Zhao Xiaoyang
We first met Master Meng Zhiling in the autumn of 2012, when he came to London with a delegation of the China Taoist Association to plan Taoist cultural exchange events soon to be held in Britain. As we were about to have a meal in London's Chinatown, Master Meng explained that he would only sit with us for a while and would not eat with us, because he ate just one meal a day—a breakfast he had brought with him from China.
In our conversations that followed, we realized he was deeply committed to cultivating the Tao and might tell us his story, so we were all delighted when Master Meng agreed to an interview the next day.
Q: What led you to become a true Taoist master? What was that process like?
Master Meng: For many young people today, becoming a Taoist priest may be a happy thing, because they believe in Taoism and like Taoist culture. But in the years when I left home, holding a religious faith was not easy; it was even considered somewhat disreputable, and people did not know or understand much about religious faith. Something very unpleasant happened back then, after which I quietly left my hometown to look for a place where I could leave home as a monastic.
After leaving my hometown, I traveled through many provinces and visited dozens of Buddhist monasteries as well as Taoist temples and monasteries, but none would take me in, and I was very bewildered. At first I only knew of Buddhism, and that monastics were called monks; I knew nothing about Taoism. My thinking at the time was simple: I thought that once I entered a temple, I could get away from the real world and its troubles.
The first place I went was the Shaolin Monastery on Mount Song in Henan. I had heard of it before, but the monks there would not take me in. At an inn I heard that besides Buddhism, China also had Taoism, and I heard of the famous Taoist mountains—the Wudang Mountains in Hubei.
I went to the Wudang Mountains, but neither the Zixiao Palace nor the Taihe Palace on the Golden Summit would take me in. I stayed at an inn for nearly half a month and often went to the old masters to plead sincerely, but in the end I was not accepted. Later the innkeeper, who had once worked at the Zixiao Palace, took pity on me and introduced me to the old steward of the Zixiao Palace, Master Mao, but I was still refused.
After that I visited several more provinces one after another—Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan, Chongqing, and elsewhere. Once I stayed twenty days at an inn beside Mount Jinhua in Sichuan, going every day to the temple on the mountain to beg the steward at the time, the old Master Yang, to take me in, but in the end I did not get my wish.
A Buddhist lay practitioner who heard about my situation watched me quietly for several days. Just as I was about to leave the inn to look elsewhere, he came to me and said that if I was interested in Buddhism, he could introduce me to a Buddhist monastery to become a monk. At the time I did not mind whether I became a Buddhist monk or a Taoist priest, so I gladly went.
We followed a small path along a river to a remote place upstream where not a single road was level. There was a very small temple where a Buddhist nun in her seventies lived. The temple was very remote; she had left home and practiced there since childhood and had not left even during the Cultural Revolution—more than sixty years in all—and she enjoyed great prestige in the area. She was very happy to take me in, and pointing to a small temple under repair not far away, she said: “When it's finished, you'll live there.” I was deeply grateful.
I had been there only a dozen or so days when one morning she suddenly said to me: “You should go to a Taoist temple; you don't belong to Buddhism.” I was very nervous, thinking I had done something wrong and sensing that she no longer wanted to keep me. I became flustered and stopped eating. But she very kindly dispelled my worries, telling me that a bodhisattva had come to her in a dream and said I was not meant to be a monk but a Taoist priest. Before this I had heard people around say that she could always foresee things that were about to happen, but I did not believe in messages in dreams. I did not understand why she wanted me to leave, though she seemed to like having me there. I said to her, “I've been drifting for a long time. This is the first place that has taken me in—where else can I go?” Hearing this, she proposed to go the next day to find a Taoist temple elsewhere that would take me.
When she woke me the next day it was still dark. She had already made breakfast; we ate together, and she set off before sunrise. It was a poor, backward mountain region, and the rugged, narrow trails were very rough and hard to walk.
It was late when she returned, but she looked very happy and said she had found a Taoist temple about twenty li away that was willing to take me. Past seventy, she had spent a whole day on the road for me, and I was deeply grateful.
I went to this very small Taoist temple. There was only one gravely ill Taoist priest there, and often there was not enough to eat. The hardships of living and working there are hard to describe; it was probably the most difficult period of my life. Not only that, the temple had not been approved by the relevant government departments to open. In less than a year of my living there, officials came to investigate twice, said it did not meet the conditions for taking disciples, and ordered me to leave.
Helpless, I left and tried other famous mountains. I went to Mount Qingcheng, a famous Taoist mountain, and Mount Emei, a famous Buddhist mountain, and many other famous mountain temples, but was still turned away everywhere.
I went to the Wudang Mountains in Hubei once more and stayed a long time, but still did not get my wish. Later the abbot of the Zixiao Palace kindly suggested I try Mount Tai.
On the way to Mount Tai I passed the Temple of the Central Peak on Mount Song in Henan and decided to try my luck there. After entering the mountain gate, I met the old Master Meng Minglin, who was then the presiding steward of the temple and also president of the Henan Taoist Association. To my great joy, he agreed to take me in. In the autumn of 1986 I bowed to him as my ordaining master and became a twenty-first-generation disciple of the Longmen lineage, the Dragon Gate.
My master was not highly educated, but he was a man of fine character and took great care of me. In the spring of 1987 he recommended me to study in the specialized Taoist knowledge class that the China Taoist Association ran at White Cloud Temple (Baiyun Guan) in Beijing. As the course was about to end, the association's leaders hoped I would stay and work there, and I agreed. I lived at White Cloud Temple for a while, but gradually I found that life in the temple was not quite as I had imagined.
After that, whether at White Cloud Temple or elsewhere, I often sincerely sought teaching from the old masters. They patiently taught and nurtured me, telling me about philosophies of life, knowledge of cultivating the Tao, and deeper Taoist thought that I had never heard before, which often suddenly lit up my mind. I was always curious: they had received no formal education and their schooling was extremely limited, so why did they have such profound thought and such spiritual attainment? They told me that the attainment of the Tao is not learned from books, still less does it depend on education; it is gained by cultivating and awakening to the Tao, and cultivating the Tao can even make an ordinary person transcend the ordinary, enter sagehood, and become an immortal. I was skeptical of this, yet at the same time I was eager to know whether it was true. So I began looking for chances to seek out, with reverence, the old masters who lived and practiced in the mountains.
Through their further instruction and nurturing, I came to understand cultivating the Tao more deeply and gradually realized that the Tao is the truth truly worth pursuing; at the same time I developed a strong interest in classics such as the Tao Te Ching and the Zhuangzi. I immersed myself in the wisdom of life in the Taoist scriptures, and my earlier troubles were no longer a problem. But gradually I became dissatisfied with temple life and longed more and more for the traditional way of life of cultivating the Tao. I decided to leave Beijing to seek and realize my ideal.
That was in 1992. I was deputy dean of studies at the China Taoist Academy, responsible for the day-to-day work, and the leaders all hoped I would stay and work in Beijing, where a brilliant future awaited. But I was not very interested in these things. At the beginning of 1993, without saying goodbye to anyone, I gave up my job at the China Taoist Academy and quietly left Beijing.
From then on I went wandering from place to place seeking teachers and asking about the Tao. Once I had obtained a method of cultivation, I needed to choose a suitable place to put it into practice.
I chose the cold Northeast. First, beside a tiny Taoist temple in the desolate northwest of Jilin Province, I dug a cave in the earth and lived in it. Later I moved to the even colder upper reaches of the Songhua River, where in a mountain gully there was a dilapidated house no one had lived in for years; I did some simple repairs and settled there.
When I first began living in the earth cave, I was fortunate to meet an old master of deep attainment in the Tao who taught me the method of “refining one's nature through hardship.” So in those years of living alone I set myself some principles and standards for my dwelling and daily life: accept no alms from anyone; beyond securing the most basic conditions for survival, refuse all comfort and enjoyment; and spend all my time on seated meditation and hard discipline. So every day, apart from seated meditation, I spent the rest of my time looking for hard work to do—something ordinary people find hard to understand. Treading hardship and difficulty, subduing the mind and bearing humiliation, is one of the traditional methods of Quanzhen for tempering the mind and nature in cultivating the Tao. If you want to cultivate truly, you must pass this test.
I actively sought out hardship and difficulty, never considering whether the suffering I endured or the work I did was important, nor whether the work was hard or easy. I set no wish or goal for enduring hardship; I only wanted to make my life a little harder, and to seek naturalness within hardship. What matters most in this is that the mind, the spirit, and the intention stay steadily and wholly focused on that hardship and difficulty. In fact, a supreme method lies hidden within hardship and difficulty—as the saying goes, “Dwelling in hardship, the spirit easily gathers.”
The place where I lived was very cold in winter. Every day I worked in the snow and ice of the mountain gully; my padded clothes soon wore through until the cotton showed, my palms grew rough and covered with calluses, and my fingertips sometimes wore until they bled. Once I had overcome the first hardships and difficulties, I went on to look for harder and more difficult work; once I had overcome those, I looked for the greatest hardship and the greatest difficulty. Following this pattern, in the end none of the hardships and difficulties I faced felt like hardship or difficulty anymore. Then body and mind became quiet and content, and the mind and nature gradually became clear and free of confusion, without sorrow or joy, without vexation; it seemed as though a new realm was gradually opening, and inside and outside the body all was a warm scene of peace and harmony. At the same time, and more importantly, in the depths of my heart I came to confirm ever more clearly a fact: the true self is certainly not the body of flesh and blood, still less the outward appearance, but is closely connected with the world of the Tao, the world of the immortals, the natural nature of heaven, earth, and all things—all the spiritual worlds. This is one's inner, formless spiritual nature, which Taoism calls the true self, the original self, the true nature, the constant nature, the original nature, and so on. Only then did I truly understand why, since ancient times, those who cultivated the Tao have taken things outside the self so lightly and let them go so easily. Once you have recognized and discovered the true self, who would still regard the false self and external things as important? At the same time I also realized that I had formerly been like everyone lost in a dream, clinging to the false self as the true self, to the illusory body as the true body, to the dream world as the true world, and to external things as my own mind—and that was why I had been deluded and entangled by all kinds of things outside myself.
Another thing that kept disturbing my clarity and stillness was visitors from the world. They came to ask about all sorts of problems, and I told them I didn't really understand such things. They didn't believe me and kept coming. But to keep the peace of my mind from being disturbed, I had to make people believe that I truly understood nothing. Although Taoism has a tradition of helping the world and saving people, one must first save oneself; only after one has seen clearly oneself is one qualified to save others—this is what is meant by saving oneself and saving others. Otherwise, if you are still an ordinary person yourself, whom can you save?
Through this way of life, I gradually came to realize that the hardships and difficulties of life really are a treasure. If you suffer hardship and difficulty passively, then every hardship and difficulty is real hardship and real difficulty; you will suffer greatly and struggle greatly, you yourself will be a seed of suffering, and you will inevitably bring about a life of suffering. But if you treat hardship and difficulty as demons that must be subdued, as necessary tools for cultivating the Tao, then you will surely rouse your spirit, go out to meet them gladly, and do your utmost to subdue them in order to temper yourself. Then hardship and difficulty become the steps or the walking staff that help you up the high slope; the demons can instead be made to serve you. Then however hard and difficult things are, they are no longer hard or difficult, and you can even find joy and meaning in suffering.
In fact, this ladder built of hardship and difficulty can sublimate the mind and nature and make one's realm clear and penetrating, reaching a state in which nothing in the world affects my mind, in which I yield before nothing, and in which everything is possible. This state makes a person care even less for fame, profit, gain, and loss, rise above honor and disgrace, right and wrong, let go of empty illusory appearances, and cherish one's natural original face; it lets a person enjoy boundless freedom.
Q: So nothing could easily affect your mind anymore?
Master Meng: By then, basically, yes. Facing any hardship or difficulty without feeling it as hardship or difficulty is a state of transcendence. Wherever you go and whatever you do, you do not feel hardship or difficulty, you do not feel loss, and nothing can easily affect your state of mind. At this stage your heart becomes clearer, and your original nature, which had grown dim, shines again.
Human nature is closely connected with the Tao, this formless spiritual world; it is originally bright and shining, like a luminous pearl. But as we grow older, along with the scheming and desires in our hearts, it becomes more and more stained with dust and grime, the pearl loses its brilliance and grows dim, and life becomes like wandering in a dream. If we clean away this grime, the pearl will again shine with its original light. This method is called subduing the mind and transforming one's nature. Subduing the mind means subduing the restless mind so that it no longer gives rise to deluded thoughts and gathers no new grime, bringing the heart to clarity, stillness, and peace. Transforming one's nature means gradually clearing away the grime that has stained one's nature since birth, so that the nature regains its brightness. This restored nature is the Tao originally inherent in oneself, one's original face. The basic principle of this method is this: in any ordinary person, the original nature is ceaselessly consumed by the mind, the spirit, and the senses, harmed by all kinds of desires, and scattered in all directions, while it is constantly covered over by grime; this is the universal pattern for ordinary people. Cultivating the Tao goes precisely against this pattern: it gradually clears away the grime accumulated since birth, uses the method of concentration to draw back the mind, the spirit, and the desires, and brings the broken, scattered nature back to one place so that it is restored to wholeness; this is called returning to simplicity and reverting to the true. So the most important point of this method of cultivation is to bind sight, hearing, smell, and the mind (awareness) tightly together, focusing on one particular point, not letting them scatter, and not being disturbed by the outside world—just as Patriarch Qiu, Perfected Changchun, during his “six years at Panxi,” embraced and guarded his mind and spirit, subduing his mind and transforming his nature, in extremely harsh conditions.
Panxi is a small river with no bridge. Patriarch Qiu stayed by this river for six years. Every day on the riverbank, when someone wanted to cross, he silently carried them across on his back, asking for nothing in return, not asking whether the one on his back was man or woman, old or young—he simply carried them. At the same time, he gathered his mind, spirit, and intention on one key point, forgetting everything outside himself. This method looks simple, but the true secret of cultivating the Tao lies hidden within it. It does not depart from the essentials: the Tao has always been found in what is simplest and easiest.
If you practice this method for a long time, you will gradually come to know yourself clearly; your nature will gradually become pure and true, your heart gradually clear and bright, your state gradually empty, numinous, lofty, and far-reaching, and your wisdom gradually deep and penetrating. Without reading or study, you will understand the principles of the sages and understand heaven, earth, and all things. This is why Laozi said, “Without going out of the door, one knows the world; without looking out of the window, one sees the Way of Heaven,” and Zhuangzi spoke of “returning to one's beginning,” “reaching clarity,” and “coming and going alone with the spirit of heaven and earth”—all meaning the same thing. So it can be said that, in the face of this simplest of secrets, toil and hardship become a precious raft for saving oneself.
Q: This seems a very unusual path. Could you give one or two concrete examples from your own experience of tempering the mind and nature?
Meng Zhiling: There are many ways to transform the mind and nature. For example, I once chose to spend the height of summer in the hottest place to experience unbearable heat, and to spend the depth of winter in the coldest place to experience bone-chilling cold; one can also choose to experience loneliness and chill during grand, warm traditional festivals.
In the more than ten years after I left Beijing, I deliberately chose to spend seven Spring Festivals or New Year's Eves on trains. The last time I spent New Year's Eve on a train was in 2006. In the early morning of New Year's Eve, I set out from Changchun by train, first to Harbin, then via Qiqihar to Mohe, the coldest place in China.
After a full day of continuous travel, by night the train was running through the snowy forests of the Greater Khingan Mountains. In the bare, cold hard-seat carriage, dozens of passengers gathered at one end with the wine, meat, and snacks they had brought, merrily seeing out the old year and welcoming the new and celebrating New Year's Eve. I sat alone at the other end of the carriage. I had brought no food, only a bottle of mineral water and a piece of coptis root that I always kept in my pocket to taste. The whole of New Year's Eve I faced that bottle of ice-cold water and that bitter piece of coptis, accompanied by the sound of the wheels and the merry noise, now loud, now soft, from the other end of the carriage, concerned only with gathering my mind and focusing my spirit, enjoying my own world of clarity, stillness, and solitude.
When the train reached Mohe it was already New Year's Day, and the festive sound of firecrackers came to my ears from time to time. Just then I received a New Year's greeting by text message from a young Taoist friend far away, asking where I was. I replied that I was in Mohe. He immediately asked, surprised, what I was doing in Mohe. I answered: “One is the most desolate and coldest place in the world, one is the warmest and most beautiful festival among people, and one is a lonely man without home or temple. I didn't know what it would taste like when the three met, so I came.”
Facing all the good things people pursue—warmth, happiness, fame and profit, pleasure—which, for subjective or objective reasons, had no connection with me, in that atmosphere my inner world felt not loneliness or loss but rather an even greater sense of natural, peaceful, clear and still freedom. This is a special training of the mind and nature, and an important part of subduing the mind and transforming one's nature.
One summer, I walked alone through the uninhabited wilds of the Greater Khingan Mountains for one month and seven days, carrying no food, only a little salt, a lighter, and an empty tin can. Every day I walked casually southward, without any destination and without any thought of progress. By day I looked for wild food to fill my stomach, such as wild fruit, mushrooms, and some fresh medicinal herbs, like codonopsis growing in the soil. Every day before sunset I found a relatively open spot and chose a large tree, gathered dry branches and laid them in a big ring around the tree, then put the wooden stick I carried beside me and piled up rotten leaves in front of me to make smoke. That way I could sit against the tree at ease and pass the night in stillness.
During that time I met wolves several times, sometimes one, sometimes several, and was once attacked by them, but in the end I drove them off with my stick. Yet in that environment my heart became ever purer and more tranquil. Apart from occasionally gathering my spirit to match wits with the wolves, I hardly had any thoughts each day, let alone stray thoughts; in my heart even life and death no longer mattered—in fact, my practice was left to heaven. Only then did I suddenly understand what the “Heavenly Worthy of Constant Clarity and Constant Stillness” means.
Q: When did you return to White Cloud Temple in Beijing?
Master Meng: In 2005, while I was living in that gully on the upper Songhua River, some people came and found me, wanting me to return to Beijing. After they urged me again and again, I agreed to go back with them first to have a look. I stayed in Beijing a few days and then went back to the mountains. In 2006 others urged me to return to the Taoist Academy to teach students. So I returned to Beijing and taught at the China Taoist Academy.
Q: Do you have any advice for Westerners who practice cultivation?
Master Meng: Whether Easterners or Westerners, the most important thing in cultivation is how to gather the mind. Only by gathering the mind can you nourish the spirit; if you can gather the mind and nourish the spirit, the mind and spirit will gradually become clear and bright. This is the most basic skill of cultivation. Of course, this requires that in daily life your heart becomes a little simpler, without too much petty cleverness. Whether you are an Easterner or a Westerner, this principle is the same for every practitioner. Also, do not be bound by too many theories of cultivation; they are just different ways of putting things. There are many methods of cultivating the Tao, but making your heart simple and clear is very important. When your practice has reached the right point in this way—the proper fire timing— you should then seek an enlightened teacher to guide you to the next step.
(Master Meng Zhiling is currently vice president of the China Taoist Association, vice president of the China Taoist Academy, and abbot of White Cloud Temple in Beijing.)