How to Cure Ignorance? Only Through Learning!

Everyone has areas in which they know nothing or only half-understand; in those areas we are ignorant, and only learning can root out this ignorance.

Even with lifelong learning, we still have many blind spots in our knowledge, which is why no omniscient person exists in this world. Society compensates for each individual's shortcomings in knowledge and skills through division of labor and cooperation. But as an individual, it is always better to learn a bit more; the more you know, the fewer mistakes you make.

Smart people know how to conceal their weaknesses and remain cautious in speech and conduct outside their professional field. Ignorant people always put on an air of the fearlessness of the uninformed, convinced that their own judgments are correct. We often have to pay for our wrong judgments, because wrong judgments mostly lead to wrong decisions.

In any society, people should not only receive professional training but also a general education; otherwise they easily become one-sided people who "know only one aspect and not the other."

But in this era of knowledge explosion, general education is very expensive and lengthy; most people need a lifetime of reading and study to complete it. Personally, however, I believe that in order to make fewer mistakes, spending more time completing a general education through self-study is worthwhile.

When I was young and high-spirited, I had no doubt about my own judgments; after middle age I began to question many of the things I had learned in the past. Because as age and experience grew — and, most critically, as my own knowledge grew — I discovered that my earlier understandings were not entirely correct.

I am forty-one this year, and I do not plan to stop reading, stop exploring new things, stop continuing to learn, or stop negating myself. If one cannot negate one's own past, one cannot accept new knowledge.

There is a Chinese idiom: "A single leaf blinds the eye and prevents one from seeing Mount Tai." Buddhism has a concept called the "hindrance of views." Both speak of how inherent thinking in the mind prevents a person from seeing a broader world.

As I have grown older, I have become increasingly able to tolerate things that I previously could not. For example, when I studied medicine, I mainly studied TCM; for a while, heated up, I criticized Western medicine like many TCM practitioners. But later I no longer felt such dislike; not only that, I began to study it seriously, and in the process I found that I gained a great deal of new knowledge.

So I have gradually become unwilling to get involved in the various disputes between Chinese and Western medicine. Rather than spending time arguing with others over who is right in words, it is better to save that time and read more books.

I have now grown accustomed to quickly ending meaningless conversations and associations. I regard myself as a "fool" rather than a "sage"; I need to spend more time than the wise on learning and completing a general education, so I have less time to argue with people until foaming at the mouth.

But some people have plenty of time and energy for quarreling — forgive me for saying so, but in my forty-plus years of life I have never seen a quarrel change anyone's views. Both sides in a quarrel merely hope to change the other through arguing, but that is a goal unlikely to be achieved.

Productive discussion requires that both sides have a certain professional background. I have a few friends with whom I discuss things regularly, and I always benefit from those discussions. Sometimes in the course of mutual discussion I discover my own shortcomings and my shallow understanding of certain things; after the discussion I will buy a few books to read and give my brain some nourishment. Next time I discuss a similar topic with someone, the conversation can be more interesting, and I can learn deeper things from others.

If I had no foundation at all, discussions with professionals would leave me completely bewildered; listening to them talk for a long time would be like entering a treasure mountain and returning empty-handed.

Curing ignorance is a lifelong task. One must have the courage to cure one's own ignorance and cultivate the habit of doing so in order to learn more and gradually raise one's level of understanding.