Life Is a Giant Dream

Life is like a train without beginning or end. You can’t remember when you go on the train, and all you know is that you were wearing some kind of clothes, and that some people were chatting with you, and some people were rubbing shoulders with you as they passed by. You know that you have gone through some kind of story on the way, but it is hard to keep from forgetting it. Suddenly, at a certain time you are tired out, and then death appears. In just an instant, everything seems to start all over again from the beginning. But you do not recall that this is a new beginning. You completely forget the other road you passed along before, the other clothes you wore before, the other people you met, you remembered, you forgot, the other events you had encountered and forgotten. You just take this as the one and only beginning.

Is this emotional cycling decided by “causes and conditions”? We can talk this way, but it is more tied to our bad memory. Most people are accustomed to forgetting about the existence of “change.” They fail to discover that the whole world is like a dream, full of change. We always think that this scene that changes so often is permanent, and so when we get things, we are delighted, and when we lose things, we are full of sorrow, and when we face the unknown, we are fraught with anxieties. When we understand clearly that everything is like a dream or an illusion, will we still have all these cares?

You close your eyes and recall many dreams from the past and imagine you are still in the dreams: those beautiful or frightening or sadly moving or absurd dreams. Isn’t this like a movie that lets you savor it again and again? But why don’t you crave for the beauty of dreams, why are you saddened by the moving sadness of dreams, why aren’t you frightened by the fearfulness of dreams? Because you clearly understand that what is gained and lost in dreams does not really exist. If you can take a step further and clearly understand that apparent reality is also a dream that mistakes the false for the real, then you will be able to live life very independently.

This is the cycle of birth and death from the Buddhist point of view. It lives in the beauty in art, but the real cyclinghas nothing other than pain. But does the cycling really exist? Perhaps it is only an imagination, perhaps it really exists. What we can say for sure is that each of us is continuously experiencing the cycle everyday. In moments of relaxation and happiness, we are heavenly beings. In moments of hatred and anger, we are asuras, jealous spirits. In moments of stupidity and ignorance, we are animals. In moments of unbearable pain, we are in hell. In moments when we are full of desires and hopes, we are hungry ghosts. When we are tangled up in the travail of desire and conscience, we are human beings.

When some men and women are in love, as soon as they hear their partner speak of “letting go of everything,” they feel very frightened. This is because they are assessing things by the standard of whether or not their partner values them, and they often look at whether their partner is generating strong emotions toward them. Isn’t this right? Actually, it is not right. Whether they are generating strong emotions toward you just shows that you can arouse their desires, like emotional desire, like possessive desire, like the desire to control, and so on. Genuine love is something grander. If a person genuinely loves you, that person will honor you and value you as he or she would honor and value his or her own life. The person will ignore his or her own feelings, and even sacrifice himself or herself, for the sake of making you blessed and happy. Genuine love is a kind of selflessness: it is very similar to the religious spirit.

Unfortunately, some people always cling to a good feeling between a man and a woman, and are constantly scheming to hold onto it. Some people, when they cannot possess and adore their partners, do not hesitate to destroy them, and are unwilling to let someone else possess them. For example, a student once told me that someone in her class liked a girl in the same class, but after revealing his feelings to her and being rejected, one day he assaulted that girl, and killed her, and buried her corpse on the top floor of a high-rise building. The student who told me the story asked, was this love?  I told her, this is absolutely not love! There is absolutely no kind of love in the world that would let people harm the people whom they love. This kind of so-called “love” is just a kind of desire that at first glance resembles the emotion of love. Many people take emotional desire as love, and that is why so many murderers appear in the world acting in the name of “love.” This is because many people, when they can love, do not understand love, and when they are finally able to understand love, they have often lost the opportunity for love. This is why it is that, only after seeing through the truth of the mundane world, can some people take the love which they have built on a certain person and transform it into a great love that takes all living beings as its object, a kind of religious spirit that is very similar to love.

When you have understood this point, then you will understand that in fact life is just a giant dream.