When Learning Reaches Its Depth, It Becomes Leisurely Delight

Great Beijing is so vast that most people who come to this city can never rise to prominence; in the end they all live unobtrusively.

Lin Yutang's Moment in Peking opens by creating the figure of Yao Sian, a Daoist man living in Beijing who contends with no one. I did not quite understand this before: logically, on the soil beneath the emperor's feet, people ought to be striving, so why would anyone love a life of quiet non-action?

After living in Beijing a long time, I gradually came to feel that after soaking in this enormous cultural melting pot, one easily has "a hundred steel blades turned into soft, pliable thread." Things that in a small place take a lifetime to experience can be lived through here in a very short while.

And once a Chinese person has broad experience, he quite unconsciously becomes a follower of Daoism.

I have been in Beijing nearly twenty years. In the first ten I lived as a passionate young man, energetic and striving, even speaking in ringing, forceful tones. In the last ten I have lived the quiet, non-active flavor of a Daoist: contending with no one, bearing grudges against no one, and at gatherings of friends, saying as little as possible. Over time, no one thinks to invite me anymore.

Everyone says Beijing is full of hidden dragons and crouching tigers, a city of talent; the capital has always been a hard place in which to make a living, and a cruel, fierce survival competition is always playing out here, never closing its curtain.

In such a place, both winners and losers emerge "scarred." To call Beijing a hail of gunfire may be an exaggeration, but who among those who muddle through Beijing has not been wounded a few times?

Qian Zhongshu, in Fortress Besieged, voiced a classic line: "Studying abroad can free one from this inferiority complex—not for the sake of deep scholarship. Going abroad is like having smallpox or mumps; you simply must have it, so that when you meet these microbes called doctors and masters, you have the antibodies to defend yourself."

Many things in life are like studying abroad as Qian described: like catching smallpox, you simply must go through it once. Many people will not be at peace until they have had their "pox." Once they have had it, they are immune.

The good thing about Beijing is that all the various "pox" and "mumps" a person must catch in a lifetime can be caught within just a few years.

So old Beijingers naturally carry the air of Daoist figures: they love visiting bird-and-flower markets, love strolling along tree-lined avenues, love playing blind chess on street corners—they just do not love talking about striving.

If you think these fellows are all fools, you are greatly mistaken. When they display their talents, you will find that among these seemingly idle characters there are countless masters.

Walk into any of Beijing's great parks, and the "Beijingers" who usually carry bird cages, grow flowers and look loafing play musical instruments at a level that commands admiration.

Just from this professional-level playing, you know how much silent hard work they have put in at home. How much more they have in their breasts is probably known only to themselves.

The Qing dynasty man of letters Li Yu was a thoroughgoing Daoist. He wrote a book, Xianqing Ou Ji (Occasional Offers of Leisurely Elegance), in which he enthusiastically advocated all sorts of leisurely, tasteful ways of living; the lifestyle he praised took deep root in China. Li Yu's prose is the unruffled, self-narrative voice of a man beyond the world, and reading it broadens the heart.

Some say that China's traditional culture all flowed east to Japan. After reading Li Yu's Xianqing Ou Ji and the anthropologist Ruth Benedict's classic Chrysanthemum and the Sword, one sees that the Japanese still did not grasp the essence of traditional Chinese culture.

Chinese people truly raised in the nurture of traditional culture are relaxed and at ease. They do not, like the Japanese, carry a heavy spiritual burden all their lives, nor do they readily develop extreme national emotions like militarism.

After Bertrand Russell visited China, he was full of admiration for the traditional Chinese way of life. Though China then was being humiliated by the world powers, Russell still found, in the ordinary Chinese person's attitude toward life, the most precious essence of Chinese culture. This essence later appeared in a series of his essays such as In Praise of Idleness and In Praise of Wasteful Knowledge.

Much Chinese learning is played at, rather than studied, in a leisurely life. Zhu Xi, commenting on the Doctrine of the Mean, said: "A good reader who delights in pondering and thereby gains insight will benefit from it for a lifetime, and still not exhaust it." Xianqing Ou Ji is a typical example of this "delighting in pondering and gaining insight."

The ancients said: "One who knows it is not equal to one who loves it; one who loves it is not equal to one who delights in it." From ancient times to today, all who have reached depth in learning have been those "delighters" who revel in their subject and "gain insight through play."

Caigentan says: "A scholar should have a heart of diligent earnestness, and also a strain of free and easy delight. If he is only restrained, austere and bitter, he has the killing air of autumn without the generating air of spring; how can he give birth to the ten thousand things?"

This means that in pursuing learning one needs both diligent earnestness and free, natural delight. If one knows only austerity and diligence, it is like having only the bleakness of autumn with none of the life of spring; one cannot generate the ten thousand things.

So Hong Yingming, the author of Caigentan, went on to say: "Anxious diligence is a fine virtue, but if too bitter it cannot suit the nature and delight the emotions. Detachment is a lofty quality, but if too dry it cannot help people and benefit things."

Hong's view is a typical Doctrine of the Mean: everything should be done in moderation, with tension and relaxation balanced, so that a vitality can emerge. Only by studying dry learning in this way can one find delight in it, and truly achieve "broad in scope yet exquisite in detail, supremely lofty yet walking the middle way."

But it is no easy thing to temper such a mindset. Personally, I think only after a person has weathered the storms and passed thirty can he gradually enter such a realm. Genuine scholarship requires an especially detached, calm state of mind: letting things be, not contending, asking little, not being perplexed, being free of worry. Only thus can one avoid eagerness and restlessness.

When I was in second year of high school, I went through a restless spell. My teacher Li Lixin brought me a copy of Liu Shahe's Modern Edition of Zhuangzi. This book has accompanied me for more than twenty years; wherever I go, there is a copy on my shelf, and from time to time I take it down and leaf through it.

There are countless translators and annotators of Zhuangzi. Why do I especially love Liu Shahe's Modern Edition? Because I feel that the state of mind in which Liu Shahe wrote it was very like the state of mind in which Zhuangzi originally wrote the book.

Liu Shahe translated his Modern Edition after the Cultural Revolution. His translation was not a word-for-word classical-to-modern rendering but an incorporation of his own re-creation.

By then, after going through the upside-down human affairs of the Cultural Revolution, Liu Shahe had grown much more detached from worldly concerns; his prose has a plain, unadorned quality left after the great tide has washed away the sand.

From two short poems of Liu Shahe from that same period, one can readily see his state of mind at the time.

Cajoling the Little Boy

Father has become an ox in the stall,

Today again a horse within the home;

Laughing, on all fours I crawl upon the bed—

My dear little son,

Come ride the horsey.

Daddy will carry you off to play at guerrilla—

Is it fun, or not fun?

In the tiny room there is freedom;

Shut the door and it is our own domain.

Do not run out the door—

Outside, someone will scold.

Blame only Daddy for dragging you into this,

My dear little son,

Quick, take up the whip and hit.

The Fragrant Neighbor

The neighbor's face was all springtime,

Night after night he invited me over;

A bellyful of grievances,

A mouth reeking of wine—

He treated me warmly.

Lately, rebelling, he became an official,

And autumn suddenly came over his face;

Fiercely he exposed my "poison-dripping,"

Harshly he condemned my "restoration"—

And our friendship was cut off.

His little dog is too muddled;

It still wags its tail and licks my hand.

I tell it to stop,

But it cannot understand;

There is a barrier of language.

Is not this state of mind—still able to laugh after tasting all the vicissitudes of the world—precisely the state Zhuangzi was in when he wrote with unbridled exuberance for his own delight?

I personally believe that most of the chapters in Zhuangzi were written after Zhuangzi reached middle age. Without deep accumulation of life, how could there be the free, easy mindset of one who has weathered it all? Without that mindset, how could one resist the temptations of the floating world and sink into deep, sustained scholarship?