Andrea Miller: What was your introduction to Buddhism?
Jet Li: In the 1980s, I was making my first movie, Shaolin Temple. I went to a few temples to make that film, and I was so happy. The temples just felt very familiar. After the movie was released, then I was quite famous in Asia, so lot of people would try to talk to me and to take pictures of me. To hide, I stayed in the temple in Beijing. They opened at nine o’clock in the morning, but at night they closed the door, so I could be free in the temple. Nobody bothered me after five o’clock in the afternoon.
Why, initially, did Buddhism resonate with you?
People always said you should work hard and become famous. That way, you’ll have money and can get anything you want, and then you will be very happy. So, I tried hard, but whenever I got something, I always wanted more. Happiness was very short lived. If I made a movie that was very successful, I was happy for only one or two months. Then if the next movie wasn’t as successful, I was unhappy. Most of the time, there was a lot of pressure. I worked so hard, and I struggled. I wanted to find happiness.
I was thinking about this more and more, and then I read The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. It’s a very interesting book, and it made me think about why we aren’t free. We’re nervous because we want to keep our life secure. We want more money, more power, more things. But in the end, we will all die. Then we’ll leave everything behind. So, what’s the solution to making us happy? It’s not fame or money. Being free happens only on the inside.
I became a Buddhist in 1997. Learning more and more from Buddhism for more than thirty years, I’ve found a way to be more at ease, much happier, much more relaxed.
Even for dharma practitioners, it can be hard to let go of the idea that worldly success can make us happy. Do you have any advice for people who are struggling to let go of that idea?
The problem is we’re always looking outside of ourselves for happiness. I learned from Buddhism to look inside and see who the decision-maker is in my life. Am I my own boss or am I being bossed around by outside labels, the ideas of society and other people?
I think this is very important. If you change your thinking, everything will change. In Buddhism, we
talk about the monkey mind. This is the monkey boss. If you know your mind, you understand the truth.
If I don’t know the truth, I will say, why am I unlucky? You think Jet Li is a success, but I think that’s not good enough. I want more. I want to be Tom Cruise. But if I get to be Tom Cruise, after that I want to be a successful corporate billionaire, triple billionaire.
You can always find something outside of yourself, something more that you can grasp for. But even if you get it, it will not give you enduring happiness. I have a lot of friends who are politicians, billionaires. They still have their troubles. They’re struggling. Everybody struggles. Maybe for normal people, the struggle is over a hundred thousand dollars, while for others it’s a hundred million. These are just the numbers. It’s important to look at what I actually need. It’s easy to mix up what I need with what I want. That makes for more pressure.
Buddhism has many schools, many different kinds of teachings. Usually, I suggest people read some Buddhist books, then watch teachings on YouTube. You need to believe there is a solution to fix your mind, then you can find a way, step by step, to improve. You will get happier and happier. Well, maybe the better word is “free.” You’ll get more and more open.
You’ve spent your life making movies. How has that shaped the way you see reality and the roles we all play?
I make movies, and I try hard to convince the audience to say, “Wow, so cool. That’s the real man. That’s the hero. That’s love.” I know it’s not true. It’s just a movie, but people think it’s true.
In a way, I think life itself is a movie. A lot of people think life is completely real, not a movie. But think about it: Maybe we’re stuck in a big movie, or maybe it’s like a video game. We’re stuck there, acting every day. We’re the performers, the writers, and the directors.
We’re suffering, but it is like a dream. In the dream, everything feels real, and then when you wake up, you realize it wasn’t real. If it’s not real, why let it bother you? Life also is like this.
If I know this whole journey is acting—is a movie—why am I struggling inside the movie, inside the character? Step by step, one day you can see absolute truth. Absolute truth—no subject, no object, no good or bad. And then you look back at the whole world, and maybe you see it’s just a video game. But a lot of people don’t know, so they’re stuck in the video game, stuck in the character. They don’t want to change. They only complain: “It is so bad. I’m so unlucky. I don’t have a good this. I don’t have a good that. I need more and more and more.” They always want to change the outside, not who they are.
It’s difficult to talk about Buddhism, because the true idea, the true belief is beyond the words, beyond sound. So, you can only use examples to explain the different angles from which you can see life.
You’ve studied with many different teachers over the years. How did you navigate all those different styles and teachings, and how did you eventually understand which practices were right for you at each stage of your path?
In the beginning, I met around thirty teachers. I really wanted to find the truth—relative truth and absolute truth. Different teachers have different styles. Some styles work for you, some don’t, and sometimes a style that doesn’t work for you works perfectly for somebody else. It’s like with children. You can’t just give a child a “universal teacher.” You need the right teaching at the right moment, something that helps you take the next step toward your goal.
A lot of Buddha’s teachings are about relative truth. The Buddha is like a doctor, and the sutras are like medicine. You need to understand what kind of problem you have. If you have a headache, you need the medicine for a headache. If you take the wrong medicine, it won’t help you. If you take something that’s only for the skin, of course it won’t fix your headache. That’s why there are 84,000 kinds of medicine for 84,000 kinds of suffering. You need to understand your own suffering and then ask a teacher to help you find the right medicine.
But sometimes even a teacher gives you the wrong medicine. You try it, and it doesn’t help. Then you need to find another doctor. You try again, and maybe that still doesn’t help. So, you keep going until one day you reach the understanding of emptiness. When you truly see emptiness, there is no center anymore—no patient, no “self” that is sick. You realize you don’t need medicine.
I understand this idea, but understanding it with the mind is different from experiencing it. To experience it, you need another kind of teacher—someone who can help you move from intellectual understanding to direct experience. Then you realize emptiness is not just a word or an idea. It’s something completely different.
When you look back after twenty years, you see that everything you learned before—all the Buddhist teachings—were relative medicine. They helped you at the time, and now you don’t need them anymore. You move to the next step. But for beginners, you have to go through the whole journey. You can’t skip it. Just like school: You need primary school, middle school, high school. Only after you graduate can you look back and see that what you learned wasn’t the final truth, yet you still needed every step to reach that point.
In Western popular culture, people often see martial arts and Buddhism as linked. From your perspective, where do they overlap, and where are they actually very different?
On the level of relative truth, there are some similarities. In martial arts, you start by looking at your weaknesses—what your problems are—and you train them. You become stronger, more skilled, more exceptional. In the beginning of Buddhist practice, it’s similar: You look at the causes of your suffering, and you find the right teaching or the right teacher to help you reduce that suffering. If one method doesn’t help, you try another—Zen, Tibetan Buddhism, different sutras—until you find what works for your personality.
But on the level of absolute truth, martial arts and Buddhism are completely different. Martial arts are about becoming special, becoming stronger than others. Buddhism ultimately points to emptiness. Martial arts don’t go to that level.
Shaolin is famous for both martial arts and meditation. How do you understand the relationship between movement, the body, and Buddhist practice?
Shaolin Temple was the first Zen Buddhist temple in China. People think meditation only means sitting and watching the breath, but the Shaolin masters developed movement meditation because sitting too long was difficult for the body. So, they created walking meditation, movement meditation—many ways to practice. Hearing, smelling, drinking—anything can become meditation if it leads to awareness. Awareness is the goal; meditation is the method. Different people need different methods depending on their personality.
In Tibetan Buddhism, you have the six yogas of Naropa, which use the body to help you experience the nature of mind. When the body opens, it becomes easier to understand how the mind works. Shaolin martial arts also developed in this direction—using the body to support awareness.
But today people are very busy and often don’t want to train the mind. They want to focus only on the body. That’s fine, but eventually the physical body stops working—that’s death—and then the subtle body continues.
How does Buddhist practice help you face aging?
For me, understanding absolute truth is what helps with aging. People are afraid of getting old, and they’re afraid of death—they don’t even want to hear the word. But if you look at human life, everyone is young and everyone, if they don’t die first, becomes old. It’s completely normal. If it’s normal, why be scared? I’m old—that’s just how it is.
People say, “Oh, I liked you when you were young, like in the movies.” That’s fine—that’s their opinion. I’m old now, and I’m okay with that. If someone hates that I’m old, it doesn’t change anything for me.
If there were someone in the world who could stay young forever, maybe I would feel differently. But everyone ages. It’s like the seasons. If you love spring, you might hate winter, yet winter comes anyway. Whether you like it or not doesn’t change the season. When something is natural, there’s no need to struggle with it.
You can try to keep your inner life fresh and young, but of course the body will change. Even if medicine improves and people live to be 150 or 300 years old, what’s the point if your inner problems aren’t solved? Why would I want to struggle for another hundred years? If the mind is still full of pressure and fear, a longer life just means a longer struggle.
A lot of people try to stay young on the outside with surgery, treatments, all kinds of things. Maybe it helps them look younger for a while, but inside they’re still struggling. They need constant effort and constant approval from others. That’s not confidence; that’s fear.
How do you understand the process of awakening—moving from an idea of enlightenment to actually experiencing it?
In the beginning, you read books or hear teachers talk about enlightenment, and you get an idea—a picture—that there is a way to have less suffering and more freedom. So, you want to follow that path. Then you practice, practice, practice, and slowly you try to bring what you’ve learned into your daily life.
But as long as there is still a strong sense of “yourself,” enlightenment is only an idea. Over time, that “self” becomes less and less solid. It’s gradual. Maybe at first you feel a few seconds of real awareness. Then, with practice, it becomes five minutes. Then thirty minutes. Then a few hours. That’s the journey I’m on.
Now I don’t think of enlightenment as something a person can “reach.” There is no person who becomes enlightened. Everyone already has Buddhahood—we just haven’t discovered it yet. So, you keep giving yourself time and space to uncover it until it becomes a lived experience instead of a concept.
As long as you’re asking, “Who is becoming enlightened?” or “Who is becoming a Buddha?”—that is not enlightenment. That’s still the mind creating a subject. And if someone says, “I am enlightened,” then for sure, that’s not it.
What does your practice look like these days?
These days, I just try to keep awareness in daily life. I watch “Jet Li”—the person doing interviews, promoting a book, helping others—the way you would watch a character in a movie. Every day the character acts, speaks, works. But awareness is what sees all of it. I can’t keep awareness every moment—my habits are still strong—but I try. That’s my practice now: staying aware of everything, watching the character Jet Li move through the world, and not getting caught in the story.
Finally, last question, what was your purpose in writing your new memoir, Beyond Life and Death: The Way of True Freedom?
I wrote this book because I wanted to share something simple with the world. In my understanding, the most important things for any human being are to be healthy and happy.
For physical health, there are many ways to train the body. A lot of people—not everyone, but many—already know how to take care of their physical “hardware.”
But I want to focus more on the mind, because the mind also needs training. The body gives you health; the mind gives you happiness. You can think of it as hardware and software. Both need attention. Both need balance.
If you only work on the body, you might be healthy but not happy. If you only work on the mind, you might have insight but no energy. So, I want to share how
training both—the physical and the mental—can help people live balanced, healthy, and happy lives.
That’s really the whole purpose of the book. I hope everyone can be healthy and happy.
