Materialization, Mutual Equality, Lesser Unity, Freedom, Freedom from Desire, Stillness, Supremacy, Returning to the Hidden, Great Unity...
Nine Major Grotto-Heavens, nine Great Worlds, represented the different stages and achievements of this heavenly society's development. They could also be called the materialized nine realms!
This was the ideal heaven Li Chen had envisioned by combining the essence of Daoist, Buddhist, and Confucian teachings.
In his past life, Li Chen had struggled against the limitations of earthly humanity, searching far and wide through works such as the Dao De Jing, the Book of Changes, Zhuangzi, Liezi, the Sutra of Forty-Two Chapters, and the Analects. After surveying the essential teachings of Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism, he had not attained complete enlightenment, but he had finally understood that all contradictions lay within the human heart.
For people living in this world, the mind was the key: it was the reflection of the material world upon the spirit.
Although people lived in the material world, everything they saw, heard, thought, and imagined was still influenced by their own minds. As the saying went, the four elements were all empty, and nothing existed outside the mind.
Yet consciousness was also determined by matter. Human desires could not be separated from the body's needs, and human ideas could not be separated from the environment in which people grew up or the education they received. If the mind itself was determined by matter, how could there truly be nothing outside it?
Ten thousand expanses of fertile fields, yet only three measures of grain eaten each day; a thousand spacious rooms, yet only eight feet needed to sleep at night. Such wise words certainly had merit, but they were difficult to put into practice.
If someone could attain such understanding and truly act upon it, then even without meritorious