Faith
Behind our village there’s a mountain, the highest one for miles around. There’s also a Buddhist temple on the mountaintop. It used to have grand halls and flourishing incense. During temple fairs, people from villages within ten li would come here to worship. After the events of ‘98, although it was repaired multiple times, it became an occasional activity center for the elderly to hold temple fairs. But you can still see what it went through from the broken bricks and tiles scattered around.
After a countdown of ten seconds, with a series of “boom boom” sounds from detonators exploding, that year I personally witnessed this beautiful Buddhist temple collapsing with a crash amid flying stones and huge clouds of dust. That day, not many believers came to witness the disappearance of this piece of history. They said they couldn’t bear to watch, but actually they couldn’t get up there either—many people coming down from Santala had completely blocked the surrounding roads. A few kids and I, along with some young people, stood on another hilltop and watched all of this without any feeling, then excitedly returned to the dim classroom to continue our lessons. It wasn’t until later that I could see a hint of terror from the headless land god’s mutilated body that had been dug up. Maybe I really did treat him as a god, thinking he would bring disaster to our impoverished land.
The sun rose as usual. After the temple was blown up, those people disappeared. No one from above came to the village to promote religion versus superstition—just more bickering among the elderly. Fortunately, no disasters ever befell us. They said it was because of sincere hearts, and that the leader who dug up the land god had his hand broken, and another person had his leg broken. But no one had seen it—they weren’t locals. Educated by books, I became an atheist. I’ve also been to temples in many places and seen fat and thin versions of Shakyamuni and Guanyin Bodhisattva, but I’ve never burned incense or donated money. In my eyes, they’re just scenery, spiritual sustenance for some people. Or rather, gods are spiritual sustenance. If everyone has their own ideals, pursuits, and principles for dealing with the world, then everyone has faith.
The village where I grew up, in countless confused years of the past, generation after generation lived here, farming and tilling the land. There was no written history, no beautiful future to look forward to. Living was the entirety of life. They hoped not to get sick, hoped their families wouldn’t get sick. But who would promise them that? Was it the government that forced people to drink pesticide and commit suicide because of high taxes back then, or the invisible charitable organizations? Naturally, this is an embarrassing joke. Hungry people can’t establish transcendent personal faith. So religion, which can be used without thinking, became their best choice. As long as gods could bless them with food and clothing, what did it matter whether it was Buddhism, Christianity, or Islam?
Although the rise of that temple in our village stemmed from villagers’ lives becoming increasingly difficult, the meaning of religion isn’t about poverty alleviation and prosperity. Furthermore, religion wasn’t originally born to solve humanity’s basic needs. I’ve read a bit of the Shurangama Sutra and feel that religion’s purpose is actually to cultivate believers’ personal faith—teaching people to learn to endure difficulties, pursue an optimistic and open-minded attitude toward life, be charitable and benefit others. This is quite similar to the spiritual realm explored by some atheists.
The most frightening situation is when some people have neither correct religious faith nor appropriate personal faith. Some elderly people believe in Buddhism and donate all the family’s money to the temple, buying countless oil lamps and burning them, seemingly forgetting that this money comes from their children’s hard work and also includes their own food money. This kind of faith is very selfish in purpose—not Buddhism’s pursuit. You could say the popularization of Buddhism locally has been a failure. There are also people who don’t believe in religion and haven’t learned the correct personal pursuits in life. Their life’s purpose is entirely about pursuing wealth, satisfying their own preferences at the expense of others’ health and interests—making fake medicine, fake milk powder, letting substandard products circulate on the market. But they haven’t taught how to be a proper person. In Those Years, We Were Chasing Girls Together, Nine Knives mentioned that when they were in elementary school, they went to the mountains to study Buddhism. This kind of education method is very enviable. Regardless of whether they can learn personality development in class, at least they have one more religious choice.
On November 25th, in the waiting room of Taiyuan Railway Station in Shanxi, an elderly person suddenly died. A monk among the crowd of onlookers forming a large circle held the hand of this elderly person to perform a funeral rite. Although performing rites for the deceased has no meaning in the eyes of atheists, I saw respect for life and a proper view of death.