In a remote corner of the country, there lived a stubborn old man. People who used to know him told many stories about him. In one story, he was very young, only a boy. Watermelons were harvested from a nearby village, and children gathered at a spot to eat them. Everyone wanted to have a taste. The boy, in order to have many for himself, bit off the top of the many slices, and no one was willing to eat them anymore. So he leisurely ate them all, and after a while, his stomach ached and fell ill for several days.
Knowledge casts big shadows. Toward these shadows, we chase. To these shadows, we worship. To these shadows, we obey.
What is knowledge? And what is its place in life? Knowledge has become tremendously important to our life. Yet has it solved anything? Has it finally brought peace and happiness? Has it found the eternal and love? Has it found the way to live totally and harmoniously with everything? None of these questions have been answered by knowledge, yet we continue to rely on it to solve our many problems and crises. The schools of philosophy and mysticism have offered many solutions, and all of them are based on knowledge. It provides a framework, a series of practices, and all of them needs to be memorized, and then applied to life, and this application is supposed to dissolve our problems. Yet are problems not born again? We dissolve one and another come to the surface? If we observe life, it is quite obvious that problems continue to surface, and we might then conclude that there are infinite problems in life, and life is simply the process of solving problems, which are infinite. Is that so? What is the relationship between knowledge and problem? Can knowledge solve our problems at all?
A traveler began a journey in the valley. She had lived in the valley for generations. It was said that a woman shall not leave her soil, travel alone to foreign lands, yet she did not listen. She heard the calling of the mountain top, and yearned every day of her life to attain to that height. So one day, she decided to leave everything behind, her family, her children, her house. She looked at the mountain top, covered with snow, majestic, solitary, imbued with power she could not name.
Rarely are we faced with only sorrow. So much of our life is filled simply to escape this sorrow. The mother who lost her only son, stayed silent for days, and turned up to church one day, cried enormously, and finally believed in God. And in this religious business she went on, taking part in groups, preaching to others, trying to forgive her enemies. But has she dissolved her sorrow? Has she finally faced the fact that her son is really gone, finally gone, without any possibility of return, or has she put her hope in a heaven where her son lived on, or in a group where her loneliness can be subdued?
We are faced with this sorrow. Existence is ephemeral. It does not last. No matter it is our parents, our lovers, or our pets whom we meticulously take care of for years. In the very end, death is there, unwavering, immovable, and all we could do is to invent some fantasies to escape death. These fantasies are made by thought, and thought has made the most spectacular worlds of the afterlife, or reincarnation, but none of such things are really there. Thought knows this, yet unable to face its own mortality, it invents the eternal.
What do we mean when we talk about life? Life has given us food, shelter, beautiful mountains and animals, as well as our many pleasurable or painful experiences. In life, there is the technology which occupies us, the sorrow of losing one's parent or child, the pain of facing loneliness, the daily boredom and routine, of going to work day after week after month after year. Then at the end of this life, we must face death. So this business of death is also part of life. We see the flowers die after a storm. We see the monkeys die after the wildfire burns through a forest. We also see our own cells die, shedded from our skin. And those we know die, due to disease, accident, and war fought on religious or political ideals. At the end of this journey we call life, we must also face death. We might believe in heaven, in the afterlife, or that our soul lives on in some other world, but this death is still coming, and if we are totally honest, we do not know what would happen. There are those who come back from what is called a near-death experience, and they claim they know what happens after death. Yet they have not died, for if they did they could not return to tell us all about it. Why are we so concerned about what happens after? What exactly is happening before death? Which also means, what is this life that we lead?
There once was the one with many faces. Many people had seen the one, but only through the faces. They had seen happiness, courage, solitude, discipline, and many other faces. The people thought these faces were tremendous. The faces were articulate, exquisite, brimming with an inexplicable energy, and they had accomplished incredible deeds in the world. They had scaled the highest mountains, crossed the enormous ocean, conquered entire kingdoms, built the most complicated architecture. To these faces, the people wrote many tales. The tale of the happy man. The story of a lonesome warrior. The adventure of a fearless pirate. The ascent of a just ruler. Soon, the tales were gathered into books, collections, and they were studied. People's children imitated these faces, or the tales of these faces, and those who imitated the best were venerated. They were deemed the living expression of the one with many faces.
Two friends gathered around the campfire. The night had encompassed everything. The moon is full, and its light seemed quite bright in the forest around them. There were the occasional ruffling coming from the animals hiding in the darkness, but the surrounding had become quiet.
“Let me tell you a story. I have quite a good one to share.” One of them, a bright young lady, who was a traveler, with quite a serious expression on her face, began to talk between them.
“Alright, let's hear it.” Spoke the other, who was a professor, quite accomplished in the academic world at his young age. He came out camping with the traveler for a change of scenery from the big city.
For as long as human beings can remember, there has been this search for something greater. The ancients might call it God, the Atman, the Dao, or mystify it into tales of Genesis, stories of Creation. But, since we have existed, this yearning for that something eternal, true, and beautiful has never ceased. When we are born to this world, we must wonder, by seeing the stars, the distant snow-capped mountains, the rivers and oceans that disappear into the horizon, what is this all about? Why are we here? What is the purpose of life? There are the plants and animals we kill and eat, the trees we cut and burn and make into some of the most ornate structures. We have built enormous cathedrals, places of worship, temples. We have told tales of great Gods, of heaven and hell, of the great struggle between good and evil. We have written enormous amounts of texts, on every subjects that we could imagine. Human's search for this greater meaning went into science, the exploration of the Moon and Mars, the observation of distant galaxies, and the theories of the smallest particles imaginable by the mind.
“Could you tell me a story before bed?” The little girl asked the Grandmother.
“Of course, my dear. Now get in bed, put on the covers, and please don't get a cold at night. Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
“The story goes like this. Once upon a time, there was a fox in the mountain. The fox was chasing its tail. The fox thought its tail was separate from itself, so it kept chasing and chasing, but never really catching it. So on and on the fox chased its tail, wearing itself out slowly.”