Finger reading and the "websites of the spiritual realm": the exact address is what counts

By Prof. Si-Chen Lee

1. When I was young, I thought burning incense and worshipping the Buddha was superstition

Every time I pass a large temple I see hundreds upon hundreds of worshippers burning incense in prayer, kneeling in devotion. When I was younger I would go along with local custom, burn a stick of incense and perform the ritual, but I never asked the bodhisattvas for their protection, or made any request of them. The reason was simple — I did not believe there was any world of gods, buddhas or bodhisattvas at all.

Raised from childhood on a Western scientific education, I believed only in phenomena that could be tested repeatedly in a laboratory. Traditional Chinese culture carries a great many inherited beliefs, from burning incense and worshipping the Buddha to every kind of taboo, and I took them all for superstition that would not survive scientific scrutiny. When Christian friends invited me to church to hear the gospel, my attitude was the same: you cannot prove that God exists, so why would I go to church? Inside a temple, then, I could respect other people's faith and follow the customs, but in my heart I did not believe.

That held until 1999, when my finger reading experiments showed that sacred words from religion — characters such as 「佛」(Buddha), 「菩薩」(bodhisattva) and 「耶穌」(Jesus) — all produced unusual visions: bright light, luminous figures, a gate of heaven in the form of a cross filled with light. Those results led me to conclude that the information field, which is to say the spiritual realm, exists, and my attitude turned around a hundred and eighty degrees. Now, when I stand in a temple and watch the faithful kneel in devotion, murmuring their requests for a bodhisattva's protection, I am often shaken and moved beyond words.

Thousands upon thousands of people carry out rituals handed down over centuries without a flicker of doubt, while I had thought since childhood that this was superstition and beneath me. Yet what they are doing — asking a higher intelligence for help — appears from these experiments to be a real act. I was the one who was wrong, not them. I felt deeply ashamed: it was the arrogance of science that had carried us away from our own cultural inheritance, and away from the reality of the universe.

2. How to connect correctly to a deity's website

Can the bodhisattvas hear what the faithful ask of them? And how can we connect to their websites correctly? To get at this question we ran a series of experiments with Miss T, whose finger reading ability was the strongest of all our subjects.

I damaged the character 佛 as shown in the image below, changing it to 彿, 弗, 拂, 「」, 「」 and so on, the last two removing either the slanting stroke or the vertical stroke from the person radical on the left of 佛. Every vision in Miss T's mind's eye then disappeared. But whenever the character was exactly 佛, she would see bright light, luminous figures and other remarkable visions. In other words, the writing has to be completely correct before the Buddha's website will connect. This is just like the internet in our own world: the address must be written exactly right, without the slightest error, before you reach the site it belongs to. I also tried the phonetic spelling of the character, ㄈㄛˊ, and to my surprise it worked — again a field of bright light. In a Mandarin dictionary only one character carries the reading ㄈㄛˊ, and that character is 佛; so as long as the sound is right, the word connects to the Buddha's website just as well. We then tried the Burmese word for Buddha, , and there was a vision again: in her mind's eye she saw something on the screen.

Next we wanted to know how the Sanskrit "Buddha" would respond. On the first attempt I carelessly wrote it wrong, as "Buhhda", and Miss T read it as "Buhda": no vision, and one letter h dropped. On the second attempt I wrote it correctly, and she saw a field of bright light — the "Buddha" website had connected. As long as the shape or the sound of a word is correct, finger reading can connect to the site that corresponds to it.

Miss T is a Japanese American and speaks Japanese, so we also tried the Japanese word for Buddha, ほとけさま. In her mind's eye Miss T saw a bright, slender figure, who said one line to her in Japanese: "なによ" (What?) — as though this Japanese-speaking luminous figure had been disturbed by our attempt to connect through finger reading, and had asked what we wanted. That site evidently has a Japanese address, and its owner may be a deity who attained the way in Japan.

The address of a sacred word has to be written correctly, or sounded correctly; the subject's ability has to be strong, and the browser in their brain new enough, before they can connect to the website of a deity in the information field and communicate with it directly. Most of us have no such ability — yet when we pray, or ask a bodhisattva for help, might we also be performing an act of connection without knowing it? Many cases in religious history suggest it is possible. That is for future experiments to test; but we are at least confident that the sound of a deity's name must not be spoken wrongly.

3. The deities who have lost contact

Several very large religions — Catholicism, Protestant Christianity, Buddhism, Islam — have spread across the world. But the prophets and bodhisattvas within them often lived thousands of years ago, or never existed in the human world at all. The language they spoke and the script they wrote, such as the Aramaic used by Jesus, may have been lost long ago. When we use a modern script to connect, or the script of another country, can the connection still be made? Do these beings understand those languages and letters?

The Buddha's site seems to raise fewer problems. We tried Chinese, Japanese, English, Burmese and Sanskrit, and every one of them connected and produced a vision. At first we guessed this might have to do with the subject's own culture and beliefs, so in later finger reading experiments we tried the names of several saints of Tantric Buddhism: 蓮花生 and 蓮華生大士 (Padmasambhava, who carried Tantric Buddhism into Tibet in the eighth century), 瑑哈嘎拉 (Mahakala, the two-armed black-robed protector of the Kagyu, or White, school), and 龍樹 (Nagarjuna, the Indian saint). The subject wrote all of these names out correctly, and saw no vision whatsoever. We were puzzled for half a year. Why would the Tantric saints not let us reach their sites? Was there a firewall, a password still to enter?

Then a friend reminded me that these Tantric saints were either Indian or Tibetan, and knew no Chinese. It woke me from the dream. I quickly asked an expert in Tibetan to help me find the Tibetan for Padmasambhava and for Mahakala, and this time the attempt succeeded. With Padmasambhava she saw a small ball of intense light, flashing twice, with no writing visible. With Mahakala she saw a bright screen, in a color unlike the usual one. The subject could not read Tibetan at all, and it made no difference — the connection went through all the same. This phenomenon indicates that what the subject sees is not a hallucination produced by her brain. But when I cut the last three characters from the Tibetan for Mahakala, she simply drew out the letters that remained and saw no vision.

Once a sacred word is damaged, it is no longer an address.

Evidently the Tantric saints' sites in the information field carry no Chinese address, which may mean that their owners never studied Chinese. That seems reasonable enough: the Tantric saints did not learn Chinese in life, few Chinese have practiced Tantra, and once a soul has gone to the information field, what motive would it have to learn other, later scripts?

What effect, then, do the simplified characters promoted in mainland China have on the act of connecting? We tried the word 觀音 (Guanyin). Written in traditional characters, 觀音 always produced a vision: a very bright screen, with no writing visible. Changed to the simplified form, 观音, the brightness of the screen dropped sharply and the characters themselves appeared on it, which suggests that the sacred meaning had weakened considerably. This also makes sense. Guanyin and the Chinese people communicated in traditional characters for two thousand years, and the sudden switch to simplified forms seventy years ago distorted the shapes. The channel to the information site is not severed, but it is much weakened — as though Guanyin were being kept at a distance.

Perhaps the Chinese people will need another few hundred years of communicating with Guanyin in simplified characters before a stable channel is rebuilt. Will she go on watching over people who write in simplified script in the meantime?

Chinese writing has changed many times. Only specialists can read the oracle bone script of the Shang dynasty today; everyone else has lost it entirely. Might there be early sacred figures who know only oracle bone script, whose information sites carry only oracle bone addresses, drifting further and further from later generations who read only the regular script, until communication is no longer possible? How many deities in this universe have lost contact?