Filial piety is one of China's traditional virtues. As the saying goes, "parents who can't help themselves", even if everyone is an independent individual, they will have different thoughts and pursuits when they grow up, but in essence everything we have comes from our parents. In the first half, we care about our parents, and in the second half, our parents are our responsibilities.
So what is filial piety? Nowadays, many people are prone to make a mistake, that is, "I will give it to you if I think it is good for you." Parents do this to their children, and children do the same to their parents.
Indeed, sometimes some reasonable meal planning and a beautiful nursing home are beneficial to parents' life from an objective point of view, but is this really what parents want? Not necessarily. True filial piety should be to meet the needs of parents as much as possible without hurting them. Sometimes, inner satisfaction is more important than seemingly beautiful environment. Lin Shangshui is such a dutiful son.
Lin Guanrong, 1925, a native of Shangrao County, Jiangxi Province. From a very young age, Lin Guanrong was very unusual. He is precocious, intelligent and sensible, and has a good nature. He doesn't have the playful temper of a child at all, but is as peaceful as an old monk who sees through the world of mortals.
There is a saying that "the world of mortals refines the heart". Practice doesn't have to be in temples, in deep mountains and forests, in society and in life, and you can always stick to your heart. Is it not a kind of practice? Lin Guanrong is such a "monk of the world of mortals". He still married and had children, but after the 1960s, he stopped eating meat and animals. Although he didn't become a monk, all the monks in Lingshan Temple nearby knew him very well.
Because the journey from the village to Lingshan was not smooth, the monks in the temple had difficulty going down the mountain. Lin Guanrong built the road stone by stone, and finally built a mountain road with more than 2000 steps. The villagers below and the monks on the mountain all praised him for his great merits. At this time, Lin Guanrong is over 70 years old.
In the 1990s, Lin Guanrong felt that his time was coming and told his son Lin Shangshui to bury himself in a jar. "Burial" is a special burial method, also known as urn coffin burial, which can be traced back to the Paleolithic Age. The urn and jar are used as coffins, with holes at the bottom as places where the souls of the deceased go in and out. Most of them are buried near houses in residential areas or under indoor floors.
Lin Guanrong asked for such a funeral with only one purpose, that is, to become a "body Buddha."
After the death of an ancient monk, the body was sealed in a big jar in a special way, called "sitting on the altar". It was sealed for a whole thousand days, and then it was opened. If the body does not rot at this time and the face is like life, you can directly mold the golden body, and the "body Buddha" will be completed. For example, there are a large number of ancient "body buddhas" in Quanzhou, Jiuhua Mountain and other places in Anhui Province, which are called "all-southern Buddhist countries".
But this method is obviously not accepted by local villagers. In rural areas, people generally pay attention to "being buried in the ground." Whoever doesn't find a "land of feng shui" for the deceased elders will stab him in the back.
On the one hand, it is the father's expectation, on the other hand, it is the finger pointing of the whole village. After Lin Guanrong died of cerebral thrombosis in 2000, Lin Shangshui decided to comply with his father's request, customized a "sitting cylinder" of suitable size for him, and disposed of his body in strict accordance with the requirements of Buddhism, and finally sealed it near his home.
The day before yesterday, Lin Shangshui opened his "sitting cylinder" according to his father's instructions. Except for a little dehydration, Lin Guanrong's body is really just like the "body Buddha" in ancient books, neither rotten nor rotten. Lin Shangshui immediately contacted experienced craftsmen, applied a thick plaster to Lin Guanrong, and then carefully decorated it, eventually becoming a "body Buddha".
In some people's eyes, Lin Shangshui's practice is indeed against tradition, but he can still unambiguously carry out his father's wishes after his father died. For Lin Guanrong, Lin Shangshui is a great dutiful son. As for what outsiders say, what does it have to do with the Lins?