Who is Cai Zhizhong?
He was one of the most well-known Chinese cartoonists of the last century. He has drawn well-known masterpieces of classical Chinese thought, such as "Cai Gen Tan", "Analects", "Tao Te Ching", "The Getaway", etc., into comics, with in-depth and simple content, and interesting writing.
According to statistics, his works are currently sold in 59 countries around the world, and Princeton University Press has specially opened a series of Cai Zhizhong comics for him. In addition to the identity of a cartoonist, Cai Zhizhong is also a bridge master, has opened a company, won the Golden Horse Award for Best Animation, and was selected as one of the "Top Ten Outstanding Youth of Taiwan". In addition to these identities, Cai Zhizhong is also a world-renowned Zen master and bronze Buddha collector.
Cai Lan once commented on Cai Zhizhong: "He is not an earthling, he comes from an alien planet. ”
Cai Zhizhong's life can be said to be an extremely beautiful work.
How did he do it?
In this week's cutting-edge course "Cai Zhizhong: A Lifetime of Focus on Beautiful Works", Chaos University is honored to invite Mr. Cai Zhizhong to share his life philosophy.
The following is shared by Cai Zhizhong.
The instructor | Cai Zhizhong The world's largest cartoonist, winner of the Golden Horse Award for Best Cartoon, and Taiwan's Top Ten Outstanding Youth
Edit the | Chaos University Business Research Team
Support | Chaos University Frontier Course
What am I going to do in this life?
I became a cartoonist with an impact on the world thanks in large part to my early education.
The village where I was born had a small Catholic church. My mother believed that catholicism is the same as buddhism, and the more you pray and the more you pray to Mass, the greater your blessings. So when I was just one year old, my six-year-old second brother carried me to church every morning to attend the lecture class. From Genesis to the resurrection of Jesus, I listened to many, many bible stories as a child.
Bible stories are different from fairy tales, there is history in the Bible stories, such as Moses leading the Jews from Egypt and then back to their god-promised places; there are also myths in the Bible stories, such as Moses can separate the Red Sea, Jesus Christ has superpowers; there is wisdom in the Bible stories, such as King David's Arias, King Solomon Truth, etc., which are all wisdom.
At that time, I had 1,000 Bible stories in my head, of which there were nearly 100 powerful characters, for example, Jesus Christ could feed three thousand listeners with two fish and five cakes, and Noah could forge a large ark full of pairs of animals all over the world...
In the countryside, three-and-a-half-year-olds can actually do a lot of things. The blacksmith's children can already help their father burn the stove, the farmer's son can help weed and deliver tea in the field, and the three-and-a-half-year-old girl even begins to carry her younger siblings, but Cai Zhizhong will not do anything.
My father is the secretary of the villagers' representative association, the first calligraphy in the whole township, and the "cultural person" in the countryside. When I was about four years old, he began to teach me to write, writing "Cai Zhizhong" or "Heaven and Earth Xuanhuang", "Cosmic Flood", "Kong Yiji"... When I was almost four and a half years old, I learned to write, I also learned to read, and I found my way through the little blackboard that my father gave me—I found that I loved to draw, and I was very good at drawing.
At that time, I decided that as long as I didn't die of hunger, I would paint for the rest of my life.
(Please click the Mini Program to make an appointment to watch)
Mom's enlightenment
It is often said that behind every great person, there is a great mother.
Just like Mr. Shi Zhenrong, the founder of Taiwan Acer Computer, his father passed away when he was very young, his mother opened a small grocery store, Shi Zhenrong has been doing business with his mother since he was a child, sending rice, salt, soy sauce, and he will even calculate in advance which household's rice is almost used, and take the initiative to send rice over. Shi Zhenrong's company is always less than a kilometer away from his home, and he has to go back to eat his mother's cooking every day at noon and at night.
I will become who I am now, also because I have a good mother. My family usually doesn't talk, and the words I've spoken to my dad, brothers, sisters, and sisters in my lifetime should add up to less than 50 sentences per person, but I don't have anything to say to my mom. My mother is very good at telling me stories, she can also teach me to sing, and she also loves to watch songs.
There is often a scene in the song play: two people sitting in the living room talking, and suddenly one person will stand up and walk to the stage and pick up the microphone to tell the audience the inner OS: "Oh yes, there must be a reason for it, I will go back to observe what his intentions are", and then walk back to sit down and continue to speak.
So in the process of watching the play, I learned a truth: when a person talks to you, don't listen to what he says, but see how he does.
Looking back, when I was more than four years old, most of it was drawing comics on small blackboards. My mother laughed at me and said, can you mix rice after you draw that doll? I said: Definitely. Unfortunately, at that time, there was no painting industry, only the ancient beds in the countryside would have rich flowers and plum bamboo chrysanthemums, but there were very few ancient beds, and they used brushes to draw, I did not necessarily draw this; if you draw signboards, those signs usually write "so-and-so shop" or "so-and-so factory", and I can't write so beautiful words; but I know an industry - painting movie signboards, so I was determined to grow up to draw movie signs.
When I was 9 years old, Taiwan began to popularize comics, including "Comic Weekly", "Comic King", "Model Boy", and then I had a feeling: I must become a cartoonist in the future. But I'm not the same as other cartoonists, and I know that the most important thing about comics is the content.
When I was 9 years old, I read all the books in the village that I could access, including Robinson Crusoe, Travels of the Big and Small People, The Adventures of Tom, The Three Musketeers, Brothers of Karamazov... After reading a lot of books, I began to learn to make up stories on my own, and then tell them to my mother, whether she was feeding pigs or ducks.
Find the "brush" of life
Every child is a genius, but the mother does not know; everyone can be a hundred times more powerful than the present, but they don't believe it. My mom knew I was a genius.
During the summer vacation of my sophomore year of junior high school, I sent four pages of the comic I drew to a publishing house in Taipei. In order to show that I was professional, I also inquired about the paper, ink, brush, and where the words should be written for real comics.
Later, I received a letter from the Taipei Publishing House, saying that they could ask me to be a cartoonist, with a monthly salary of 300 yuan, to provide food and accommodation. I was very happy and said to my mother, "Mom, I'm going to take the morning bus to Taipei tomorrow morning." Mom said: "Parents are not far away, and there must be a good way to travel." "She asked me to at least tell my father.
I still remember it to this day. Dad was usually very serious and rarely spoke, and after eating he would lie down on a wicker chair and read the newspaper, and I was standing behind him:
"Dad, I'm going to Taipei tomorrow."
"What are you going to do?"
"Picture manga.".
"Got a job?"
"Found it."
"Then go for it."
I spoke 14 words and he spoke 13 words. I didn't go ahead of him, and he didn't look back at me.
The next day I took the first bus at 6:20 to Taipei. I was sitting on the last section of the train, and there was a door in the last section, and there was an iron in the door, and I put my feet underneath, and looked at the track that kept going backwards, and looked at the hometown that kept going away, and I cried out in my heart: "Never go back, never go back again."
After arriving in Taipei, I took a tricycle to the Guanghua Mall to meet with each other. Someone came to see a child, not much taller than the suitcase, and asked me: "Are you Cai Zhizhong?" I said, "Yeah, didn't you tell me to come?" He took me to my place to sleep.
The conditions there were very poor, the room was about 4 square meters, there was a bunk bed on each side of the left and right, even I slept four people, so crowded that two people sitting on both feet would hit, but I was excited.
At about 4 o'clock the next morning, I faintly heard chickens and dogs, birds, the sound of trucks starting at intersections, and cars honking their horns. I closed my eyes and thought, "Wow, I'm a cartoonist now." "I couldn't be happier. From the first day, I drew martial arts cartoons until two o'clock in the morning, without getting tired. Probably because I was extremely diligent, the boss gave me twice my salary in the first month. Three months later, I went to Taiwan's largest publishing house, where there were more than eighty cartoonists.
I often say that everyone should think clearly about what they are going to do in the future, and don't wait until all their studies are completed to decide what they want to do, it is too late. There is a Nobel Laureate in Chemistry in Taiwan named Li Yuanzhe, and the project he won the prize was the research he did in college.
Therefore, the best way to do something is to start thinking about what you want to eat in this life from a very young age, and think about what the "brush" of your life is.
People have to do what they are best at all their lives
In 1981, I founded Dragon Cartoons. In the years that followed, my company shot cartoon movies such as "Colorful Cartoon Old Master" and "Oolong Courtyard", among which "Old Master" also won the Golden Horse Award for Best Cartoon Feature Film.
At that time, Dragon Cartoon was the most powerful animation company in Asia, earning 250,000 Taiwan dollars a month. It was at that time that I started asking myself, I only spend 5,000 Taiwan dollars a month, why should I earn 250,000 yuan? At that time, I was rich and free, I already owned 3 very good houses, and I had NT$8.6 million in banks, but my daily living expenses were less than NT$20.
So I made up my mind not to cut my life in exchange for fame and fortune. On April 22, 1984, at the age of 36, I closed the Dragon Cartoon Company and went to Japan alone to become a manga artist again.
At that time, there were many people who did not understand my behavior and thought that I could open the company and let the employees manage it. My wife also asked me why I had to close the company when I went to Japan to draw manga. I replied that chasing two rabbits must not be a rabbit. (Golden Sentence)
The most famous manga artist in Japan is Osamu Tezuka (real name Osamu Tezuka, manga artist, animator, doctor of medicine), whose representative works include Astro Boy and Doctor Black Jack. When I went to Japan, Osamu Tezuka had already passed away. However, at that time, there was also a famous manga master named Tetsuya Chiba, who had drawn "Good Boy" and "Little Boxer", drew various sports, and was the king of Japanese manga.
How can I be like them? It's hard to do. Because I was a Taiwanese, the Japanese at that time looked down on East Asian cartoons and American comics, and they respected british, French, German and other countries' comics. No matter how hard I try, I probably won't be able to become one of Japan's great manga artists.
I often say: academic qualifications are bronze medals, ability is silver medals, interpersonal relationships are gold medals, and thinking ability is the trump card.
My greatest ability is to think backwards.
It is impossible for Tsai To be Japan's greatest manga artist, so what works can make publishers all over the world line up to grab it? The crux of the matter is not what you as a cartoonist want to draw, but what the reader wants to see.
That makes things simple – my Japanese and ability to draw story comics is certainly not as good as a Japanese story manga artist, but my Chinese is much better than a Japanese manga artist, and story manga is not as good as theirs, but philosophy manga must be no one can beat me.
Since the age of 9, I have been involved in all the philosophical books in the world, such as the Indian Vedas, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the middle Eastern poet Miru's poetry collections, and so on. In the bookstore of the Three Provinces, there are "Han Feizi", "Sun Tzu's Art of War", "Lao Tzu", "Zhuangzi", "Confucius", "Mencius", "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", "Water Margin", "List of Fengshen Gods"... But I chose to paint Zhuangzi. Because I feel that my life is like Zhuangzi, I don't care about ragged clothes, and I am used to showing my true face.
So I typed more than eighty copies and went to challenge the Japanese Kodansha. Kodansha is Japan's largest comprehensive publishing house and copyright holder, and together with Shueisha and Kokukan, kodansha is known as the "manga mio" in Japan's publishing industry.
After consultation, all of my manga were published by Kodansha, and eventually sold nearly 270,000 copies.
Before that, no foreign manga artist could sell so beautifully in the Japanese manga industry. In addition, all the manga artists in Japan later changed my name to せんせい, which is "sir", which is an honorific title, which means that I am regarded as a manga artist of the same level as them.
Don't care if we lose 1 million things to 1 million people, but care about which one of us wins the world. In other words, people have to do what they are best at all their lives.
Extreme focus is what makes for extreme beauty
I think that a person should have three "dragon slaying swords", the first, thinking for everything first; the second, finding the "brush" of his life early; and the third, creating his own "sunflower treasure book".
I grew up with my mother around 3 o'clock, and when I grew up, I also developed the habit of getting up before 3 o'clock. Last year I only slept 3 and a half hours a day, and this year I am a little tired and sleep for 4 hours. I'm a lot like Balzac, who goes to bed when it's dark, and whenever I wake up, no matter what time it is, it's considered the beginning of the next day.
I am very much looking forward to waking up in the morning. A lot of writers start writing in the dead of night, which is not true. Because after a day to dinner, and then a short break and then continue to write late at night, in fact, from the past to the present, so 95% of your brain has past thinking; but if you turn it upside down, get up in the morning without talking, not watching TV, not reading, making a cup of coffee and standing at the window, and starting to think, then 95% of your brain will be thinking about the future, and only 5% will be thinking about the past.
I heard Mai Jia talk about how he wrote "The Sound of the Wind" - it took half a year to think, a month to write a "small arm" of the work, and then half a year to write a "head", the process is very unhappy. But cartoonists are different, cartoonists draw beautiful moth eyebrows, big eyes, cute small mouths, and exploding heads at the same time. Writers can write up to dozens of books in a lifetime, but cartoonists can publish more than 300 books.
I painted 8,000 pages in 4 years in Japan, and I didn't open the door for 42 consecutive days and didn't leave the chair for 58 consecutive hours in order to complete a more important work.
When I was the chief consultant of Tencent Animation Platform, the general manager of a cultural publishing company called me on December 26 and said, Teacher Cai, didn't you promise us a set of books this year? I asked him what book I promised them to publish, and he said, "Dharma Four Wheels."
After confirming that the deadline was January 3rd of the New Year, from December 27th to January 2nd, I lived in Taipei's Municipal Square for seven days from translating words and paintings, and the fireworks and evening parties outside the room to celebrate the New Year's Eve did not exist at all for me. On the 2nd I called the general manager and said that I had completed two and a half books, and one and a half I had completed in three days. Then, supposedly on the fourth day, I submitted drawings of four books. That's when I found out that my left foot had burned a dozen blisters from the grill.
Jing Cen Zen Master in Changsha, Hunan Province, said that entering the ten square world is the sand gate eye, entering the ten square world is the sand door body, entering the ten square world is the sand gate itself, and there is no one else in your own time and space light, this is the flow, that is, entering the light and heat space.
When you do something very focused and smooth, you will enter the light and heat space, into the flow. All the space, time, and people are equivalent to non-existence, and the only thing you can hear is the friction sound of the pen tip touching the A4 paper, and the sound of your own heartbeat.
If you look at the world celebrities, whether it's Microsoft's Bill Gates, Or Apple's Jobs, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, the most successful people, they all choose to do what they're best at at the most important point in time, and do it to the extreme.
Look at things from a higher perspective
I drew a cartoon in which a bird said to a giraffe, "Although you are tall, I can fly." ”
Therefore, a person must know what he wants to become, why he wants to become, and how to become, which are the three most important things in life.
In 2013, 2014 and 2018, I was the chief consultant of Tencent's animation platform. Someone who has been working with me has tested me a math problem: there are 1,000 copper plates that you can randomly put on 10 piles, and then you are not allowed to touch them again; then I will say a number of 1-1000, such as 316, and you will say that it is a combination of the first piles to the first piles. How to design the heap method?
It only took me 2 minutes to get the answer to this question:
If you pile 1, you always have to pile 2 and 4, because with 1 and 2 you don't need 3, and if you have 1, 2, 4, you don't need 5, 6, 7. In the same way, with 1, 2, 4, 8, there is no need for 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. So the answer comes out – the first pile 1, the second pile 2, the third pile 4, the fourth pile 8, the fifth pile 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, so that the sum is 511, the last pile 489, so if it exceeds 511, take out 489, and the rest can be combined with the previous 9 piles.
I took this question to the youth team leader of Bridge Club, who had gone to the United States to study mathematics and received his doctorate in his twenties. I asked him this question, and then we drove to the restaurant for dinner, and as soon as he stopped the car and came in, he told me, "I know, it has to do with the 10th power of 2, the 10th power of 2 is 1024, but why 24 more?" I said, "Don't tell you." ”
Later, I asked the same question to another person who had dinner with us, who graduated from Cambridge, was particularly good at mathematics, and was a researcher at the Academia Sinica. He asked the restaurant waiter for an A4 piece of paper, wrote down 10 advanced mathematical formulas, and wanted to solve the algorithm through combinations. I read it and said, you will not find the answer for three more lives with this method. He asked me what the answer was, and I said, "Don't tell you."
The same question, three results, what does it mean? I think it's this: the more you learn, the more analogies you make. To put it bluntly, learning has given up thinking, and will only think about whether what has been learned in the past can be applied. But nothing in the world is repeated, because time is different, people are different, and conditions are different.
Therefore, it is foolish to give up thinking because of learning; when encountering anything, only in the present moment, thinking from a higher perspective, can we find the "thread".
In fact, from this matter, you can also get another lesson: many people often want to learn to run before they have learned to walk, but in fact, if a thing wants to succeed, it must first have the right start, and then follow the necessary steps to complete one by one to succeed. If you compare the process of doing things to going up the stairs, from 1 to 10, the top floor is the truth, the first floor is ignorance, and every step in the middle you have to make sure that you are stepping on the right step, and then step by step.
In other words, you first have to know what the goal is and why you're doing it.
Love to learn and be unique to yourself
In 1988, I went to Seoul, South Korea (now called Seoul), and the media interviewed me and reported that the headline was "The Man Who Has Read 20,000 Books." One of the main reasons I can become my current self is that I love to learn and read.
Many people also love to read books, but often read a book from the east to the west, and the way to read the book is not right. My view is that you have to read books systematically, only then can the books you have read constitute elements of your knowledge. For example, I look at Buddhism for a certain period of time, and then I look at the Hundred Schools of Thought of the Pre-Qin Dynasty in China for a while. We must work hard to see through and familiarize ourselves with all the books of that kind for a period of time.
Learning must be with the highest standards, do not learn from the "half bottle of vinegar", that is better than not learning. For example, to learn geometry is to learn Euclid, to learn calculus is to learn Leibniz, to learn Western philosophy is to see Aristotle, Plato, socrates, to learn the hundred schools of thought of the pre-Qin sons, to see "Old Zhuang Kong Mengsun", must be the most powerful person as a teacher.
From 1990 to 1993, I spent three years reading all the Buddhist books, including the Za'a Han Sutra, the Zengyi Ahan Sutra, the Chang A Han Sutra, and the Zhong'a Han Sutra, which added up to 4.95 million words. I also like to read the history of Western philosophy, the history of Western music, the history of Western art, the history of Chinese philosophy, the history of Chinese calligraphy, the history of Chinese art, and I have also sorted out the history of the world's electric toys, the history of the world's computers, the history of Silicon Valley's creation, the history of semiconductor development, etc., all of which are systematic.
One day, I went to a noodle shop in the wet market to eat, and a young man sat down in front of me and asked me, why can I draw so many cartoons? I replied that any wet market, whether it is Saigon or Northern Europe, Vancouver, buys nothing more than chicken, duck, fish, meat, vegetables and fruits, but why are there French, British, Italian, and Chinese cuisine alone, sichuan cuisine, Hunan cuisine, Lu cuisine, Cantonese cuisine and so many other cuisines? It's because the craftsmanship is different.
When you go to the restaurant and order a plate of egg fried rice, they can serve it to you in three minutes. You know that the chef didn't go to raise chickens and wait for it to lay eggs, didn't plant rice to grow rice, didn't go to plant vegetables and wait for it to be harvested, all the ingredients were already prepared; when you go to the Chinese medicine pharmacy to grab a patch, the pharmacy guy can also give you a match in three minutes, he relies on the hundreds of thousands of drawers on the back that have been prepared with different herbs.
Each ingredient in the restaurant, each medicinal material in the pharmacy, is an element, each element is a simple individual, through a variety of cooperation, combination into different results, different medicinal materials combined together can be an antidote, can also be poison, tonic; an egg can be made of egg flower soup, omelette, can also be made of brine eggs, tea eggs.
With 26 English letters, plus 10 Arabic numerals, plus plus, minus, multiplication, and division, 4 four-point operator symbols, and 10 Greek scripts, nothing in the universe needs the 51st symbol. Using these 50 symbols, you can write 14 lines of poetry, you can write "War and Peace", you can write mathematical formulas, physical formulas...
What does this mean? In the case that all the materials are almost the same, the number is not large, but the flexible use, whether the materials will be integrated, whether there is innovative thinking. To excel, you must retain your uniqueness and be unique.
Of course, the same goes for cartoonists. There is no time limit for comics, no regional restrictions, no language restrictions. For me, comics are a language, a means, and the most important thing is content, and content is king.
Think backwards, always innovating
As I mentioned earlier, academic qualifications are bronze medals, ability is silver medals, interpersonal relationships are gold medals, and thinking ability is the trump card. In my opinion, the best way to think is to think backwards. When you encounter problems, think from the inside, think from the outside, think from 360 degrees, and find ideas that others don't have.
When I was in the third grade of elementary school, the teacher said that "learning" means that I usually have to learn, I don't understand to ask, I don't understand in class, and I don't understand in life.
There are many questions that I don't understand, and I always follow the teacher after class. For example, why do your fingers wrinkle after playing with water for a long time, why do chopsticks in the water cup look like they will turn... Until one day, I saw the teacher coming out of the teacher's lounge in the corridor outside the classroom, and as soon as I saw me, I suddenly turned into the health room next door, and I thought: Ah I can't ask any more, he still owes me 23 questions to answer.
Since then, I have understood that I still have to find my own answers to my own problems, and I have to learn through myself, not just with my teachers.
I learn everything has its own method, because the methods of the past may be effective and can be used, but many things must be innovated by you.
It's like memorizing words, if you draw an X axis and a Y axis, write different letters respectively. For example, the English word "ark" can be composed of multiple words by combining different initials: "a lark goes to a dark park, and through the spark carves a shak mark in the middle of the bark." "It was" a silver sparrow went to a dark park to carve the shark's logo on the bark of a tree by the spark of a star. "This way you can memorize 7 words at the same time and then reinforce your memory through the picture."
I taught myself in Vancouver for a year and came up with a 2500-word English word d image memory method. In fact, whether it is learning Chinese, English or Japanese, the methods are different.
Many teachers and parents will say that you can get to the top as long as you work hard. This is a white lie. Why don't some people work hard? Because his efforts did not bear fruit, because he did not find the right way.
The learning of life is not to take the slope, but to take the ladder, the effort of life must have a method, otherwise you can only jump in the same place for a lifetime, and even the first step cannot go up.
Of course, innovation comes from some of their own life experience, and some of them come from knowledge. The greatest source of knowledge is reading. There is a philosopher in the United States who said that wisdom is buried in knowledge, and knowledge is buried in information. This goes back to what we said earlier, people still have to read more books.
Analysis of the Three Philosophical Schools of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism
I spent a lot of time studying, thinking, and analyzing the three philosophies of Confucianism, Interpretation, and Taoism.
Confucius said: My way is consistent, and there is nothing but loyalty and forgiveness.
This is the core of Confucianism.
"Loyalty" means seeking his own government in his position and ending at the highest good. "Forgiveness" is not to forgive others, but to push oneself and others and be the best version of oneself. People are social animals, no matter how strong a person is, he must work with others, and when he works together, he must think from the other side's position, look at his behavior from his point of view, and think in a different position. So "forgiveness" is "as the heart", as the heart of others and to do it.
"Loyalty" and "forgiveness" are the ultimate, which is called "benevolence". Of the 15,900 characters in the Analects, "Ren" appears 108 times, making it the most common word in the Analects. But "benevolence" is difficult to achieve, and it is the highest state of Confucianism. Confucius said: The benevolent Leshan, the wise enjoy the water, the benevolent live, and the wise enjoy."
Taoist thought is not the same as Confucianism. Taoists say: Man's law, earth law and heaven, heaven's law, heaven's law, and the way of nature. The Taoist looked dazed, but he was actually very awake.
Taoists pay attention to the harmony between man and heaven and earth, the harmony between man and nature, the heavens and the earth are great, pay attention to the good as water, maintain the original state, do not go to the wisdom, because wisdom out of the clever deception. "After the loss of morality, after the loss of morality, after the loss of benevolence, after the loss of righteousness, after the loss of righteousness, after the loss of courtesy, after the loss of courtesy and wisdom." Returning to the original state, not being clever, is a Taoist.
Confucianism exhorts people to make a difference, and Taoist thought is reversed. Confucius said: If the state has the way, then it is shi, and if the state has no way, it is hidden. Taoist thinking is just the opposite--the state has the way to hide, and the state has no way out.
Lao Tzu has a total of 5007 words, and the last 15 words are the most important: the way of heaven, the way of profit but not harm, the way of the saints, for the sake of not arguing. Many scholars have actually mistranslated it, and its real meaning is exactly the same as Buddhism or Zen Buddhism: the way of heaven, the interests should be all things under the world without harm; the saints, who only change with change, do not change because of themselves, this is the person who has reached the highest standard of behavior.
When I returned to Taiwan from Vancouver in 1990, I had already finished painting the Hundred Sons, so I began to think about what I should do next, and finally chose to paint Buddhist scriptures.
It took me three years to read the Five Sutras of the Southern Transmission, the FaJushri Sutra, the Northern FaJugic Sutra, and the Southern FaJugic Sutra, and I read 70 more sutras, and I also drew 30 of them, and finally understood what buddha thought was.
Many devotees go to the temple to worship the Buddha every New Year's Festival, hoping to use the Buddha to dispel disasters and disasters, which is actually wrong. When we believe in the Buddha, and take the Buddha as our teacher, we want to learn the spirit of the Buddha.
Under the Bodhi tree, the Buddha contemplated the staged processes of "suffering": ignorance, action, awareness, fame, the six realms, touch, receive, love, take, have, live, and die.
Before this, the ancient Indians already had two seals:
The first is "impermanence of all actions", which means that everything that exists must change, everything that does not change must not exist, and any life must go through the four processes of birth, residence, alienation, and extinction; the second is "all suffering", and the good and bad you feel are the causes of suffering. Bad is immediate suffering, and good is also suffering, because actions are impermanent, and good will become bad.
What the Buddha created was "selflessness in all dharmas." This means that there should be no self in any present moment, and no self should be used to judge the quality of the situation in front of us, that is, no self.
The Buddha said: What is the first sutra of emptiness? What is the highest state of emptiness? The so-called "when the eye is born, there is no place, when the eye is gone, there is no place, only the eye is born of unreality, and there is karma without an author." "When we look at a thing, don't imagine how the situation came about; when the situation disappears, don't think about how it goes, only the behavior that participates in the change, and the existence of the uninhabited self is the highest state of emptiness.
Many friends have asked me, since you believed in Catholicism when you were a child, why did you draw Confucianism and Buddhism when you grew up? I would like to say that if everyone is at the foot of the mountain, everyone sees different perspectives, but when everyone climbs to the top, the scenery seen is actually the same, but the way is different.
From this point of view, Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and even the thought of Jesus Christ are actually the same in their bones.
On September 3, 2006, I went to the Shaolin Temple for the first time to unveil the monument erected in Tianlongdian Square. On the front of the inscription is written "Heart is like a mirror", and on the back it is written "Life is the calculus of time".
"Heart as a mirror" is taken from Zhuangzi's "The heart of the person is like a mirror, not to be undesirable, should not be hidden", the heart is like a mirror, only look at all things without judging, according to the flower is the flower, the grass is the grass, the beauty is the beauty, the ugly is ugly.
This is actually the same as the highest state of emptiness that the Buddha spoke of — using the right mind, reflecting everything like a mirror, no matter how circumstances change, acting that only completely reflects facts, completely selfless.
Why is it said that "life is the calculus of time"? For when a person is all in a state of no-self, every moment of his life itself, every moment, every present moment is added together, it is a lifetime. In other words, the present moment is the derivative of a lifetime, and a lifetime is the sum of all present moments.
The English painter poet Blake was also an enlightened Zen master, and he wrote a poem: one sand and one world, one flower and one heaven, holding infinity in the palm of the hand, peeping at eternity in a moment. If it cannot be integrated into the here and now, tomorrow is also the here and now; if it can be integrated into the present, no life will come.
epilogue
About two years ago, I suddenly thought that if Qian Zhongshu, Fu Lei, Chen Jingrun, Hua Luogeng, and others could spread the essence of their lives to all listeners and viewers through video, it must be China's wealth. So, I've started participating in a lot of video shows in recent years, and I hope you'll get some insight into what I've said.
For example, life is not actually to exchange for RMB, life is to complete their own.
For example, every child is a genius, but the mother does not know, so as a mother, you must understand your child and really know what is good for him.
For example, everyone can be 100 times stronger, but they don't believe it; how much you think you are, how powerful you can become; how beautiful you feel, you will show how beautiful.
……
I was born in a small, poor village in the mountains of central Taiwan, with no family background and no diploma. If I can have today, then the children in the remote and poor areas of Guizhou and Yunnan can also do it. If you can't, don't blame time and space.
Everyone can be the best version of themselves, and everyone must look up to themselves and make the best version of themselves.
*This article is based on Mr. Cai Zhizhong's course at Chaos University, and the entire course lasts nearly 2 hours. Limited by the reading experience of WeChat, the content of this article is only 1/3 of the complete course, if you want to know the complete dry goods of Mr. Cai Zhizhong's course, please click the poster below and scan the code to watch the course.