Cherish Blessings, Cherish Connections, Cherish This Life

My wife's salary was cut this month, and her housing provident fund has been delayed in coming; my own income has dropped by more than half. We still have debts and a mortgage to pay, so money has begun to tighten. The impact of COVID-19 on ordinary families is showing day by day.

But we are not the worst off; there are great numbers of unemployed people whose lot is even harder.

I am digging out all the things at home that I bought but hardly ever used, and keeping objects I would otherwise have thrown away, putting everything to use. No longer shopping and buying books as freely as I did last year.

When Master Hongyi studied Buddhism under Master Yinguang, every word and deed of Yinguang's was a model for others. Hongyi was deeply impressed by Yinguang's frugality, and especially moved by Yinguang's words: "You must cherish your blessings!" After he became a monk, Hongyi would not waste a single grain of rice; his towel and toothbrush he kept using until they were worn beyond worn; a single quilt he patched again and again.

The life I lived as a child was frugal too, first because my family was poor, and second because the family ethos my grandmother championed was frugality. My grandmother was someone who cherished her blessings like Masters Yinguang and Hongyi; she treasured even a bowl of porridge or a meal and would never waste it.

I do not advocate consuming as little as my grandmother did; when one has the means, one should still consume. Consumption creates jobs for others and solves the problem of putting bread on their families' tables; so consumption is not squandering—it is accumulating virtue.

But if we truly lack the means to consume as we once did, we must learn to live frugally and tide over the present difficulty. That the world economy is shrinking is already a fact; how long it will shrink is uncertain. What I care about most is whether any of my relatives and friends can no longer put food on the table; if someone cannot, I will consider sharing some of my grain with them.

Giving help to relatives and friends is not merely a matter of cherishing blessings; it also has an element of cherishing connections. I am rather fond of solitude and normally dislike disturbing my relatives and friends; still less do I like sponging off others, because fawning on the powerful is a kind of clinging I detest. But in a great disaster, relieving relatives and friends is quite necessary; giving someone a hand before disaster strikes is cherishing a connection, not clinging.

From a sociological point of view, no human being is a completely isolated animal; even a solitude-lover like me is by no means isolated. If I truly had no relatives or friends, my inner world would collapse. Each of us needs warmth, needs love, needs the support of kin.

For those with means, relieving relatives and friends is the most effective form of social relief. Institutional disaster relief inevitably has problems of efficiency and fairness, but relieving kin avoids these problems.

Not long ago my wife's school asked its teachers to donate to support Hubei. My wife wanted to give more, but I told her not to overdo it; just give the basic amount—there is money to support your own family.

We ourselves are Hubei disaster victims; so many people throughout the clan are affected. Even now, among my relatives and friends I have not heard of anyone who received disaster relief money or grain.

I do not know how the money I donated was distributed, and no one explained it to me. Rather than let people distribute our money in opaque ways, it is better that we ourselves, openly and clearly, give to our relatives and friends.

When this plague began, I once donated in whole ten-thousands, but after the Red Cross scandal broke I somewhat regretted being so impulsive.

For ordinary Hubei people like us, with so many disaster-stricken people in our own clan, such donations frankly are far less efficient; it is more practical for us to buy rice and distribute it to our own kin.

Occasionally I write grand narratives at the national and all-humanity level, but the life that ultimately comes down to earth is huddling together with one's own relatives and friends for warmth. I believe most people are like this too.

Staying alive is our only craving in the face of this plague. The people we can truly help, and who can truly help us, are very few; these bonds with us are deep, and we must cherish them. Only when everyone cherishes these connections can we all join hands to tide over the crisis.

The human body is hard to come by; life is precious. It is no disgrace to have a strong will to live. We praise heroes who fear no death, but in my view it would be even more perfect if those heroes, while saving others, also cherished their own lives. We medical people especially advocate protecting ourselves before saving others.

This time someone told me that the government saved us. I do not quite agree. I believe we all saved ourselves. Governments around the world merely did what they were supposed to do after taking our taxes—and some things they did not do flawlessly.

For those of us in medicine, in the face of plague we are the ones who save; to say we are the ones saved would make no doctor accept it. Erasing our doctors' contribution and transferring it to others is both heartless and ignorant; even political leaders would not dare do that.

My own family is protected by me. I warned them as early as mid-January, so not a single one of my family or friends was infected. Moreover, I have saved more than my own kin; because of my early warnings, at least many people benefited.

As far as I know, many doctors in Wuhan warned their own relatives and friends in advance, so many Wuhan residents actually took precautions. It is just that we medical people have limited power; our voices could spread only within our small circles, and some were suppressed and attacked, so the effect was limited.

Some local-government officials I know, having seen my warnings on WeChat, took prevention and control action locally in advance, thereby saving local people too.

These people who were inadvertently saved because of our actions share a certain affinity with us. So each of us doing our duty benefits someone; this too, in the unseen scheme of things, is cherishing a connection.

The disaster will pass. Whether society progresses or regresses ultimately depends on every one of us. Hard times will last a while; those who can share both sweetness and bitterness with us are people worth cherishing. Those who profit from the fire will, sooner or later, be abandoned.