A Journey of Learning and Insight: An Autobiography of Chan Master Sheng Yen 聖嚴法師學思歷程(英譯版)

Chapter 1

Childhood and Youth

A Carefree Childhood

I was born in 1930, in Xiaoniang Harbor, near Wolf Hills, Nantong County, Jiangsu Province. I have no memory of my place of birth because in 1931, the great Yangzi River flood washed everything away while I was still an infant. Not only the properties, but also the land along the northern and southern banks of the river was all under water. As far as I can remember, the place where I was born was already under the Yangzi River, at a distance several miles from its banks.

According to my parents, our family, surnamed Chang, originally lived at the Jiaopen Embankment on Chongming Island located at the delta of the mouth of the Yangzi River. From its name, one can tell it should be a swampy area near the sea. Due to a great flood, my great-great-grandfather moved to the Wolf Hills area near Nantong County. When I was born my family and close relatives all lived in the area of Nantong and Haimen. The dialect we used still retained the Chongming accent. After 1931 most of our family moved to Changyinsha of Changshu County, though some distant relatives in Haimen County remained there. Thus, [the dire effects of] the flood as well as the need to relocate deeply affected my family’s history and brought tremendous suffering to our family.

Due to generations of moving and loss of home, we lacked the means to raise a large family of three-to-five generations, and we did not have the financial resources to build an ancestral hall. Although I had heard from my father that our family had a genealogy, I have never seen it. My father was illiterate, so he did not pay much attention to that kind of thing. At present, I only know that my grandfather is Chang Xifan, my grandmother’s surname is Jiang, and my father is Chang Xuancai, my mother’s surname is Chen. Although once there was a zhuang yuan (winner of the national civil examinations in the old days) by the name Chang Jizhi who came from our family, as for others, aside from having the surname of Chang, they have no kinship with my family.

After the Yangzi River washed everything away, my family moved to Jiangnan. My parents brought their six children, rented seven acres of land, built three thatched huts, and worked as tenant farmers and day laborers to sustain the family. I remember this during the Japanese invasion: due to the need for strategic [war] materials, in our countryside we planted a single crop of rice, mint, and beans, and then we alternated those crops with cotton each year. No matter what we planted, we never had enough to eat because the crops were used to pay the landlord and for army provisions. I was ten years old, had to work as a child laborer, and was drafted by the army to help build military structures. In this period it was said that “the masses live in dire poverty” and the people must face the misery of struggling to survive. I witnessed it but in the eyes of a child, there are not many worries or uneasiness when you think that life has always been like this. But later, hearing grownups relate and discuss historical events, I came to know that in the era of my birth China faced strong external rivalries, and was also torn by internal strife among the warlords. Most unfortunate was the Japanese invasion, causing overall restlessness and turmoil in Mainland China. That was the unfortunate time I was born in, encountering the chaos of war.

Our family was impoverished, and in our countryside even the wealthy were poor because the whole country was poverty-stricken. Seeing our landlord’s courtyard, I could tell they owned more properties, had more land, and had more provisions and clothing, but their quality of life was more or less the same as ours. At the time, it was said that there were three university graduates in Changshu County, and our landlord’s son was one of them. Our countryside treated him as a modern zhuang yuan. However, in 1948, the landlord’s family’s fortunes soon deteriorated. To escape the turmoil and dangers of the countryside, and to seek refuge with their relatives in Shanghai, they rode in the same ordinary class railway car as my third eldest brother.

In my memory, there were no intellectuals in our Chang family. The conditions at the time prevented them from being literate and there was no schooling. I have three elder brothers and two elder sisters. Only my second eldest brother was roughly literate due to self-study and the other four were all illiterate. There were no public schools available at the time, only private schools and private tutelage schools. If the parents were to send their children to study, they would endure a double loss: the first being that the school required tuition fees and uniform expenditures, the second, when the children were at school they had no time to do chores at home, and that was a loss of manual labor. For an impoverished family like ours, it was simply unaffordable.

As a child I was feeble and mentally deficient. My body was often prone to illness because it is said that my mother was already 42 when she gave birth to me, and as a poor woman in the countryside, she didn’t have any milk to feed me. In addition the food at the time was coarse (poor in quality, lacking in nutrients) and scarce, so I was malnourished. As a child my growth was extremely slow; I did not learn to walk till I was three years old, or talk until I was five. When I was nine, my brothers and sisters had already grown up and helped my parents by earning money, so the family decided to send me to a private tutelage school. In my first class, four lines and twelve words were taught: “Shang da ren / Kong yi ji / Hua san qian / Qi shi shi.” However, I didn’t know their meaning. The tutor did not explain then that they meant: “The greatest man is Confucius; he taught three thousand students, and seventy became gentlemen.” This was the normal style of teaching of private tutelage schools.

I attended a total of four private tutelage schools for two reasons: first, the tutelage teacher’s classes didn’t survive very long, and second, my family could not consistently afford my tuition fees, so I needed to work to supplement my family’s income. I formally entered primary school when I was twelve. I began in the second semester of the third grade and completed fourth grade in the second year. Due to a poor yearly harvest our family was in wretched poverty, so I left school and went with my father and brothers to the Southern Bank of Yangzi River to build a dike for the new reclaimed land, and so I became a child laborer.