Carving Out the Years, Savoring the Rest of Life: Finding Joy in Growth Through Gardening

I love growing plants. None of what I grow is especially rare or expensive, but watching these plants flourish makes me genuinely happy from the bottom of my heart.

The lives of indoor plants are fragile; if they are not cared for well, they die. Lacking sunlight and water, they wither. Lacking nutrients, they will not grow vigorously.

My gardening skill is moderately above average; more than 80% of the plants I grow survive. I basically spend the whole day in my study—I study and work there, exercise there, and live there—so I am especially fond of this small room of mine. I grow all kinds of green plants here, which makes my study feel full of life.

I like to keep my study bustling with vitality. Having long worked with terminally ill cancer patients, my mission is to create miracles of life. I want to see life, not death. Death makes the heart too heavy; only vigorous life can bring joy.

Indoor space is limited, so I have to find ways to accommodate these plants. My balcony and the tops of my bookcases are full of the greenery I grow. Pothos has the strongest vitality and spreads everywhere; I use an existing shelf in my room as a trellis for its vines and let it grow freely. The life of all things is precious; "give life, do not kill; give, do not take away" is the bounden duty of a physician. I look forward to the day my pothos weaves a green bridge across my room.

Plants alone are a bit monotonous, so I also put small ornaments among them to make my "little garden" more charming.

Although I am not a Buddhist, I greatly admire Master Hongyi, so among the greenery I placed a statue of him. Occasionally, looking up and seeing Master Hongyi, I silently press my palms together in reverence and hold a dialogue with him in my heart. No one else can hear this dialogue, but it calms my mind.

By chance I have visited many of the places where Master Hongyi practiced and taught. I have been to the Great Kaiyuan Temple in Quanzhou, the former site of Hupa Temple in Hangzhou, and Zhanshan Temple in Qingdao—all places where Master Hongyi stayed after becoming a monk. In these temples I have sensed the state of mind of such a brilliant man who, in his forties, renounced everything and embraced a life of total emptiness.

There are still bonds in this world worth my clinging to; were it not so, I might have followed Master Hongyi into the monastery, living in some green, clear mountain hollow by farming and reading, amusing myself while also, through karmic connections, relieving the suffering of a few patients.

The begonias I grow have bloomed four times in a year. This is probably because my study faces south and gets excellent sunlight, so this begonia mistakenly believes it is always spring. My trick is that whenever the begonia's flowers fade and its leaves wither, I cut away all the dead branches. Remove those withered parts and, before long, the begonia puts out new buds and blooms and leafs out again.

Life is so wondrous. When some tissue in the human body is damaged and a surgeon removes the lesion, the body can regain new vitality. A withered plant, once its dead branches and leaves are removed, can flourish again. Only by removing the rotten can the new grow. People too should constantly prune away the rotten things in body and mind, so as to always retain vigorous vitality.

I am a person who has kept a childlike heart. In the flowerpots of some of my green plants I place a few toy dinosaurs as decoration, giving my "little garden" a Jurassic Park feel. A life without imagination is too monotonous and dull to be worth living. People need not only the world before their eyes but also a vast, boundless world of imagination; the richness of the spiritual world keeps one's inner landscape from becoming a desert.

Some European scientists have found that people who are keen on gardening generally live longer, because gardening stabilizes the mind, lifts mood, and can lower blood pressure. Scientists have even developed a set of horticultural therapy for treating various chronic diseases.

My pace of life has slowed step by step as I grow these green plants, until at last it draws very close to the natural state human beings are born with. This state relaxes me and lets me settle deeply into the medical research I love.

In a natural state, a person can most single-mindedly do what he loves. There is no need to care about social status, no pressure of professional titles, no red tape of the establishment; one is driven purely by passion forward of one's own accord. I believe this is freedom: when the soul is unshackled, the meaning of life is brought to its fullest.

In this life I am willing, like the begonias I grow, to bloom regardless of the season. I am also willing, like an orchid in a deep valley, quietly giving off my fragrance. I need no one's applause; it is enough that I myself am immersed in the joy of life.

Toward the world outside myself I have only one attitude: let karmic conditions take their course!