He had been a cold-blooded professional killer. In jail, he shared a cell with a condemned prisoner. As the man was dragged away for execution, he turned and looked.

I was brought up in a poor family. Actually, my family was somewhat wealthy before I entered the third grade, but that year my father gambled away all our money. He lost everything, including his business and all his property. In order to raise my two brothers and me, my mother went to work as a maid. Many people laughed at her for having come down so far.

The situation made me a little unhinged. Why could other children’s mothers enjoy cozy lives at home while my mother had to wash clothes and cook for others? I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I ended up venting my frustrations by physically abusing the child of my mother’s employer.

Stop Hatred with Hatred

Because of my psychological imbalance, I often got into fights with my classmates. My teachers treated me as a troublemaker. When I entered middle school, I began to neglect my studies. I made trouble everywhere and became a notorious juvenile delinquent. One day in ninth grade, a friend of my father’s came to our house to try to borrow money from my mother. My mother knew that he would use the money for gambling, so she turned him down. At that, my father’s friend became very vindictive and told my father that my mother had been cheating on him. My father got angry and hit my mother very hard. I knew my mother was innocent, I developed an extreme hatred for my father’s friend.

That hatred nearly ruined me. I never thought of trying to end hatred with love. Instead, I chose to counter with more anger. Having acquired this destructive tendency, I continued to pick fights in school and was consequently expelled.

With no school to attend, I had no wish to improve myself to become a useful person. On the contrary, I sank into the underworld and became a professional gangster living a fearful, uneasy life. I got into an accident once when I was driving a motorcycle to collect a gambling debt. My left leg was broken in four places, and I was sent to a hospital for an operation.

Before the operation was over, the anesthetic began to wear off. I woke up on the operating table and saw my leg cut open like a piece of work. The surgeon was fixing the broken bone with a stainless steel bar. It hurt so much that I screamed.

After I returned to the ward, I recalled what I had experienced in the operating room and I began to think about the law of cause and effect. Didn’t those whom I had killed or wounded wail the same way? However, the sympathy stopped there, and I was still very angry with the surgeon.

When the surgeon came to check up on me, I punched him and knocked him unconscious. After that, I was afraid that the surgeon would take revenge by giving me a shot of poison, so I assigned several gangster brothers to look after me. Whenever the surgeon gave me injections, I told those gangsters to open the packages and keep the empty bottles for reference. I stayed in the hospital for more than twenty days under a permanent shroud of suspicion. The director of the hospital suggested that I check out as early as possible. He said my stay was giving them too much pressure.

The Last look of a Condemned Man

Not long after I left the hospital, I was arrested again in another criminal case and sent to a detention center. I didn’t like the look of one of the other inmates, so I beat him. I was confined to a solitary cell after that.

Then one day, a death row criminal was put in my cell. We stayed together for more than ten days. Three days before he was shot, he told me: “Once you do something wrong, you have to pay double for it. If you don’t mend your ways in time, it will go hard on you when your fate is decided by others.

At 4.00 a.m. the next day, he received the notice for his execution. His legs became so weak that he couldn’t walk, and he had to be dragged out. He kept turning his head to look at me. Although he didn’t say anything, his eyes seemed to tell me to mend my ways as soon as possible and not to follow his fatal path. As I squatted in one corner of the cell, my mind was filled with painful memories. The scene of a fellow prisoner being dragged away was ingrained in my mind for a long time.

Then one day, I found a picture of Buddha on a wall. It was a label from a tin can. Feeling helpless and disturbed, I prayed to Buddha every day, begging him to let me leave the jail in peace.

Maybe it was because I had rediscovered my conscience that I was able to see Buddha’s picture. If my mind had been covered with ignorance as it was before, I would never have seen the picture.

I prayed every day. I deeply felt that in prison I was no different from an animal, except that I wore clothes. I felt no dignity at all. I vowed to Buddha that once I left prison, I would become a vegetarian and leave the underworld.

I was finally release after ninety-three days. It was so nice to breathe the air of freedom again. However, my mind was still filled with hatred. I wanted to seek revenge against a prison warden who had tortured me. So in the middle of the night, I went to his house to give him a lesson.

I turned out that was the last time I used violence. Afterwards I thought to myself: “How could I violate the vow I made in front of the Buddha? How could I not try to become a new man?” I made up my mind to leave Taipei and the underworld. I went to Taichung and got a job there.

The Boss Accept Me

Although I tried very hard to mend my ways, I couldn’t immediately get rid of my gangster temperament. After I had worked in a company for several months, my boss told me one day that the more than twenty workers in our company were all satisfied with my work, but my past still worried him. He didn’t know what to do with me.

I realized that once a man had gone astray, he had to double his efforts if he wanted to return to a normal way of life. With this in mind, I said to my boss that as long as he gave me the job, he didn’t even have to pay me for the time being. He could pay me when he completely trusted me. The boss finally accepted me and I worked even harder. Later he promoted me to head of the sales department.

A gangster really can change himself and society can eventually accept him. It all depends on the effort and the commitment of the gangster. Because his bad habits and temperament have been with him for so long, he has to work harder and use more willpower in order to change them.

Take me as an example. Though I had split with the underworld and no longer earned my living with a knife, my dissolute habits remained the same. I changed girlfriends one after another. I couldn’t really treat them as friends. That habit didn’t change even after I got married. Because of that, I ruined the business which I had built up so painstakingly.

I really grateful to my wife! She not only tolerated my infidelity, but also lived a miserable life with me without any complaints. Moreover, after I failed in business, she encouraged me to start all over again. In June 1989, with my wife’s encouragement, I tried to set up a business again.

The Fire of Ignorance

My wife and I sold vegetarian food in the morning. In the afternoon I traveled all over selling gears. Without my own capital, I just gave whatever orders I received to a factory. Slowly I managed to build up a legitimate business.

But the good times didn’t last. In August 1990, the factory robbed me of all my orders, and my hope as well. Money is not the most important thing, but hope is. Once you lose hope, it is difficult to withstand the pain in your heart and the feeling of not knowing what to do. The only customer who didn’t leave me was a Mr. Yen in Tainan, to whom I felt very grateful. He was a man of justice and rejected the enticements of the factory. He still gave his orders to me.

When I lost my whole business, the fire of ignorance flared up again in my heart. I told my wife that I was going to kill those two men in the factory who robbed my orders. My wife was very worried. She knew I would do what I said. But she managed to dissuade me from reverting to my gangster ways, and she gave me a book of Master Cheng Yen’s lectures. She told me that the Master’s brother was beaten to death in the army, yet the Master advised her mother to think of the feelings of the killer’s mother. She asked her mother to ask the military court to give clemency to the killer and reduce his penalty. What broad minds they must have had to forgive the other person! My wife said to me, “You’ve only lost your business. If you kill those two men, you yourself will also be ruined. Is it worth it?”

I was touched by the story of the Master Cheng Yen. My wife and I talked for a long time. I told her that since there was very little business anyway, I might as well take the opportunity to have the steel bar in my leg removed. I went to a hospital, and the surgeon told me that the operation was very simple. After he removed the bar, I only had to come back each day for medicine.

I was very glad that the procedure would be so simple, but I sought a second opinion from a friend who was also a surgeon. He affirmed that removing the bar was simple. However, it had been in my leg for more than twenty years. If something unexpected happened, I would be in big trouble.

When I heard that, I lost my confidence. At that time, I thought of the Tzu Chi General Hospital. I was told it was very well equipped and the doctors and nurses there were very caring. So my wife and I took the train to Hualien to visit the hospital.

The hospital was huge. But when I went into the diagnosis room, I lost my confidence again because the rooms were partitioned with shabby wooden boards. I was afraid that the skill of the surgeon would be as poor as the partitions.

The surgeon whom I consulted, Dr. Chen Yin-ho, chief of the orthopedics department, confirmed that it was easy to remove the steel bar. He told me that since it had been in my leg for twenty years, something unexpected might happen. But he assured me that he had full confidence.

I figured that since I was already there, I might as well get the operation over with. Once inside the operating room, I saw that all the facilities were the most modern and advanced. I realized that Master Cheng Yen didn’t waste any money donated by the public. She had spend money on the important things and saved where she should save. Knowing that, I lay peacefully on the operating table.

The operation, which usually needs four hours, took only one. I stayed in the hospital for eight days after the operation. All the medical staff were very kind to me.

The forth day happened to be Sunday. Several hundred Tzu Chi members from Taipei came to visit the hospital. My wife pushed me in a wheelchair to the hospital lobby, where Master Cheng Yen gave the Tzu Chi people a lecture. Several commissioners also told their personal experiences.

The visitors left around 5.00 p.m. The Master went to inspect a construction site in the hospital compound and then returned to the lobby. My wife pushed me over to greet her.

The Master asked me why I was in the hospital. I told the Master all that had happened in the past. I cried when I thought about all the bad things that had happened to me, and my wife knelt down next to me. The Master told me not to be too sad. “Although your business was stolen, what about your skills? Have they been stolen too?”

“No, they’re all still in my mind.”

“Since you still have your skills, you can start all over again. I give you my blessing.” She held me with one hand and my wife with the other.

At the time when I felt the most helpless, the Master was so kind to me. That touched me deeply.

Master Cheng Yen’s Counsel

The Master’s counsel gave me wisdom. My heart was opened. I no longer felt hatred toward those two men who robbed me. On the contrary, I felt grateful to them. They had given me the chance to go to Hualien to have the operation, which gave me the chance to see Master Cheng Yen, which allowed me to start a new life.

“Misfortune might be a blessing in disguise.” I was lucky that I had taken my wife’s advice and refrained from any impulsive and foolish actions.

When I was discharge from the hospital, we went back to Taichung. At the end of the year, Sister Ke, a Tzu Chi commissioner, suggested that we go with a group of Tzu Chi members to Hualien to spend the New Year holidays there. My wife and I accepted the invitation with pleasure.

On the train, I deeply sensed that the Tzu Chi world was very different from others. It was an organization full of peace and love. Everybody chanted “Amitabha.” The Tzu Chi people rendered services to other people with kindness and sincerity. The train moved peacefully, but my mind was not at peace. I was preoccupied with various thoughts.

Why, in the same world, do some people actively create blessings while others only make bad karma? Why do the people who breathe the same air live such different lives?

When we arrived at the Abode of Still Thoughts in Hualien, it was already afternoon. Master Cheng Yen came in. Everybody was excited and happy to see her. My wife suggested that since it was inconvenient for me to walk, we could just stand in the back. Unexpectedly, the Master walked through the crowd toward me and asked if my leg was getting better.

I hadn’t experience motherly love in twenty years, and I was moved to tears by what she said. Ever since I began to support myself, I had always risked my life for money. No one had ever cared about me. Only the Master cared about me with her motherly love. How could I not to be touched?

Everybody encouraged me to walk a few steps. However, the Master’s show of kindness had made my legs numb and I could only stand. The Master encouraged me by saying that when my leg was recovered, I should start working as soon as possible to establish my own business and also to join the Tzu Chi world.

The next day, the Master told us that when the idea of building a hospital came to her mind, she didn’t have one tile or one grain of sand. She only had confidence, perseverance and courage. She combined the strength of people from all walks of life and finally built the hospital to help the suffering.

After the Master’s lecture, my wife pointed out to me that we had nothing. If we wanted to stage a comeback, all we had were---as the Master had said---confidence, perseverance and courage. I felt the Master had actually directed her words toward me, so I was full of confidence.

After my leg recovered, I stood up and went to work. As it turned out, a Japanese company had come to Kaohsiung to set up a factory. The man in charge of purchasing was as old friend of mine. One day he came to my house and asked me to help obtain a precision-made bronze shaft.

Because of my lack of knowledge, I went to many places to consult with experts. Fortunately, they all taught me patiently. The next problem was capital. The material was a controlled item made in Japan, and it had to be imported by the new factory. The capital required was around NT$8 million [then US$200,000]. How could I get so much money? I was in such agony that I couldn’t eat or sleep.

My wife suggested that I go to Hualien again to ask Master Cheng Yen for advice. The Master said: “Whatever you want to do, as long as you have confidence, perseverance and courage, you will succeed. Please don’t worry.”

Not long after we came back home, that friend in charge of purchasing came to see me. He said, “It’s a blessing from heaven---you have very good luck,” The bronze needed for the shaft was now available. The headquarters in Japan had one lot to be scrapped, and it would be shipped to Taiwan for me to make the shaft. I didn’t need to pay a penny!

How incredible! It was too good to be true. My wife said that the Master always told us that many Tzu Chi members together would create strong power and blessings. Since we were walking on the Path of the Bodhisattvas, all the Tzu Chi members gave us blessings. Certainly heaven would give us strength.

The shaft was eventually made. Right now my heart is filled with gratitude. I want to express my gratitude to our Master, to all Tzu Chi members, to those who have helped me and to those who have pulled me through times of adversity.

Cause and Effect

I hope those friends who have gone astray like I did will return to the path of righteousness as soon as possible. As long as you have confidence, perseverance and courage, you will definitely be able to return and society will surely accept you. If you can’t control yourself and you don’t even have the courage to return, what kind of weakling are you? How can you expect others to accept you?

I also hope the public won’t reject the returned prodigal sons. If you reject them, you will force them to choose the wrong paths. Please accept them with love. You don’t have to give them sympathy, but you must give them care and encouragement.

Last but not least, I hope everybody will believe in the law of cause and effect. Just look at my leg, which was broken into four pieces and was fixed with a steel bar for twenty years. Isn’t that retribution?