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Lonely boy who changed his life

By Liu Wei (China Daily)
2009-02-20 13:47

He cites a story to illustrate.

Su Dongpo, the great writer of the Song Dynasty (960-1279), liked talking with senior monks and one day told one of them: "You are a pile of excrement in my eyes." The monk replied: "You are a Buddha in mine." Su told his sister Su Xiaomei about the exchange, apparently in the belief he had scored an oral victory, but his sister, who was famous throughout China for her insight, told him that in Buddhism, what you see reflects what is in your heart.

"Buddhism has changed me most in my way of thinking, and that has changed my whole life," he says. "So for many years now, I have even been thankful for the hard times."

And hard times they undoubtedly have been. Chen's parents divorced when he was 7. His mother re-married, taking his older sister, who later died in a car accident. Chen and his younger brother stayed with their grandmother, returning to their mother when he was 10. Nor was he popular at school, because his mother was the only divorcee in his neighborhood, a riverside district in Chongqing. His mother struggled to raise three children on her own and once had to sell her hair to a local salon to buy apples for the children.

To ease his mother's burden, the teenage Chen worked part-time as a nightclub waiter and singer. Even after he got into university, he had to sing in pubs to pay for his tuition and his college classmate Huang Xiaoming, now also a popular actor, recalls that Chen often got back to their dormitory after everyone had gone to bed.

Chen has often spoken of his inferiority complex as a child and his eagerness to be accepted by his peers. Now, however, he has learned to accept whatever happens to him because Buddhism has taught him nothing is ever only good or bad.