Jottings of an Ordinary Person (1)

July 17, 2015

A person has two problems to solve: one is his own state of mind, the other is how to get along with others. The way to solve them changes with the times. Solving the first solves most of one’s personal happiness; solving the second solves the rest of one’s personal happiness and part of the happiness of those connected to one.

Honesty is the prerequisite for thoroughly and efficiently solving every problem. Dishonesty may solve part of a problem but leaves a messy trail of leftovers. Everything must rest on sincerity; without sincerity, even the kindest intentions cannot solve a problem at root. Facing one’s own errors honestly, constantly examining oneself, and quickly correcting faults is the best way to grow and perfect oneself.

A person who escapes reality cannot teach the beings who must face reality how to solve their problems, yet they feel they can—which is absurd. They can only teach people to escape; escaping and solving are two entirely different things.

Whether life has meaning and value is not important; what matters most is that the heart be happy and joyful. Meaning and value end up as emptiness anyway. To be unhappy and joyless is to waste this life.

If I had not suddenly gotten cancer, with my present state of mind and the health knowledge I have mastered, I could probably live past a hundred without much problem, and in old age my thinking would still be sharp and my ability to think and write still strong. I should plan the rest of my life well and stop wasting time. A man in his thirties or forties is exactly when he should be doing something serious. Regardless of whether it has meaning, at the very least one must be true to oneself.

I have a view that sounds funny: we cannot solve the problems left over from the old era; we can only wait for nature to solve them, letting the old guard die off naturally. The young should devote themselves to building a new society, not argue themselves hoarse trying to change the old—after all, we cannot kill them all to build a new society. That would be inhumane. The middle-aged and young should just seek a new way forward, bury themselves in breakthroughs like Liu Chuanzhi, and not get tangled up with the older generation. Nature will eliminate the old forces generation by generation.

The old-guard cannot run new businesses; the nostalgic cannot solve new problems. The times move forward; the individual cannot step back.

Mr. Fei Xiaotong’s From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society is a book I cannot put down. Ray Huang’s macro-historical view gave me great inspiration. My observations during cultivation at Longquan Monastery made me realize that traditional Chinese culture built on agrarian society has a very harmful side; some of what I saw on Tianya forum made me realize that today’s thinkers who care about social development are in fact all quite lost.

The question China most needs to consider now may be: how to build a good urban China, so that the growing numbers of Chinese living in cities have a peaceful social and natural environment. This is an extremely complex sociological problem; the world of thought needs to elaborate old meanings, absorb new knowledge, and create a new, workable system of thought—not cling to the old. Perhaps it is time for a work of thought, an Urban China, to appear that can stand beside From the Soil.

Urban life requires a different philosophy of life from ancient pastoral times. Pastoral life can be self-sufficient; the social environment of cities must be built and shared by all. It is necessary to learn from successful models of urban construction. Modern people cannot return to the ancient idyllic age. I once thought long and hard about classical philosophy, looking for ways to solve practical problems, only to find it conflicted with my concrete life situations. The root cause is that the social foundation of existence has changed.

Almost everyone in China has an escapist attitude and too little spirit of participation, which is why the social environment keeps deteriorating. Much of the thought of classical philosophy and the various religious schools can no longer adapt to the new urban age, and little wisdom can be drawn from them. Classical thought excels at solving the problems of the individual in solitude, but on how crowds coexist, though there is some discussion, the relevant thought is backward. How crowds coexist better is a technical problem that needs new avenues.

Think independently; inherit critically. Do not deny the reasonable part of others’ words, nor blindly believe all their theories; be diligent in examining your own faults, and do not use anyone else’s words as an excuse for your own errors. In this way you can minimize mistakes. Keep a clear head and an easygoing manner. It is fine to take small losses or small traps; harming others is a sin, and doing evil is one source of affliction. Objectivity and rationality lead to less evil and less trouble.

When belief runs deep, one easily becomes dogmatic and arrogant; this is spiritual poisoning, not salvation. Whether one believes in a religion, some ideology, or some life attitude or pursuit, this easily happens. A person is arrogant; after believing in a religion he lays down his arrogance before his deity, then takes his deity as the greatest being and his faith as the greatest faith—entering the state of religious arrogance, which is still arrogance. And this arrogance drives a person to interfere with others; if it goes wrong, one becomes a Hitler, very harmful to others.

Where there is arrogance there is prejudice, and arrogance and prejudice are obstacles to seeing the pluralistic world and regarding all beings with an equal mind. As Du Fu mocked so well: “Your persons and your names alike will perish, yet the great rivers flow on forever.” Not only is secular life of little value, but all “great” causes are of little value too.

I truly must learn, think, act, and live, but in the end I must understand: what I learn and think, what I gain through hard work, is nothing remarkable. Treating these as pleasure rather than honor is the most honest and least harmful attitude toward one’s spirit. Loving to do something is better than any other reason.

Liu Chuanzhi put it well: make close friends, build key partnerships, and take trustworthiness as the first principle.

A mere ordinary person, who has accomplished nothing, is worthless, and is full of flaws. One must strive and correct oneself.

Most of my life is already past; I can only continue to reflect and improve myself, while hoping that my son will have stronger problem-solving and reflective abilities than I, and at the same time a more ordinary state of mind and a more detached bearing through life, yet never surviving by depending on others’ favor. Financial freedom is required for spiritual freedom; talking about spiritual freedom without a material foundation is very hard. So I hope my son, while tempering his mind, does not forget to learn skills—he should be versed in letters, science, crafts, and medicine, with knowledge and action united.

Stop desires when enough is enough; act without harming others. Be honest, loyal, tolerant, and broad-minded. Do not speak falsehood; do not speak truth when it would wound others. Do not harm others to benefit oneself, nor harm oneself to benefit others. Help those who deserve sympathy, but do not be a blanket good person wasting one’s life everywhere. Constantly reflect on one’s own faults; just cultivate slowly.

July 17, 2015

Why does a person become perplexed? It is always because he is bewitched by himself, not by others. No longer perplexed means being free of self-bewitchment; it is a state that integrates forward and reverse thinking and can constantly discover one’s own blind spots, not a state of already knowing everything. In the state of no perplexity, one can think at any time and reflect at any time; one is not swayed by others, nor by one’s own emotions.

High school education is the most important stage in a person’s life; one must have a good teacher. I will definitely find a good high-school teacher for my son later. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg all dropped out of university; I think that by university age a person can already study on his own and needs no mentor, and needing one then is a waste of precious time.

A person should be fervent when young and balanced when grown. The young, without fervor, cannot sweep away obstacles and form their own way of thinking and grow quickly; the grown, without balance, cannot live well.

Self-discipline, self-confidence, self-encouragement, self-examination, self-improvement, and self-perfection must all be done by oneself. A person who lives under pressure, not easily, with work and life going badly, does so not because others have caused him great trouble, but because he has not yet understood and mastered himself.

A good life mentor can awaken a person’s abilities to think independently, reflect, correct himself, restrain himself, perfect himself, and strive on his own; when this is done, education succeeds. The transmission of knowledge is only secondary. That is why Han Yu said that it is easy to get a teacher of classics but hard to get a teacher of persons. This is an eternal truth of education. Anyone who teaches students to obey the mentor is either a fraud with ulterior motives, or someone who himself does not understand what true education is.

What is masculine beauty? In my eyes, masculine beauty is like Xiao Feng in Jin Yong: so long as it does not violate conscience, he can fly into a rage, having the courage and resolve that says, “Though there are thousands upon thousands, I go!” Yet when facing enemies and the weak, at the critical moment he is magnanimous and lets them go. Passionate in feeling yet true to his nature. Or like the Sweeping Monk: generous, honest, wise, and perceptive. Masculinity requires courage, wisdom, strength, and breadth, as well as insistence on great right and wrong and responsibility for life and society.

The pursuit of material things always has a point of satisfaction; the pursuit of thinking and spiritual cultivation is endless.

July 20, 2015

When reason overcomes desire, that is when spirit overcomes matter. The more a person thinks, the less attached he is to material things, fame, and status, and the more solid his inner joy becomes. After tens of millions of years of development, humanity’s treasury of wisdom is already vast; no one in a lifetime can fully understand all human wisdom. But the broader a person’s range of contact, the more it helps eliminate arrogance and prejudice. The broader the contact, the less arrogance and prejudice in the heart, gradually approaching none. Desire, arrogance, and prejudice are the sources of human strife.

If we only understand how we ourselves think and not how others think, it is hard to forgive them. Though two people need not be close, there is no need for them to hate and blame each other. A person cannot resolve disputes with others by escaping the world; those who successfully escape the world are few. What truly resolves disputes with others is penetrating wisdom and a tolerant heart; with penetrating wisdom and a tolerant heart, we can understand and forgive anyone, and then no one can stir our negative emotions.

So to gain true spiritual freedom, one does not hide from others; one understands others. Broadening one’s horizons, increasing wisdom, and expanding one’s heart are the fundamental way to spiritual freedom.

Forgiveness is not the absence of right and wrong, nor unprincipled tolerance of all wrongdoing. If one sees wrongdoing, one should stop it without hesitation. To ignore wrongdoing in the name of forgiveness is to violate basic conscience and show a lack of social responsibility. An ideal society is one in which all wrongdoing is effectively restrained, both by self-restraint and by social restraint. A person sometimes does evil without knowing it, or knowing it cannot control it; then social restraint is needed. There are two channels of social restraint: legal sanction, and the timely intervention of others.

The great world is not a perfect world, so the looser and more humane the rules against wrongdoing, the better; so long as one has not harmed others’ interests, any individual’s thought and behavior should be regarded as reasonably existing. But when a person’s behavior

July 25, 2015

The less you seek, the happier; the more you care, the more painful. Letting go to the utmost gives the utmost freedom: let go of grievances, and there is no hatred; let go of greed, and there is no anxiety; let go of obsession, and there is no unease; let go of wrong thoughts, and there is no disquiet; let go of arrogance, and there is no contention; let go of prejudice, and there is no friction; let go of vanity, and there is no affectation. Let go of everything and be an ordinary person, and the heart will be as clear as possible, leaving only ease and joy.

The economist Lin Yifu said that the fundamental factor shaping an era is the various currents of thought that emerge in it; this is quite correct. A current of thought is a popular idea that has the greatest influence on the public. Sometimes such popular ideas are very harmful—for example the Nazism Hitler believed in, Japanese militarism, and the frenzied revolutionary fervor that swept all of China during the Cultural Revolution; events have shown that these currents were very harmful.

But as the French philosopher Le Bon studied, when a group falls into some current of thought, few people consider its harm. That is why Le Bon named all kinds of groups “the crowd” and held that for a group, independent thinking does not exist; once a person falls into a group, his IQ drops markedly.

I have deep experience of this. I now like the state of living apart from the crowd; except when work requires dealing with people, I spend the rest of my time quietly reading, thinking, and writing. I have blocked all my fanatical religious friends, whether Buddhists, Christians, or Catholics. The reason is simply that these people have long lived among religious groups, their thought is near-fanatical and dogmatic, and they always try to convert everyone around them to be like themselves.

At the same time, I keep a distant distance from all those who embrace some kind of idealism and try to use it to unify the world. Countless beings each have their own life and their own splendor; to insist on converting them all is to spiritually castrate others for one’s own satisfaction. So those who claim to deliver all beings, no matter how great and kind they proclaim themselves, are at root evil and extreme; they simply do not realize that they build their own happiness and sense of achievement on the pain of trampling others’ will.

Sometimes the frenzied conversion campaigns they launch cause countless deaths and injuries among the innocent, yet they think the price is worth it. These fanatics are paranoid cognitive-disorder patients: they can only recognize the “good” they themselves see, not the “good” others see. The world is full of strife because of all the idealists who want to impose their own standard of “good” on others.

If a person cannot see the goodness in others and his own faults, that is a disaster both for himself and for those around him and the society he lives in. A person who believes he will go to heaven while others go to hell has deep vindictiveness in his heart, full of fault-finding and resentment toward the world and others. However gentle he pretends to be, he is actually aggressive. Truly gentle and tolerant people are mostly those who are learned, widely experienced, and broad-minded.

If I must find someone to admire, I might choose someone like Sun Simiao, the Medicine King of ancient China; his chapter “On the Absolute Sincerity of Great Physicians” moves me deeply. He held that a physician, even when an enemy comes to his door seeking treatment, must set aside hatred and do his utmost to heal; he should disregard all material rewards from the patient’s family. Before disease, there is no distinction of high or low status; respect for life comes first, and all beings are treated equally.

Now whenever I have time I study medicine to improve my diagnostic and therapeutic skill; perhaps when I am old I will, like the Medicine King Sun Simiao, practice medicine to save people and end my days. Such a heart as Sun Simiao’s must have benefited both himself and his patients greatly. That Sun Simiao lived past a hundred is certain; as for the claim in some books that he lived past 150, it may not be true, and his real age was probably around 106 to 120.

From practice I have come to realize that, standing in the physician’s place, understanding and sympathizing with everyone and helping relieve their suffering can, to the greatest extent, help me maintain a balanced state. No one in this world wants to be a person harmful to others, but countless people, because of the education they received in the past and the worldly events they have gone through, have formed character traits they cannot yet change; some of their behaviors, at root, are not within their own control.

The reason we tear ourselves and others into different social classes is precisely that we do not intend to understand others and only care about our own views.