, which really made me feel a lot of emotions. I immediately saw Sylar's greatest Homeric epic, which added up the two full epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, which were no more than 20,000 lines long. And Dante's Divine Comedy, the greatest epic of the European Middle Ages and the classic of world literature, is only about fifteen thousand lines.
Poetry, of course, does not judge heroes in terms of length. However, in today's impetuous and impatient time, there are actually people who are calm and calm, green lights and yellow scrolls, poor days, long-distance raids, long-distance expeditions to the poetry country, to cross the mountain peaks of the poetry country, can not help but make people secretly amazed.
Xiang Wei, the author of the Hunan Youth Literature Award, has emerged in the Chinese literary circle. His small family was poor, and long, fell into the hair as a monk, and on the occasion of worshiping the Buddha, he was happy. Hunan Changde Huayan Creek, water xiushan Qing, cultural fortune prosperous. Across the mountain is Tao Yuanming's cultivated land peach blossom source. This kind of literary trend, more or less born from this, soaked in this landscape.
In the history of China, there are many strange people in the Huxiang monastic circles, such as Yongzhou Huaisu, who uses the earth as paper, dead branches as pens, former sages as teachers, nature as the law, creating flying dragons and phoenixes, vines and branches of Huaisu body, writing Chinese characters full of paper smoke clouds, unpredictable, and respected as "grass saints". Xiang Wei can also be called a contemporary strange monk, in the cold loneliness of Shamen, He is standing alone, and he has many gains in literature. Poetry, biographies, red studies, television dramas, every dabble, have become a climate, like a multi-habitat and prolific writer.
Buddhism, as a bolai product, in the process of transformation and anti-transformation, in the process of integration and mixing, in the face of the transformation of a powerful Chinese culture, constantly integrates and develops, and shows people with a new face. I remember visiting India a few years ago to discuss the similarities and differences between Indian Buddhism and Chinese Buddhism with my friends, and everyone saw invariably that Indian Buddhism seeks the afterlife, attracts sentient beings with the unknown, settles the soul with the future, and is relatively ethereal and empty. Chinese Buddhism, on the other hand, seeks the present world, and under the wrapping of secular culture, hopes to solve the more realistic problems in life. Eliminating disasters and avoiding disasters, seeking peace and happiness, is embodied in a very specific purpose. This kind of Buddhist realism, which has been transformed by Chinese culture, makes the people see and feel, so that Chinese Buddhism has a huge group in the folk, and the so-called Pudu sentient beings it preaches, Amitabha Buddha, have a powerful appeal.
Xiang Wei's "Twelve Causes and Conditions" very clearly reflects this characteristic. Although it explains the Buddha's teachings based on the clues of the past, present, and future to the cycle of life, it makes a simple explanation of life's confusion, hardship, sorrow, and suffering, and explores the cause and effect relationship between the origin and the end of life from the subtle meaning of the twelve causes and conditions.
From the interpretation of the text of "Twelve Causes and Conditions", we can clearly feel that the poems choose the theme from the current life, and their sense of the times is very strong. The poet begins with the individual. One I am an innumerable me / An innumerable me / Life is bottomless / Before birth / And the past / After death / And the future. These are the three stages of the cycle of life. Past, present, future.
The mysterious and hidden mysteries of Buddhism have been replaced by poets with the language of clear poetry, and the veil wrapped in the mist of Buddhism has been skillfully lifted.
The twelve causes and conditions, from ignorance to old age and death, are the twelve links of life in the Buddha's teachings, and these links are closely interlinked and mutually causal. The beauty of the poet is that he closely links the self, society, the world, history, and the present, to explain the Buddha's teachings, and to explain some common phenomena in life and nature to explain the profound truths of the Dharma. For example, in the chapter "Touch", the poet uses his strange deeds of coming to the world and Mr. Huang's life experience of standing and dying to illustrate the important influence of the environment on people. In particular, the description of the experience of herding cattle as a child, the encounter of parents, and the feelings of spring, summer, autumn and winter in nature, from metaphysical to metaphysical, subtle and concrete. From the perspective of children, the poet perceives and interprets the Zen meaning of the "six roots", which makes the Buddha's meaning full of mysterious illusions change and appear vividly.
The Kingdom of Buddha is the Kingdom of Heaven, and the Kingdom of Heaven seems to be far away from the human world, but "Twelve Causes and Conditions" brings the Buddha Kingdom thousands of miles away closer to the human world, the love and hatred of the world, the joy and sorrow, the kindness and integrity of the gentleman, the sinister and dirty nature of the villain, the analysis of many phenomena in Chinese society from the causes of history, the search for the original reason from the encounter of individuals, making people enlightened, awakened, enlightened, and close. He does not stand in the clouds and look down on sentient beings, but finds his own suitable position in sentient beings, he does not shout universal values in a big and inappropriate way, but from the epitome of the individual to perceive the situation of life and analyze social phenomena. This shows the distinctive social and humanistic value of the poems of the Twelve Causes.
Buddhism is really a philosophy of life, and the beginning and end of life is a philosophical proposition that traces back to the end. The so-called religion is often covered with a veil of mystery. Although the Twelve Causes and Conditions unveil all kinds of mysteries in the answer to these propositions, and uses the poet's unique interpretation of life, it still does not lose its original, rational, metaphysical, and philosophical speculation. You see, in "Dependent Origins", the poet wrote: "The secret is colored/ My inferiority passes through the blood circulation / It did not flow out of my life. So the poet wants to nirvana from the initial inferiority of life. Sensing Nirvana when Nirvana is constantly rotating and precipitating / Flowing water Izumo root / Water is the most noble / Guest present / ... The softer the language / the tougher the emotion / I look up to the sky and sigh / The bright moon rides the crane home. This change of internal and external causes, the improvement of the quality of life by spiritual nirvana, the transformation of life by the reshaping of the spiritual world, and so on, have made poetic reflections. This abstraction, philosophical thought, provides an outline of the poems. And in the final trek, he hides the philosophy of the end of life in the encounter between my father and me, and the old age that my father hopes to transcend and convert, which in a sense is the thinking of people in old age. At the end of the work, the father and the mother are in the same cave, which makes me feel a spiritual yearning for the final destination at the end of life. Based on this, the poet sincerely expressed his feelings about the future of life. The earth will not leave my footprints / but I can prove for me / I did / passing through the world / and you will be the last / clean person I met. How meaningful, how meaningful, how meaningful! From birth to death, the world of the Buddha and the world of reality are interpreted by the poet into the wonderful sounds of heaven and earth.
Writing this, I can't help but think of Su Manshu, a famous poet and monk of the modern "Nanshe". He is a rare talent in modern history who combines talent, insight, artistic accomplishment, and spiritual wisdom. He was born in the old era of turmoil, experienced ups and downs, and his life was drifting. Especially the backwardness in the family road, but also through the discrimination of the family, almost lost his life in the wilderness, fortunately he picked up a life in the cold wind and rain. After that, he became acquainted with Zhang Taiyan, Zou Rong, Chen Duxiu, Liu Yazi and other benevolent men, so although he cut his hair and became a monk at the age of 16, he did not completely escape into the empty door, but paid attention to social reality in the practice of monks and customs, closely followed the drums of life, and at the most important node of the times, he stepped forward, and in the world of entry and birth, he showed himself as a strange monk, and could not help but let us applaud him. He went to the sea to awaken the people, actively wrote for the "New Youth", and thus became a revolutionary poet, which is a strange Chinese literary marvel in the 19th century!
As the winds and clouds change and the world changes, when we look around Buddhism and look at the monastic circles, we are bound to turn our eyes to the landscape of Changde. Today's China is changing with each passing day. Xiang Wei was in the prosperous world, his talent confided in the fragrance of the times, and we are pleased to see that only in Guotai Min'an can the Buddhist community be immersed in a school of peace. Only when we are not talented can we move steadily and far, and only then can we show our fists in the cross-border between the Buddhist and literary circles. These three volumes of poems of epic quality are a testimony to this prosperous world, the gospel of the prosperous world. Xiang is not in his prime, and he is in the middle of the day, and we have full expectations for his future.
Liang Ruichen, a member of the Chinese Writers Association, is a first-class expert in literary creation and enjoys special government allowances from the State Council. He is currently the president of Hunan Provincial Prose Literature Association and the honorary chairman of Hunan Writers Association. He once served as the full-time vice chairman and secretary general of the Hunan Writers Association, the director of the management office of Mao Zedong Academy of Letters, and the editor-in-chief of literary style magazine. He is the author of the reportage collection "Ten Thousand Days and Nights", "The Imprint of Mao Zedong's Birthday" (cooperation), the essay collection "Foggy Bottom", "Qin Shishui", "Huaxia Yingjie", "Ou Xing Sanji" and so on. The essay "The Song of the Distant Past" won the second Wujin Award of the Chinese Writers Association and the Ministry of Coal, and "Foggy Bottom" won the National Supplement Excellent Work Award.