Master Chin Kung - Essence of Vajra Sutra # 3 B 金剛經要義

(English subtitles) Buddhist Master Chin-Kung (淨空法師), 1927-2022, talks dharma.
Subtitles:
When I first started learning Buddhism, my predestined bond was very special. Generally speaking, I am very lucky. Good luck is a common term in the world. But in Buddhism, it is said that my predestined bond is special. Several of the people I met were truly good knowledge, so I did not take the wrong path. I studied Buddhism when I was 26 years old. Mr. Dongmei Fang introduced Buddhism to me, and I started reading Buddhist sutras. I had been reading Buddhist sutras for less than a month when a friend introduced me to Master Zhangjia.
Then I received his guidance for three years. During this period, a colleague of mine, Mr. Ye, introduced me to the venerable layman Jingzhou Zhu, who was the same age as Teacher Li, and they were closed friends and are from the same hometown. At that time, he founded the Taiwan Sutra Printing Office in Taipei. Back then, there was a shortage of Buddhist sutras in Taiwan, and it was not easy to get a copy of a sutra, so we had to copy a lot of books that we wanted to read.
2:00
Shandao Temple in Taipei has some collection of books. We borrowed this collection to transcribe it ourselves. So we were learning the hard way, but it was useful.
　When I knew Mr. Zhu, he was already 70 years old. He took care of us very much and often tells us stories. Those stories are all his own personal experiences, true and not false.
3:00
What impressed me the most was that he said all those who die in war are doomed, indicating that what we see those people die by accident, who are also doomed, and no one is unjustly innocent. He told us a fact that before the resistance war, he was a bank manager in Suzhou. It was 40 years ago when he told me this. He often played mahjong together with several friends after work. One of the friends was doing the yin errand. This was true, not false.
4:00
When doing the yin errands, he went to the ghost path at night and came back at dawn. So this man is very hard-working and has to work day and night. He works in the human world during the day and works in the underworld at night. This is called go the yin errand. There really are some cases on the mainland. It proves that the path of hungry ghosts is real and not fake.
One day, the Suzhou branch received a book of life and death books from the Shanghai. There were many people on the list. He who went the yin errands was curious and went to look it up. After looking up, he was very confused by the large number of 4-word names.
5:00
The next day, when chatting with Zhu and several friends, he talked about this matter, none could figure it out. They thought Chinese names usually have three characters, and rarely have four characters. They had no clue at all. Three months later, the Japanese launched the battle in Shanghai, January 28th, 1932. They suddenly realized. It turns out that the book of life and death are the registers of the Japanese who died in the battle of Shanghai during the Incident, and they were sent to Suzhou three months ago. How can anyone be wrongly killed? If you aren't doomed to die, you'll be fine even if a bullet hits you.
6:00
This indicates that there is no unjust death in this world. This is "karmic retribution never fail." When and where you will die has already been predestined, no one died accidentally. Hence, it gives us great vigilance, and we must proceed with caution. Dying of war or sudden death are very bad phenomena, and it will be difficult to achieve good paths in the afterlife. Because he is panicked when he dies, he is prone to fall into the evil path. This is something we have to know, so we must be cautious with creating the causes.
7:00
The second one, he told us a story happened in 1910. At that time, Zhu was still very young. He is from Wenzhou, Zhejiang, and his family lives in the countryside. There was a scholar in a neighboring village who passed the imperial examination in the late Qing Dynasty. Although he won the imperial examination, he did not become an official. He was an only son. He took care of his parents at home, studied and farmed, leading a plain and peaceful life.
8:00
People in this place respected this scholar very much.
He said that one day at noon, when he was taking a nap, he heard someone knocking at the door, so he got up and opened the door. In fact, he was dreaming. He dreamed that there were two people leading a horse. They took a letter and asked if there was such a person in this place. When he saw that his name was written on the envelope, he said that I am the one. The two errand men were happy and said, Our general invites you to meet and talk. He was perplexed on hearing this. He said that although I had been successful in the exam, I had never interacted with the officialdom.