"If It Is Made Fresh Each Day, Renew It Day by Day, Day after Day"

The Confucian classic Daxue (Great Learning) puts forward the life ideal of "if it is made fresh each day, renew it day by day, day after day"—a spirit of constant self-renewal. In the Three Kingdoms period, Lü Meng said another line: "When a scholar has been away three days, one should look at him with new eyes." The reason one must look with new eyes is that the scholar can "make himself fresh each day, renew himself day by day, day after day." Tsinghua University's motto is "Be as generous as the earth to carry all things; renew the humanities day by day." This motto fully embodies the spirit of valuing self-renewal in traditional Chinese culture.

In the Buddhist Diamond Sutra, the Buddha tells beings that "the past mind is unobtainable, the present mind is unobtainable, the future mind is unobtainable." If a person is constantly learning and experiencing life, the mind is inevitably always changing, so the so-called "I" (self-awareness) is not an eternal existence but is renewed day by day and constantly changing. Also in the Diamond Sutra, the Buddha holds that if one wants to attain the Way and become a Buddha, achieving final spiritual liberation, one must plant good roots under hundreds of thousands of Buddhas, not just one or two. This is in effect saying that a person must learn widely from many people before their spiritual world can finally achieve perfection.

In the Buddhist Sutra of Forty-two Sections, when the Buddha's disciples asked him "what is the brightest?" the Buddha replied: "When the defilements of the mind are utterly extinguished, pure and flawless, that is the brightest. From before heaven and earth existed up to today, of all the ten directions, there is nothing not seen, nothing not known, nothing not heard; to attain all wisdom may be called brightness." The Buddha was a man who had received palace education and was extremely learned and studious. In the Buddha's time, ancient India was turbulent and unsettled; sages withdrew to the forests to practice, exchanging ideas frequently and debating fiercely. In this environment the Buddha too went through a stage of "making himself fresh each day, renewing himself day by day, day after day." Hence he deeply understood this state of a self that changes from moment to moment—"the past mind unobtainable, the present mind unobtainable, the future mind unobtainable."

Western psychology holds that a person's change must first begin with cognitive change. The so-called change of cognition is a concept very similar to the Confucian "make it fresh each day, renew it day by day, day after day." And cognition can only be changed through reading ten thousand books and traveling ten thousand miles.

"Daily renewal," taken literally, means that each day a new self arises, each day surpassing the self of yesterday. My personal experience is that after a person passes thirty, the speed of daily renewal grows faster and faster. Especially once one understands the importance of self-reflection, the "daily renewal" becomes even more obvious. There is no one in this world who never changes; as long as one wants to change, anyone can change. It is only that a considerable number of people are stubborn in character and refuse to change themselves. From my observation, most such people lack the spirit of reflection.

Why should a person renew himself daily? This question is worth thinking on. Some people renew themselves daily because they love thinking. Others need daily renewal because they dislike themselves. Still others have such poor survival and adaptability that if they do not renew daily they will easily be eliminated, so they have no choice. More importantly, in a constantly evolving social group, if we do not renew daily we will inevitably be eliminated by the group. Unless a person has made full spiritual preparation to withdraw from the human group and live in seclusion, we otherwise have to face the reality that our surroundings are "renewing daily," and therefore keep ourselves in a state of daily renewal as much as possible.

Some anthropologists hold that the more human society develops and the more complex it becomes, the more the development of social organization has sacrificed human individuality, cutting the innate bonds that connected early humans to those around them, making some relatively weaker individuals very ill-adapted after entering social groups. This is an unavoidable tragedy in the evolution of our whole species; human evolution comes at the cost of sacrificing part of the weak. If one does not want to fall victim to social development, daily renewal is unavoidable.

In scholarship, I strongly oppose the retrograde tendency of stubborn conservatism, refusing to let the "humanities renew day by day." A society or individual that overly venerates the past and is conservative can hardly move forward. Especially in medicine—a discipline that must constantly progress to better solve the physical and mental illnesses of humanity—blindly venerating the past and being conservative easily leads into a predicament.