My Dinner with San Te
In his memoir, Beyond Life and Death: Jet Li Looking for Jet Li, the titular subject includes a transcript of a conversation that he had with a monk in 2022. The transcript is included in the appendix. Like the legendary monk San Te, Dzongsar Rinpoche is interested in Kung Fu. Dzongsar saw Jet Li’s Shaolin Temple when he was coming-of-age in the eighties. Also released in the early eighties was a philosophical film called My Dinner with Andre. Here is my straight-to-the-point translation of Jet Li’s conversation…
Dzongsar Rinpoche: “I would like to ask Mr. Li, when was the first time you encountered the Heart Sutra?”
Jet Li: “It should have been when I was filming the movie Shaolin Temple, when I was seventeen years old. When I was young, I practiced martial arts all day long, so I didn’t know many words. But when we read the Heart Sutra, we can all casually say: Form is emptiness, emptiness is form, form is not different from emptiness, and emptiness is not different from color. Everyone will memorize these four sentences. Even when my wife sent our two daughters to summer school and the students were asked to memorize the Heart Sutra, they memorized it very quickly.”
Dzongsar Rinpoche: “Please tell us briefly - How do you learn martial arts? What time do you get up? What time do you go to bed? Like your teacher, are you very strict?”
Jet Li: “My father passed away when I was two years old. I was survived by two sisters and two brothers. Because I was too poor, they sent me to learn martial arts when I was eight years old. If you can study well, the government will provide you with food, clothing and accommodation. Soon I knew that maybe I had practiced it in my previous life, the life before that. Basically starting from the age of nine or ten, I train for eight hours a day. There is no cultural study, but solid training for eight hours every day. Because I practiced so hard, I often had nightmares when I was in my thirties. In the dream, the coach would shout: Get up! Practice, practice!”
Dzongsar Rinpoche: “You have been exposed to Taoism and understand the contradictions and paradoxes between yin and yang, which will make your life more open. Do you think that tenacity and open-mindedness like yours still exist in the modern world?”
Jet Li: “I believe there are, but not many, so I work very hard to share them with my friends. In fact, whether from the perspective of Chinese culture or Buddhism, finding the truth at a relative level is still very helpful in life. Most people feel that there is no sense of security in life, so they actively pursue “fame, wealth, power, and love” as a source of security. However, even with these four things, “birth, old age, illness, and death” cannot be solved.”
Dzongsar Rinpoche: “You don’t have to answer, I’m just curious. When the tsunami happened, I was at the London Airport, about to fly to India. After the tsunami, there was chaos everywhere. A day or two later, I heard that you were trapped somewhere in what seemed to be Thailand because of the tsunami? And then you rescued your child? Maybe I heard it wrong, but would you like to share it with us?”
Jet Li: “On December 26, 2004, during the Christmas holiday, my family and friends and I were actually not in Thailand, but the Maldives. That morning I felt an earthquake. I’ve experienced many earthquakes, so I don’t think there’s anything unusual about it. At ten o’clock, I took the two children to the beach. Then we saw the waves were like a rising tide, was not as exaggerated as in the movie. In fact, it just came over like this. We thought it was fun at the time. Why didn’t the tide rise at night? Why did it rise now? The first wave hit my knees. I immediately picked up my four-year-old daughter, and my aunt picked up her one-year-old daughter.”
“The second wave reached my waist, so when I turned around, it was actually not easy to walk, as if I was floating in the water. The third wave had reached here (chest), so I put my four-year-old daughter on my shoulders. I watched helplessly as the fourth wave had reached my mouth. There is absolutely no chance to recite Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Standing in the sea, I was already standing on tiptoes. I don’t know what will happen if the fifth wave comes. Since the hotel staff wanted to take a photo with me, they followed me earlier, and they were the ones who saved me in the end.”
