How to escape from the predicaments of life

How to Escape From the Predicaments of Life

The first speech delivered by Master Li

At National Taiwan University on March 27, 2004



Greetings to everybody! I am glad to be here to share my own findings regarding the ZiJiu Method with you. I hope it can offer a solution to people in the audience who may have health problems.

Today I want to talk about a certain topic, one that I have seen many people encounter throughout my teaching career. I want to talk about how to escape from the predicaments of life. Over the years, I have noticed that many people have understood their problems in principle, but they have failed to come up with the right decisions or the best solutions in handling the problems life presents to them. They fail to tackle the problem with ease or handle the problem with foresight. What are the predicaments of life anyway? From what I understand and believe, they are two things: internal anxiety and external strife. Let’s start with external strife.

When we talk about external strife, the problem usually begins with material things. After one is born, there are certain conditions of life that must be met. Of course, there are differences between humans and animals. For humans, life needs to be sustained by certain material and monetary needs; for animals, there is no need to create value, as animals have their own way to survive. So in this world, humans have continuously enriched their living conditions. To put it this way is to put it nicely. To put it bluntly, more and more obstacles are created. What is troubling is the fact that it is hard to survive if one does not meet minimum living conditions. Therefore, on the ladder of life, people existing on the lowest rung basically opt to pursue material wealth.

There is a term called “impoverishment,” and we may interpret it from two aspects. As indicated by the Chinese characters, when one is poor, one is also distressed and trapped. Many people have lived an impoverished life. In the past, this kind of life was called poor and lowly, a description that seems to be discriminatory. In my case, my father passed away when I was only 11 years old. No doubt, I faced impoverishment then. Based on what I have learned growing up, people in such circumstances can become reckless and desperate, or shall we say, they end up having no regard for life itself. For the sake of making a living, people have no alternative but to toil along, using their body, or life, as working capital. This working capital is used unceasingly to create value, whether at work or in school. I think most of us have had such experiences, although now it is quite different. I was born in 1964. My father passed away when the Cultural Revolution was on its last leg. In those years in Mainland China, many people lived through this kind of poverty. For me, when my father was alive, we lived fairly well because my family was fairly well-to-do. With my father gone, my situation immediately entered into a freefall. I was only 11 and my living conditions deteriorated so rapidly that we seemed to have not only been dropped onto the ground, but also into a pit. As you know, climbing out of a pit is really arduous. I think what I experienced at that young age was rare among my classmates. In any event, I have personally seen this sort of predicament caused by poverty in my life. In other words, the type of crisis I’m talking about is one where you have difficulty finding enough to eat.

Since I was young, I discovered that I was endowed with some special, inborn abilities. They probably helped me to survive. For example, unlike the average person, I do not feel panic or change my routine when I am hungry. I am able to handle this challenge in a different way than most others. The average person obtains his energy only through the consumption of food. Not I. I obtain energy directly from the universe to supplement what my body needs. While the average person suffers from hunger, I am unaffected, and can still laugh and continue to move around as usual. It does not slow me down at all! Even though this is strange to other people, it is not to me. My stamina remains unchanged. I do not stop reading; and I continue to do household chores. This special gift helped me a great deal when I was mired in poverty, enabling me to stay relatively unstressed in a difficult environment. In other words, I did not feel hopeless as a result of food shortages, hunger, or because my living conditions were bad. As I grew up, I saw other people in poor areas, many wearing sad expressions on their faces, feeling and looking totally helpless. The living predicament brought about by material shortages, I think, can be improved through hard work if certain opportunities are made available, since wealth can be created and accumulated gradually. With a lot of diligence and a measure of wisdom, it is only a matter of time before we can overcome poverty. In time, with the changes in life itself, this external strife can be slowly changed.

However, when it comes to internal anxiety, this is not something that everybody is in a position to change. For most people, internal anxiety is a major source of their problems. The Chinese character kun, which means hardship, trouble, or trapped, is quite meaningful. There are two Chinese characters there are highly inspiring. One is kun, the other word is qiu, which means to imprison or prisoner. Now let’s look at the character kun, which shows the character wood placed inside a square frame; the character qiu, a person inside a square, looks like a person being confined in a frame. We are trapped! If we look at the wood in the square, the square is like a frame, and on top is birth or living, while the bottom is death; on the left is sickness and on the right is aging. In our life, living, aging, sickness and death are all locked up within our internal anxiety! I think that within the effective range of survival, living requirements can be met quite easily if your demands are not that high. The most difficult issues to answer are how to solve the questions of living, aging, sickness and death. These issues result in the most anxiety. Today, no matter whether you are a king or a commoner, you all have to face these two issues: sickness and old age. Both present a tremendous crisis to mankind, just like the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) epidemic last year, which probably posed a more critical threat to mankind than the Iraqi war! SARS knows no boundaries; whether rich or poor, for once you contract the disease, your life is in danger.

If external calamities are about material things, then internal anxiety is physiological in nature. I have been talking about life. Many people hear this term without it making much of an impression on their minds. To many people, life is only a vague term. Health, however, is not unfamiliar at all. At present, what we can see and what we can touch is the onslaught of diseases against our body. The greatest predicament we encounter is sickness. Sickness, as many people have said in the past, is the path to the netherworld and has been experienced by both young and old. Anybody who has ever been to a hospital knows that it is not only the elderly – those in their seventies or eighties – who need to see a doctor. The age of patients ranges from young to old, and death is no respecter of age, either. This is the fundamental issue of life that we must face, but the question is, how are we going to face it and how are we going to solve it? Most people will probably start addressing this issue by trying to improve their daily life and their material wealth. When the material conditions of living are met, one can move from poverty to riches. That is escaping poverty.

It is only after escaping poverty that we can actually begin to think about how to improve and enrich our physical bodies and our minds, and how to keep ourselves in good shape. In the past, people used to say that if you were poor, you were worthless; and when you were rich, you would be esteemed. The term “poor and lowly” refers to the fact that when your material needs are lacking, you simply cannot care that much about your life or health. Only when your financial and living conditions are improved can you begin to buy vitamins and health tonics, fine clothing, seek better dwellings, and change your life for the better. When you travel, for example, you consider whether it is safe or not. When given a choice, you will choose to take a bus if walking is dangerous. If riding on a bus is dangerous, then you might buy a car instead, all for the sake of reducing risks to yourself.

Improved material conditions have brought people quite a sense of security. But is this true safety? Now that living conditions are getting better, are fewer people getting ill? The answer is no! It is just the opposite, for more people are getting more illnesses. Why? Let’s look at the types of illnesses being treated by modern day medical science. If we go back twenty years, in those days many people who had cancer dared not say it openly. They limited the news only to family members, and the attending physician would tell no one else. Whenever people came across someone with cancer, they would whisper among themselves, “He’s got cancer! But don’t tell him, no matter what! He wouldn’t be able to stand it. He might jump off a building and kill himself!” Today, it is quite different. Cancer-stricken patients seem to treat having cancer like having a cold! What ails you? Cancer. What’s more, the reply is sometimes accompanied by a smile, as if, like a cold, there were nothing to be afraid of. But is it really true that there is nothing to be afraid of? I think that when we face imminent death, we are all afraid.

And how are we going to escape from this internal anxiety, this predicament? Let’s start from the character kun, or hardship/entrapment. Can we remove the frame from the word kun so that the person confined to the frame can be freed? To be free from the shackles, one has to begin with three words. The first word is “sickness,” the second is “aging,” and the third is “death.” Over the years, I have often asked people a question. Who has seen people die of old age? Many have answered, “I have, my father, for instance, my mother, my grandma and my grandpa. They all died of old age!” Then I asked how do you define old age, how old is old? Nobody can say for sure. When we reach seventy-three or eighty-four, some believe that these are years of crisis. If we get sick at that age, chances are greater that we will pass away. People in the past have often made generalized statements about the ages seventy-three or eighty-four. It has been said before, that once we reach a certain age where our physical condition becomes so weakened, it is likely that any minor medical problem, such as a cold or fever, can easily take away our life. Now let us try to figure out how long, if we were free from disease, our life expectancy would be. This is a great uncertainty. Some may say it might be 100, while others say it could be 120 or even older. If we examine some of the old classics, what do they say? In the Old Testament, it was said to be over 1,000 years. Many have responded with the word, “Nonsense”! In China, some have said that Peng Tsu, the Methuselah of China, lived some 800 years, but some also say that there has never been any proof of this. Today, we say, “Seeing is believing,” which applies to practically to everything. But much of the knowledge we possess comes from ancient times, such as the Chinese calendar, the drawings of the meridian channels, acupuncture points, etc. We receive our heritage from our ancestors on a selective basis. We accept what we like. Regarding some of the writings, we are unable to understand them with our modern-day knowledge, and so we end up rejecting them with non-belief. For many things, the premise of “seeing is believing” does not necessarily hold true. Knowledge is not something you can “do” first and then learn later. In reality, it is just the opposite. The process usually starts from indirect to direct. So let’s apply this same principle to the problem of illnesses.

Today many people begin to try to solve their illnesses from without. “Let me make more money and buy more insurance policies.” Yet, will that guarantee one to be free from death? If you get sick, can you just spend money and get rid of the illness? When the doctor tells you that you have a terminal disease and there is no cure, then you panic. You suffer from a terminal disease – your body suffers, and so does the mental health of your family! Nobody wants to lose their loved ones, but how many of us have accumulated enough knowledge about disease prevention and cure before illness occurs? How much knowledge have we accumulated in this regard? Over the years, I have asked quite a number of people if they understood their body. How do the five zang organs and six fu organs function? What do they look like? Very few people can answer the question. With the exception of people in the medical field, people who are curious, or people who study this as a hobby, the majority believe that this subject only concerns their doctors and is none of their own business. Let’s say you get sick, go to the hospital, and put yourself in the hands of your doctors. If your condition reaches a state where the doctor declares the situation hopeless, what will you do? Stop taking medicine? Would you be unwilling to give up easily? Nobody can face death willingly. Nobody wants to accept death without trying to avert it! On the contrary, many people have tried to seek a cure at all costs, sparing no effort.

Some people, before getting sick, feverishly try to make money, and then after that, feverishly accumulate more and more money. They may have made a large sum of money, but when they get sick, they will need to spend a large sum of money to try to get well. It is similar to removing a few bricks from the east wall to repair the west wall. Once the wall on the west side is repaired, the wall on the east side will be damaged. Now you begin to repair the east wall by pulling down bricks from the west wall. This will all come to nothing. I ask you: Why not walk using both legs? On the one hand, accumulate external wealth, and on the other hand, accumulate internal wealth. We neglect our health all too often. If you can accumulate some knowledge in this regard, at least you will not die as the result of ignorance. As you know, the medical community has often asserted that people do not die from disease, but from ignorance. In other words, because you do not know, you cannot judge the symptoms of many diseases. This is like a heart disease patient who does not know he has a heart ailment. All he feels is an ache in his heart, and he thinks it is caused by his children aggravating him. In reality, it is cardiovascular blockage. If you have a heart ailment and you get excited, or exercise strenuously beyond your normal routine, you could have a myocardial infarction and pass away quite quickly. All these medical phenomena require regular attention. I often wonder why so many people fail to notice the condition of their health and why they don’t find out what they should watch out for. All you need is common sense in this area, and you will be able to understand these things. Once you understand, you are more apt to get yourself an early check-up without waiting until you get sick, while never even knowing how or why you got sick in the first place. If you wait until the problem surfaces, you face a real chance of “kicking the bucket,” and the “kicking” will usually be a prolonged process. By the way, I learned this “kicking the bucket” expression while I was in Taiwan.

How can we get away from this predicament? From a materialistic viewpoint, I think everyone in this audience lives a well-to-do life. After arriving in Taiwan, I have personally felt there are quite a number of people who would like to talk about enriching both their body and their mind. I noticed that many publications on this subject are available in the book stores. So I think the living standard for the majority of people here must be quite good, and for some, even higher. Such being the case, let me point out that I think wealth should be used to build up happiness. In the past, people used to say, “So long as the body exists, there is the blessing.” When a senior citizen celebrates his birthday, his children will congratulate him, saying, “May your blessings in life be as deep as the Eastern Sea and your longevity be as long as the Southern Mountain is high!” But who can do that? Who is capable of doing so? This saying sounds too good! When I was a child, I felt resentment every time I heard this! Everybody would exclaim, “Who on earth can have enough blessings to pay attention to their health?” It is so easy to lose your temper. It is so easy to give in to your emotions. Also, it is easy to not pay attention to what you eat. All these are ways to endanger your body. If you don’t pay attention to any of these things, the wishes for a long and happy life that you receive every year on your birthday will ring hollow, become a source of empty solace, and feel as unsatisfying as an attempt to satisfy hunger pangs by downing cakes, one after another.

According to the Dao De Jing, when the whole world recognizes something as beautiful, its opposite is born and it is not beautiful; when the whole world recognizes something as good, its opposite is born and it also ends up not that good. So, we are all used to seeing things superficially. We then turn around and use this shallow perception to “see” everything. If only we could bend objective rules to suit our will, it would be wonderful. We could do whatever we wanted. We could live as long as we wished or, for that matter, we could die anytime we wanted! Over the years, I have met many people who said to me, “I don’t want to live anymore!” I would reply, “To commit suicide is a cowardly thing!” In fact, one of the easiest things in life is to die because to live is indeed a very difficult thing to do. Living is not only for yourself alone; you also have responsibilities to bear. Your parents have not raised you to adulthood for you to waste your life. You have not fulfilled your responsibilities, which is your filial duty! It is incumbent on each one of us to inherit the past and usher in the future.

Within your family, if you have a sound and healthy body, you can at least take care of yourself. If you are the first one to learn this, you can then help the rest of your family to perfect their healthcare, thus setting up a good foundation for everyone within the family. With a good foundation, all family members can expect to live a good life without worrying about saving money to pay medical bills, so savings can be used for things such as good food or travel. So why should you, for the sake of saving money, mistreat your body, and eventually use your savings to pay for medical bills? What I am saying is that such actions seem to be miscalculated, and if you are scrimping on your healthcare, your math cannot be very good. If you are strong and healthy enough to create wealth, make good use of your wealth and try not to be a slave to it. Over the years, I have seen many people who are wealthy enough to raise a big family of three generations, yet they still work feverishly. Even at the age of eighty-something-years old, they still remain in the work force. I think a person who lives like this is living without knowing the value of life. I asked just such a person if he knew what men lived for. His reply differed totally from his actions. He said, “For my responsibilities.” I believe raising a family is a responsibility; keeping yourself afloat is also a responsibility. Earth will revolve no matter what, yet this man seemed to think he was the only one supporting the earth. He thought too highly of himself. In fact, if we were up in an airplane looking down on the world below us, we might not be able to see anyone because people are too small, just like grains of sand. I say people are sometimes conceited, like the Monkey King in the famous Chinese classic Journey to the West. The Monkey King’s famous weapon, an iron bar with a golden hoop, was extremely flexible. When it was big, it reached to Heaven; and when it was small, it looked like a needle, small enough to fit inside one’s ear. In a sense, mankind is insignificant, but why are we so ambitious? Perhaps the answer is: Men have failed to think about what they are living for.

So now, what about the various predicaments in life? We can start from what we can see and touch: health. It is true that life is not just about health alone. There are also matters of the heart and soul. However, I do not want to talk too much about heart and soul matters today because that involves your career and family life, and quite a wide range of other things. We will start with the topic of your health because that is the part that can affect our lives the most. In the past, people used to say, “You can’t shape iron without an anvil.” Without an anvil, an ironsmith can’t work. Similarly, it is also said, “To talk about the Dao, you cannot leave out the body.” In other words, in such a discussion, you will want to talk about enriching your body and mind as you discuss the question of the Dao. However, even after talking for a long while, you still remain like a clay Buddha figure crossing a river; you can’t save yourself because talking by itself accomplishes nothing. I think these sorts of exercises are an empty Dao without any substance. The Dao is like a road: whether it is smooth or not depends on how you build and maintain it. It is a road that you must pave yourself. For your own life, you need to rely on yourself to accumulate adequate wealth so that your road may become smooth and steady.

It is the same with your “road of life.” It all depends on your input. You will reap no more than what you have sown. Now what I have discovered is that everyone wants to be No. 1 when it comes to making money. The same is true with enjoying life. But when it comes to ZiJiu Method practice, everybody wants to be last. For example, if you mention practice, people want to know for how long? One hour? That’s not possible! Standing still for an hour?! Well, out of a 24-hour day, you should not be so stingy about using one hour to face yourself and accumulate the wealth of health. Some say that just standing there for 10 minutes causes their body to start aching all over. Physically, your body is there standing, but your mind is wandering around like the Monkey King, thinking about your children, father, wife, and many other things. Your mind is in a topsy-turvy state, running everywhere, seeming to be totally out of control. During your exercise sessions, I have told you to let your mind go into emptiness, but many people claim that it is next to impossible to do. After a while, though, those with illnesses, who say in the beginning that it is impossible to fall into a state of mental emptiness, change and find that it is actually possible to do so. Those who are healthy most likely do not want to practice the exercise at all. So I ask, are there very many people who work only when they are out of money? How many people would say they only work when there is no money left? The majority of people do not want to answer these questions. How many people are willing to accumulate good health before getting ill? I do not think I need to give the answer because everyone already knows the answer in their heart. I personally think when it comes to the issue of health, it takes time, as well as effort from your heart, mind and body, not to mention your need to have some knowledge regarding this issue and the ability to do something about it. In other words, time needs to be allocated all around, and not just simply for practicing the Exercise.

During the Cultural Revolution in China, many people were forced to abandon any efforts to better themselves culturally or in any other way. As a result, people became alienated from their loved ones. Essentially, the less learned, introspective, and curious you were, the nobler you became. You were brainwashed to the extent that you simply did not know what to do with yourself unless you were told. This phenomenon also resulted in people greatly mistrusting each other. It was very difficult to live under those conditions! Nowadays, living conditions have improved, but how many people are living better lives? I have discovered that many people are interested in things that have nothing to do with them or their lives, but when I start talking about practicing the ZiJiu Method, people frown. The only positive response comes from those who are quite ill. Those with less serious illnesses begin to negotiate how long they have to practice. If we were talking about making money, would you be arguing to make less? Very few people are okay with making less money. In fact, the majority of you would say “No, it’s not okay to make less money,” and then back it up with a truckload of reasons. When asked to spend a little more time practicing the ZiJiu Method, your answer would also be “no” and the argument is always the same: There are other things that need to be done. I see many people who have cell phones in their pockets. They seem to never stop talking on them. What about drinking alcohol? People pour one glass after another, as if their stomachs were made of iron. Is our body something that is leased or rented? Whose body is it? From all my observations, I conclude that the majority of people are still stuck without answers when it comes to addressing the predicament of their health.

What is internal anxiety? Once you are sick, how many of you are still happy? Have you seen any patients in a hospital that are happy? After an operation, has the patient ever said he felt good being opened up by a knife, having a piece of flesh cut off, or worse yet, having a whole limb amputated? Nobody wants to lose his dignity! What dignity am I talking about? For example, before an operation, you ask the doctor if amputation can be avoided. Or, perhaps, if the doctor suggests that you have a rectal diversion, you say, “Please don’t. I would be too embarrassed to meet people if you do.” Why put yourself through this? Why not spend a little energy each day to build up your health while you are healthy so that even though you are in the process of consuming it, you can also save some life energy for a rainy day. If you do this every day, then bit by bit, you will see healthy results; you will see that there is a path to turn back to. People like to say that the bow has no arrow that is reversed. Life, however, it is not a one-way street. I truly believe that life is a two-way street, that you have the opportunity to put back what you took out.

Over the years, many students who have been exposed to the ZiJiu Method have improved their health and their outlook on life. The major obstacle to becoming healthy is one of attitude, or outlook. Practicing the ZiJiu Method is not that difficult, but changing a person’s way of looking at their health takes longer. It can take up to three years to effect any change in attitude in a person who is not seriously ill. For people with puzzling or uncertain illnesses, it takes only three months, and with people afflicted with terminal diseases, it only takes three weeks. Why such a big difference in learning time? It is because, to people with a terminal disease, time is short. They feel a pressing need to change because their life is in imminent danger.

In terms of your life, if you can solve the problem of illness, I would argue that you can also expect to slow the aging process, since illness directly leads to, and exacerbates, aging. By solving the problem of illness, we are directly addressing the fundamental issue of life head on, which is, “Where does the energy for our life come from?” When we find the answer, we will also be able to solve the problem of disease, aging and death.

Next time, I will talk about how to survive. For now, I will talk about how to overcome the main predicament of life. It is possible for you to find the root of life: genuine qi. Men depend on qi to live. When qi has been consumed to a certain extent, the aging process begins, followed by a myriad of illnesses. If you can find and harness this root substance of life, and tap into and begin to gather this life’s energy to supplement what you have lost, you can begin restoring your lost health, and directly address the problem of aging. Therefore, I would urge everybody to give the ZiJiu Method a try. You may only be half convinced of the ZiJiu Method’s curative powers, or you may believe that aging is a natural phenomenon that will admit of no cure, but I say, there is no harm in trying ZiJiu. Look at gray hair. Isn’t that a phenomenon of aging? In terms of medical science, can it be reversed? Through ZiJiu practice, my elderly students have turned their gray hair black again, and their age spots have also disappeared. Over the years, I have met many senior citizens who say that the aging process cannot be changed. I respond by saying, “You have not tried ZiJiu yet.” Belief is totally up to you. Self confidence stems from belief. If you find yourself being a doubter, eventually, you might even find eating to be difficult simply because you do not believe that you are able to eat.

If you can eliminate external strife, can you solve the problem of internal anxiety? I think so. Over the years, I have helped many people with their health issues. Apart from health problems, there have also been many people who have benefited, from practicing the ZiJiu Method, in matters of the mind and spirit, as well. When you go home, I hope you will ask yourself, “What is the value of living? For what do we live?” Over the years, I have asked many people the same question. People keep on pondering what the answer is. Some answer, “We live for our children.” I then ask, if their children died, would they still want to live? Since the response is usually “yes”, then this answer is wrong. Some have replied to my question by saying it was their spouse or their parents for whom they lived life. But if they were to go now, would you like to be buried with them? No! Even if everyone you know is gone, you may still wish to live. Theoretically speaking, when your spouse is gone, you can find another spouse; when your parents are gone, you can find foster parents or godparents to serve the same purpose; and when children die, you can still adopt other children. I say these things to show you that, since all these things can be changed, then – again -- what on earth do we live for? What is the value of living? Are we machines? Money-making machines? Material-making machines? I think I will leave these questions for you to ponder.

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