Pang, Yiu Kai's Personal Homepage

I must remind some people that human life is too complicated, the application of ideologies to set a goal for one's own life is often problematic. Whether it be "I should amass as much money as I can" or " we should forgo bodily pleasure for spiritual satisfaction", sticking strictly to ideologies like these often lead us astray.

But Life without ideologies is even more problematic. When chances come, people of this kind will not hesitate to inflict, exploit or even torture others in order to satisfy their own selves. When I come to this point, in fact I am implying that inflicting, exploiting and torturing other people are evil. At this time another problem arises as on what ground can I have such an assertion? My answer to this are of two folds. The first is that I resort to my own personal experience as the final verdict. Whenever I do these, An unbearably strong negative feeling of finding myself ugly and demon like always emerges from within. The second is that I take life as a medium for the maximization of satisfaction, treating others in this way not only can never maximize one's own satisfaction, but rather, diminish it. Since to do these I would have to suppress my own affection towards other lives first.

Affection towards other lives, and negative feelings associated with inflicting them, as for myself, is not learned. Yet there are moments that I really want to fix somebody and I must resort to moral codes to keep myself from really doing this. But those only are moments when I am seriously inflicted. Whenever I have such a strong feeling, I can also find that my mind is being contaminated by anger and vengeance, and that it suffers. If anger and vengeance make my mind suffer, they are not my genuine self. If they are not my genuine self, they are contaminants.

So I incline to believe that an uncontaminated soul would not harm other life, but contamination to one's soul during one's course of life is completely unavoidable, not to speak that one's inner being is usually in a state of a "seething cauldron" (Freud). So a life without value orientation is almost certain to be a life of building one's satisfaction upon others' sufferings. In this sense, setting ideologies for one's own life becomes necessary.

Am I concerned too much about not to harm other life? By no means. Animals fight, compete, kill without ever caring about the well being of others, yet they can still contribute to the ecosystem. They simply don't need to act in accordance with any thinking of doing good to other life as a whole, for Nature has implanted a set of "instincts" in them, they just act according to their animal instincts and thus they can live in harmony with the ecosystem . But when human beings act likewise, the result will definitely be just the opposite. Why? We have high tech as well as conscious thinking skills, we can manipulate matter, people and other living things too easily. And very unfortunately Nature's way is incomprehensibly complex, also one's private interests are usually in conflict with those of other people (the money in my hand or in others' hands, for instance) , other life and the ecosystem (a housing estate or a mangrove swampland, for instance) in the short run, though they are in agreement in the very long run. If we are not conscious and careful enough, we always harm them with or without our awareness. Today, we have an environmental problem that threatens our survival, the root cause in fact lies here.

I can never understand why people like city living so much. As for myself, I only like to live with Nature, lead a one with Nature simple living, pursue the values implanted in me from Nature such as truth, genuine knowledge about the natural and cultural world, natural beauty, love of all life, pleasure, and the most important of all, one with universe.

( Sam Ah Stream, Hong Kong. 4/99 )