The Body, Great Trouble, and Trust
Good evening, everyone.
The lecture begins by asking what Laozi means by “regard great trouble as you regard the body.” Patriarch Lü Chunyang explains it this way: the reason I have great troubles is that I have this body; the body is the basis of all affliction. If there were no embodied form, then these sufferings would not arise. To say “having a body” is much the same as saying “having an I.” If one can put favor and disgrace, fortune and misfortune, behind oneself, then what trouble would remain? If I had no body, what suffering would I still have?
The teacher says Laozi here is questioning himself, not someone else. Why do I have so many troubles? Because I still take this body as “me.” Once there is this “I,” troubles arise. The body is the root from which the many afflictions come. Where there is suffering, there is worry. So “body” here means the ego-self. The point is to break the view of “I.” If one can set aside honor, humiliation, disaster, and blessing alike, one enters the state of “no-body” and “no-self.” If there were no false bodily self, then what affliction would remain?
He then turns to the commentaries and first cites the *Dharmapada*: “The body is a vessel of suffering. Therefore I leave worldly ways and cultivate the Way; I make the intention sincere and cut off deluded thought; I do not cling to the four great elements, in order to cut off the root of suffering.”
The teacher says this means the same thing as Laozi’s line. All suffering centers on this false bodily self. To “make the intention sincere and cut off thought” means to cut off delusive thinking and wild imaginings. The four elements also refer to this compounded bodily existence. If one does not cling to this false self, then one cuts off the source of suffering. So when Laozi says, “I have great trouble because I have a body,” it means exactly that the body, or the sense of self, is the root of pain.
Next he cites the *Cihai*: “Body means self.” Buddhist dictionaries also say that “having a body” means having the six faculties and this fleshly false self.
The teacher stresses that the physical body is not the true self. Our original nature is formless and without appearance; that formless nature is the real self. He then raises a common objection from Buddhism: when the infant Buddha is said to have pointed one hand to heaven and one to earth and declared, “Above heaven and below heaven, I alone am honored,” does that not affirm a self?
He says no. If Shakyamuni had meant the false bodily self, then he would not have been fit to be a Buddha. So that “I” does not mean the ordinary ego or bodily identity.
He then quotes a Chan patriarch—Yunmen Wenyan—who said: “When Shakyamuni was first born, he pointed one hand to heaven and one to earth, walked seven steps, and said, ‘Above heaven and below heaven, I alone am honored.’ If I had seen him then, I would have struck him dead and fed him to the dogs.”
The teacher explains that this fierce saying was not simple blasphemy. Its purpose was to break attachment to the surface meaning, as if the Buddha were boasting, “I am the greatest in heaven and earth.” He says the birth story is only half true and half false: a newborn obviously cannot really speak and walk like that. Later tradition shaped the story in order to lead confused people toward awakening. So “I alone am honored” is a phrase used in two ways, with an outer and an inner meaning.
He says the miraculous birth story has an outer face meant for ordinary people and an inner intent meant for cultivators. On the surface it makes the Buddha seem grand and supernatural. But in the *Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra*, the teacher says, the point is that such stories are not to be taken as literal fact.
He paraphrases the scripture at length: Shakyamuni is described as descending from Tuṣita Heaven, entering the womb, being received by Indra, bathed by dragon kings, shaded by spirit beings, and stepping on lotus flowers while the heavens welcome him. The teacher says that just hearing all this is enough to make one’s head ache—but people often will not listen to plain truth, while they eagerly listen to miracle tales.
So the real instruction is to cut off “views of this kind.” These stories are not the final truth. One must think through their meaning and arrive at a straight, correct view. Only then can one understand what “Above heaven and below heaven, I alone am honored” is actually pointing to.
He then states the main point clearly: the question is what “I alone am honored” really means. He is bringing this in to show that Laozi’s words—“If I had no body, what trouble would I have?”—and the Buddhist teaching point to the same truth. Taoism and Buddhism, at the level of truth, are not two different gates.
Ordinary worldly views differ from person to person. But truth, he says, comes out the same. He closes this section by saying that next time they will continue discussing how “I alone am honored” connects with Laozi’s teaching.
The lecture resumes by restating the line: “What does it mean to value great trouble like the body? I have great trouble because I have a body. If I had no body, what trouble would I have?”
He returns to Patriarch Lü’s distinction between the true self and the small self. The great self is the true self. Buddhist dictionaries, he says, explain that ordinary people take the mind-bound person and the embodied self as the ruler and call that “I.” But this is only a confused and inverted view. Such attachment belongs to the lesser understanding.
He explains that “freedom” means being released from the knots of affliction, able to go forward or back without obstruction. “Deluded inversion” means taking the false as true and the true as false. If we cling to this body and these mental troubles as our real self, then we are only holding an upside-down view.
He then makes the distinction explicit: there is a false self and a true self. When ordinary people or outsiders take the five-skandha body to be an independent ruler, that is the false self. When Buddhahood speaks of “self” in the sense of complete freedom, that is the true self. Taoism, he says, teaches the same thing: the body is the false self, while one’s heavenly nature is the true self.
He then turns to the subject of suffering itself and cites the *Sutra of the Five Kings*, where Shakyamuni speaks of the eight sufferings.
They include the suffering of birth, sickness, death, separation from those one loves, meeting those one hates, and not obtaining what one seeks. The teacher lingers over these one by one. Birth is suffering: the mother carries the child ten months, and the child emerges in pain as though cut by knives. Illness is suffering: with age the hair turns white, eyesight dims, hearing weakens, the body aches here and there. Because the body is formed from the four elements—earth, water, fire, and wind—when they lose harmony, sickness appears.
Death is suffering because the four elements scatter apart: breath stops, flesh grows cold, bones return to ash. Separation from loved ones is suffering. Failing to gain the fame or profit one wants is suffering. And meeting those one resents is suffering, because anger rises the moment one sees them.
He continues expanding the eight sufferings with everyday examples. Loved ones are separated: wives, children, and family members may be scattered, abducted, conscripted, or sent far away. Seeking fame or office and failing to obtain it is suffering; he even jokes that during elections people struggle desperately, and when they lose they cry bitterly.
Human life, even if it reaches a hundred years, is still mostly consumed by sleep, childhood ignorance, and old age. The truly usable span is short. Then there are natural disasters—flood, fire, wind, earthquake. If you yourself are not sick, your mother may be sick, or your children may be sick, and that too becomes suffering. Money is suffering as well: the rich suffer, and the poor suffer. Family discord is suffering. Not getting along with people is suffering. Life is suffering piled upon suffering.
Unless one cultivates, he says, everyone feels this. Ask people whether they are truly blessed in life, and very few will say yes. That is why Laozi says, “I have great trouble because I have a body.” It is only because one has this body that one has suffering. Cultivation means loosening one’s attachment to the body, letting it be, and entering a state with no worry, no affliction, no anxious love, and no sorrow. He ends this part of the lecture there.
The lecture then moves to the next part of chapter 13: “He who values his body as he values the world may be entrusted with the world.”
Patriarch Lü explains that if political authority is to be placed on someone’s shoulders, it should be given to one who regards the people as he regards his own body. To “entrust” means to hand over political power.
The teacher cites the *Zhuangzi*: “A man of virtue, at home has no vain thoughts; abroad he has no anxious calculations; he stores up neither judgments of right and wrong nor ideas of beauty and ugliness.” Such a person has a mind with no fixed attachment. That is what is meant by a man of virtue.
Because he is unattached and not driven by selfish thought, he can be entrusted with governing the world. If a ruler loves the people as though they were his own body, then the whole political order can safely be placed in his hands.
To illustrate this, he gives the example of King Tang of Shang. Tang, he says, loved the people as he loved his own body.
Citing the *Records of the Grand Historian*, he recounts how Tang saw a man setting a net on all four sides and praying that all creatures from heaven above, earth below, and every direction would enter his net. Tang was alarmed and thought this far too cruel. So he had three sides of the net removed, leaving only one.
He then had the prayer changed: those who wished to go left could go left, those who wished to go right could go right, and those who wished to escape might escape; only those that did not want to live would be caught. This, the teacher says, shows that Tang’s virtue reached even to birds and beasts. When neighboring states heard of it, forty kingdoms submitted to him. That is the meaning behind the saying “open one side of the net”—do not drive others into total hopelessness. Tang was even more merciful: he opened three sides.
He then turns to King Wen of Zhou as the second example of one who loved the world as his own body.
The *Chronicles of Zhou*, he says, tell how the people of Yu and Rui were disputing over a boundary of land. On their way to seek judgment from the Earl of the West—King Wen before he became king—they entered Zhou territory and saw the local people yielding to one another at the field boundaries and along the narrow paths. The whole atmosphere was one of mutual modesty.
Before the disputing parties had even seen King Wen, they were already ashamed. They said, “What we are fighting over is something the people of Zhou would be ashamed of.” Feeling disgraced, they turned back without even bringing the case before him.
This, the teacher says, shows what kind of ruler King Wen was. He loved the people as he loved himself. A man like that can truly be entrusted with the affairs of state. With that, he says chapter 13 is finished, and they will continue next time.
This literal version consolidates the lecture’s English material into continuous notes, keeping close to the spoken sequence while preserving explanatory detail.