During a vacation I once went to Wutai Mountain but passed through the gate without entering, wasting over a hundred yuan on the entrance ticket. Later, visiting the Shanxi Museum, I learned about the architecture and murals of Foguang Temple and regretted the wasted money—if only I had gone to Foguang Temple instead. But that's not the point. The point is that I think the kind of arrogance I felt at Wutai Mountain has a certain universality.
The reason I passed through Wutai Mountain's gate without entering—apart from physical discomfort and a certain dread of the town—was mainly, I think, a desire to distinguish myself from the other worshippers. Buddhism has to some extent become a business, especially at popular sites like Wutai Mountain, where strong commercialization is inevitable. And among the pilgrims from all over, there are naturally no few who pray for wealth or official promotion. The Wei-Jin literati, because they valued true propriety, disdained its superficial forms—they regarded the rituals of the common world as false and refused to go along with the crowd. If I were to compare myself to those Wei-Jin literati, while I certainly cannot match them in talent or virtue, in terms of thought patterns we are similar. I am not yet a Buddhist. I am on the path toward becoming one. But even while on that path, surely I cannot be like those merchants of heterodox practice.
And yet, thinking this way is wrong. Paying homage to the Buddha is not about paying homage to the Buddha—it is about cultivating one's own positive affinities. That other people's purposes in worship are impure does not affect my own worship. And come to think of it, we are all ordinary beings—who among us is so much purer than anyone else? In the ultimate sense, worshipping the Buddha has no meaning at all. Yet my concern about whether others' motives for worship are pure or not—this itself implies that I believe worship has meaning. In truth, this is a utilitarian view. Since it's all utilitarian, allowing utilitarianism for myself while not permitting it for others (even just in my mind)—this is truly absurd!
So when the opportunity to worship the Buddha arises, there is no need to mind what others are doing. Even when I visited the Buddhist Palace Temple in Yingxian and was tricked into worship by a tourism worker (in principle I don't worship, because my faith hasn't reached that level), the purpose being to extract incense money—still, worship as one should, though I didn't give the money. Worship may not be the ultimate practice, but for ordinary beings, worship is on the whole better than not worshipping. Having the opportunity to worship is an auspicious karmic connection. But the money—don't give it, because it makes you feel bad inside!
There are many things like this in life. Something perfectly good, something you were planning to do anyway—but once someone else says it, or says it in the wrong way, you deliberately do the opposite. This is truly foolish beyond measure, yet to achieve the equanimity of accepting conditions and enduring with patience is genuinely not easy. For instance, at a restaurant, a server with a poor attitude tells you, "Sit here." Actually the spot is fine, there's nothing wrong with it, and you won't even have to wait for a table. But just because the server said it that way, you refuse to sit there—as if complying with her would cost you something. In truth, even by worldly standards, you've lost nothing. Not to mention that, at the fundamental level, you cannot lose anything. There is nothing that can be lost.
Of course, there is another side to this. Since accepting conditions with patience is so difficult, it is not something ordinary people can do. A melon picked by force is not sweet—not because the melon itself isn't sweet, but because the way it was picked was wrong. Though the melon is sweet, the wrong method of picking makes it taste bitter to the one who eats it. When we find ourselves in the position of the melon-picker—in the position of the server—we should consider how to pick the melon. When you recommend something you think is good to others, it is hard not to do so with arrogance and superiority, which often provokes the opposite reaction. The first chapter of the Diamond Sutra is "The Section of Subhuti's Request"—this is precisely the point. When someone asks, and the Buddha answers, the teaching may be easier to accept.
But the excellence (the auspiciousness) of being human lies precisely in this: every day we must both eat melons and pick them. When eating, eat the melon if it's sweet. When picking, mind the method. This is not so difficult—one need only unify the experience of eating and picking melons in a kind of gentle wisdom. It is simply "putting yourself in another's shoes."