Have we really understood "Journey to the West"? "Journey to the West" is a mythical story that grows up with everyone, but have you really understood it? There is a saying that the teenager does not understand Journey to the West, and he is already a person in the play if he understands it.
The first question, obviously only Tang Seng wants to go to the west to learn scriptures, so a few other people follow the master to learn scriptures, why do they go? We found that no, these apprentices who followed Tang Seng to learn scriptures, they all had one thing in common, they all made mistakes. Sun Wukong was locked up at the foot of Wuzhi Mountain because of his havoc in the Heavenly Palace. Zhu Bajie was demoted to Gao Laozhuang because of his teasing of Chang'e. Monk Sha was demoted to the quicksand river because he broke the glass cup of the queen mother. So all three of them are at fault. What is Learning? They want to mend their ways, they want to atone for their sins.
The second question, Sun Wukong has seventy-two changes, one is 108,000 miles, he is so powerful when he fights monsters, why do you want to learn from the scriptures step by step? He carried Tang Seng on his back and turned over and back again, and it only took half a day to go back and forth, and one episode could end the whole play. Why did he write so long? When I was a child, I always thought that this was a big bug written by Wu Chengen. Until one day, I accidentally opened the Journey to the West and found that Wu Chengen was writing the beginning of the Journey to the West, and wrote such a poem at the beginning, and the last two sentences, if you want to know the Yuan Gong of the Creation Society, you must read "The Legend of Journey to the West". That is, if we want to know our achievements in this life, we have to watch Journey to the West.
At this point, I suddenly thought of a sentence of Confucius in "The Analects of Politics", I have five out of ten and am determined to learn, thirty and stand, forty and not confused, and fifty and know the destiny of heaven. The "heaven" of this "mandate of heaven" is not the meaning of God, and the "heaven" that Confucius said is the meaning of conscience and self. That is, when you are young, you just rush forward, or you are at the high and low points of life, you can't see yourself clearly, you can't see life clearly. Only when half or most of your life has passed will you know yourself, you will have a clear understanding of yourself, you will know what I can do and what I can't do.
Immediately after that, the first sentence of the opening chapter of the entire Journey to the West is that the spiritual root nurtures the source of pregnancy and flows out, and the heart is cultivated into a great avenue. What does it mean, Sun Wukong jumped out of a stone, he is the result of the creation of heaven and earth, and his parents are all things in heaven and earth. So this stone monkey Sun Wukong, it represents our human heart, our spirituality, our heart. At first glance, it makes sense, can our hearts change seventy-two? Our minds can not think out of one out is one out of one.
There is a saying that a thought brings up thousands of mountains and rivers, and a thought destroys the vicissitudes of life. So why does he have to take this path step by step? This path of learning from the scriptures is his life and his life, and his life can only be taken step by step. When you watch "Journey to the West" again, you will find that it is like a mirror, and you are the one who learns from the scriptures.
What is the ninety-nine-eighty-one difficulty? We have all kinds of tribulations in life, even the most powerful person, his life is also step by step. Only when we have gone through our life path step by step, experienced the ups and downs of the world, and experienced all kinds of ups and downs in the 2024 Book of Answers, can we get the true scriptures of life. And what is this scripture? It is our stormy life path.