many things in this world find neither an answer nor a proper explanation. for example, why should two become a couple among the billions of people on earth? why don't they love each other even though they live together everyday, and yet one of them falls in love with someone else at the first sight? why do the members of a family quarrel daily but still stay unhappily together? why can't they get married in spite of the fact that they are a perfect match to each other? why should one toil so much for the other? why should the love-infatuated always be deserted by the heartless?.....
people remain puzzled in spite of their great effort to understand the endless questions, so they invented the all-embracing word---“predestination”. in order to be more precise, different combinations were derived from it: love predestination, sinful predestination, evil predestination, and kind predestination etc., hence we have the sayings like: “predestination will definitely bring you together despite the great distance while without predestination, you'll never know each other even though you are standing fact to face” “a distant couple is tied up with the thread of predestination” and even the phrases and expressions like “the god of marriage”, “predestination without luck”, “luck without predestination”, “coming across each other is a kind of predestination”, “enemies are bound to meet on a narrow road”, “they shall not marry each other unless they are predestined lovers”. if people still can not find answers, they turn to “reincarnation” for help. lin daiyu is always in tears just for repaying for the water jia baoyu had given her when she was a plant in her previous life in a dream of the red mansions .
in fact, the so-called “predestination” is often a kind of coincidence or chance encounter, even a kind of accident. if you don't meet this person, you'll surely meet some one else. but people insist on adding some colors of emotions or superstition, thus generating various religious factions, the main theories of which are no more than that of “reincarnation”, “heaven and hell” and “the ever-lasting soul” etc.
but does anyone know anything about his previous life or his after life? what could he do even if he knew them? if he can't grasp the present life, what's the benefit of commenting on the visionary after life? giving up today is the same as giving up tomorrow, for they are closely connected. how absurd it is to work like the horse or cattle in the present life in order to be above others in the next life.
have you ever seen emperor qinshihuang reincarnate? have you ever heard of emperor wudi of the han dynasty going into another life? where is now monk xuanzang of the tang dynasty (what we know is the big wild goose pagoda)? where is the monkey king (the flower and fruit mountain does exist, though)? and where can we find those great emperors such as yao , shun yu and the influential philosophers like confucius, laozi and zhuangzi?
how many heavens do we find? are they also divided into the oriental and the occidental world? is god a chinese or westerner? which is the greatest religion among buddhism, daoism, christianity, catholicity and islamism? all religions advocate doing good deeds and not killing, but why do they keep contending against each other, even fighting and killing among themselves? is the paradise the same one in all religions? there's only one sun in the sky, and there should be only one emperor in a country, but do all religions believe in the same god, or do they have different gods of their own? if all of us expected god's help, wouldn't god be too busy and too tired?
does god respect science? if not, why does he allow computers and telecommunications to run rampant? if it is god who created human beings, then doesn't he feel out of control of what the human being are doing now (the nuclear weapons and bio-chemical weapons, etc.)?
we human beings have an origin, and is it the same with god? does god get married? is god hereditary, or is it the same ever-lasting one?
we have all those questions but who can answer them?.
predestination needs us to strive for; friendship needs us to maintain; good will needs us to treasure and future needs us to create. there is no savior, nor goddess of mercy who once saved people in the past but cannot do anything to help the people at the present. the world is developing too fast.
people have to work together and associate with each other. talking about predestination, it's just a kind of explanation about what has happened, and i'm afraid nobody can predict it before hand. from ancient times till the 1980' s, once getting married, the couple had to stick to each other for their whole life. can we say it is because of their life-long predestination? it is just because of the marriage system. in the western countries, life-long marriage is rare. can we sa
y it is because their predestination makes it so? it is actually the result of human nature. the color of love could be attached to predestination, but not the color of superstition.
predestination is a lovely word which we should treasure and respect. in the present world, we should always follow the win-win or multi-win policy, instead of being single-handed. in order to achieve success, we must gain mass support instead of indulging in self-admiration. we might as well call the communication, the cooperation, the common concerns and the common aspirations of human beings “predestination”.
