4 Youngster
Luyan’s Memoirs 1974-1991 (Age 4-21)
Contents of the Chapter：4.1 Story of Life Tree；4.2 Story of Meditation；4.3 Said I Have Peach Blossom Fortune；4.4 Grandpa Pig and Grandma Donkey；4.5 News of Real-Life Medical Experiments；4.6 A Public Case；4.7 Story of Soul Reincarnation；4.8 Introductory Case of Mental Disorder；4.9 The Flowery Newsstand；4.10 Wills
4.1 Stories of Life Tree
One day in September 1974, Uncle Dragon came home on vacation and told me a story. He said, “I heard people say that the tree of life grows very slowly, and only grows two nodes more in thousands of years.”
At this time, I was four years old, very excited to hear this, dreaming that I could have a tree of life. In the years that followed, he told me this one-sentence story so many times that I got bored of hearing it.
By the time I was a teenager, I went looking for articles about the Tree of Life on my own and didn't like it once I read it. Some years later, I went looking for it again and still didn't like it when I read it. Perhaps because I became attached to the Tree of Life as a child, I was always thinking about it and visiting it every few years. It wasn't until I was in my forties that I could understand it.
Originally, the Tree of Life had only three nodes: color node, migration node, and sense node. Later, when the ancients realized that acceptance and think have great influence on people, they took the two laws out of the migration node and made them two new nodes: acceptance node and think node, which is why it is said that "the tree of life only grew two more nodes over thousands of years (e.g., Illustration 4.1.1-1)." I reassembled the Tree of Life in 2014, after writing my memoirs, based on the Unified Compilation of Buddhist Substantiations; see Chapter 11 of this book, The Tree of Life.
Illustration 4.1-1 is from ancient Mexico (ca. 1325 CE). Figure 1 shows that as a child, Mexico was mesmerized by the story that "the tree of life grows two knots longer over thousands of years." Figure 2 shows another tree of life from ancient Mexican legend. Figures 3, 4, and 5 show Mexico growing up and re-creating the Tree of Life based on the legend.
Posted Jul 11, 2024, 3:35 AM UTC