Love Is Our Only Salvation in This Suffering World

On August 11, I saw on the webcam that my father was acting strangely, as though searching for a door but unable to find it. Within five minutes I made up my mind: I would immediately buy a high-speed rail ticket back to my hometown in Hubei and take my father to the hospital for a brain MRI to rule out cerebral infarction. I boarded the train at eleven in the morning, and by evening I was already home.

I stayed home that night of the 11th to observe my father's condition. There was nothing especially abnormal; apart from his worsening memory in recent years, his basic ability to care for himself was fine. In these last few years my father has cherished every chance we have to be together as father and son. On this visit he asked me to stay a few more days (later this fell through because too many patients came looking for me). On the one hand the elderly may fear loneliness; on the other, perhaps because late life is so precious, my father knows that the days we have together are numbered, so at every reunion he is reluctant to let me go.

On the morning of the 12th, I went to my mother's grave to tend it. Weeds grew thickly before her tomb; there was no longer any path around it, and I had to use a stick to clear a way and push my way through the grass. The summer weeds were tall and dense, full of thorns; pushing into them, one is easily scratched.

Before my mother's grave, a great grief suddenly welled up inside me. As I burned paper money, I wept uncontrollably. For several days I had been holding in a sorrow with nowhere to release it, and here at my mother's grave I could at last give way to it. After crying for a long while, my emotions gradually settled. I stayed at my mother's grave all morning, sitting there before her tomb regardless of how fierce the sun beat down. In the grave before me lay the person in this world who had first loved me deeply; the old days unfolded before my eyes, scene by scene.

There were so many things I wanted to talk over with my mother. In the past half year or more I had been through a hard time, encountering one distressing thing after another, each lasting a long while. Having reached middle age, I had not missed a single one of the crises that life brings: birth, old age, illness, death, and the education of my children. So my mood over the recent half year had become somewhat depressed.

If my mother were still alive, perhaps I could have drawn some comfort from her. But even though she is gone, at her grave I could still feel the power of a mother's love. After that long cry, it was as though I saw my mother sitting silently beside me, gazing at me gently, her face full of tenderness and pity; I even felt her stroking me softly.

In that moment my nearly frozen heart began to melt. I felt a dialogue between my mother and myself. She was telling me to use love to dissolve every crisis, and not to harbor the least resentment in my heart. Protect the people you love, take them by the hand, and walk out of the crisis together; there will come a day when they understand you. Then they too will warm you with love and understanding.

My mother also urged me to love and protect myself. Before she died, she said to me: Son, your fate in this life is that of a camel—you have toiled all your life, always thinking of others, and it has been so hard. You must learn to love yourself. That was my mother's last words to me. After that conversation, on my next visit home, my mother was already unconscious and could not say a word.

Once, while my mother was alive, I went alone to the hospital and asked a senior fellow I knew to perform a hand-surgery operation on me. Afterward, I stopped at a department store and bought her a small, better washing machine with a spin dryer to spin-dry the clothes—my mother liked washing clothes by hand, but the weather in Hubei is too damp; without a spin dryer the clothes do not dry easily. After buying it, I used the hand that had not been operated on to drag the washing machine home.

My mother saw me, one arm bandaged and hanging from my neck, the other pulling the washing machine home, and at once asked what had happened. I said I had just had a small procedure done by a contact, and thinking the coming holiday was short and I would not be home long, I had dropped by the store on the way back from the hospital to buy a small washer for the family. My mother broke down on the spot, heartbroken; she scolded me, then wiping her tears said: My poor son's fate is so hard! Too stubborn, shouldering everything alone, with no one to dote on you.

I am someone who can regard physical pain as nothing. That operation took three times longer than expected; the anesthesia had long worn off, yet I endured the pain and let my senior fellow remove the cyst from the joint gap of my wrist bone. At the time he said: Zhiyuan, I feel the pain for you myself—how on earth do you stand it?

Since childhood I have been very able to endure this kind of physical pain, but the pain of the heart is not so easy to bear. Yet my mother could always comfort me in my moments of sorrow. She gave me my first sense of security; whenever my heart was wounded, I had only to think of my mother to find comfort. So before my mother's grave, having almost lost all strength, I began once more to climb out of the lowest trough of my emotions.

After tending my mother's grave, I called my junior fellow at the local hospital and asked him to book a brain MRI for my father. He told me the same day was fully booked; the earliest he could arrange was 4:30 p.m. on the 13th.

So I stayed home one more day. After breakfast I wanted to wander over to the Medicine-King Temple in a nearby village—the place I used to visit often with my parents as a child. My father asked to come with me. We rode our bicycles, father and son, to the temple. When we arrived, I said to my father, Let's buy some incense and offer a prayer. He agreed.

For a long time I have been an atheist, but in that moment I wanted to burn incense and pray. My father said nothing; he simply accompanied me to buy incense, paper money and candles. While I burned incense he helped me, and when I knelt to pray he knelt beside me.

I am 44 now. Many of my elders have already passed away; among my own generation, classmates and childhood friends, some have died or fallen seriously ill. So I cherish the people I know all the more. At our age, most of us no longer make new friends; with every familiar relative or friend who leaves, we lose another person to talk to, and an empty feeling lingers in our hearts for a long while. I no longer like to part ways or fall out with any relative or friend; if we disagree, we resolve the disagreement, and the affection is kept. We are no longer young and cannot make large numbers of new friends. Old friends and relatives of a lifetime are, in the end, our companions, jointly supporting our emotional world.

I grew up in a village. We had a custom: for those who died the previous year, on the first day of the Lunar New Year the family would set up a mourning hall for the whole village to pay respects; every household had to send someone to offer sacrifice. We called this "burning pure incense." Every year on New Year's Day, as we made our rounds of New Year visits, we learned through this ritual how many villagers had died the year before.

I have not kept exact statistics, but I have roughly worked out the pattern: a batch of villagers dies around fifty, another batch around sixty, and the same around seventy; not many live into their eighties or nineties. The further one lives on, the lonelier it becomes, because so many of our old friends and relatives have gone to the other world. So those who become our relatives and friends by karmic affinity should be cherished, especially family.

At the Medicine-King Temple, my father began a long talk with me—the most profound conversation the two of us have ever had. He said: Son, you have been utterly sincere and filial all your life, warm-hearted and generous to others in a way rarely seen. Whether in the extended family or the small family, you have shouldered the heaviest burdens alone. Living this way is too hard; you must learn to love yourself. What my father and mother felt in their hearts was so alike that in that moment I felt I had returned to childhood, deeply loved by my parents.

My most unforgettable childhood memory was this: every year after the busy farming season, my parents would buy a little meat and stew it with peanuts until tender in an earthen pot, then ladle out a bowl each for my two siblings and me, while they themselves ate only rice soaked in the last of the broth. My parents expressed their most selfless love for us in such acts. From them I learned this way of loving others—when conditions are limited, I would rather go without myself than let the people I love suffer. I have a strong protective instinct toward people; its source is probably my parents' love.

My father gave me many other admonitions this time. He said: Now that your career is gradually achieving some success, and may achieve more in future, your reputation and social standing will rise, but you must always remember to put respecting others first, and at the same time help those impoverished patients—my father never failed to stress this point every time. That is why I have never actually charged genuinely poor patients anything, and sometimes even donate money to them. My father urged me not only to cultivate myself but also to put my family in order; not only to respect others and sympathize with the weak myself, but to establish such a family tradition, so that no one in the family is boastful. Only thus can one carry things on the strength of abundant virtue, and avoid major setbacks born of arrogance and luxury.

Recalling family events of the past, my father said: At the end of the twelfth lunar month in 1981, barely toddling, I had set the house on fire, burning it to the ground—my brilliant life had actually begun with causing such a huge disaster. But a man in our village named Chunjin, seeing the house on fire, had rushed into the flames without regard for himself and carried my brother and me out, one in each arm.

My father said he would be grateful to Uncle Chunkin for this grace all his life. Before Chunkin died, my father took tonics to visit him and said: Brother Chunjin, our family owes you an enormous debt. But for you, both my sons would have perished in the fire. Uncle Chunkin said: Don't think of it; anyone who had come along would have saved your sons. Then he chided my father for coming to see him, because he had been suffering from an infectious disease in his final days and feared passing it to my father, so he told my father to stand far away while they spoke.

This is the purest feeling of country folk: an enormous kindness, yet he expected no repayment, and even at the end hoped only that others would be well. Many of the details in this story I heard from my father for the first time, and I was deeply moved. Uncle Chunkin was only an illiterate village man, yet his soul was so great.

My father also said that although our home had burned to nothing, the village cash and account books in his charge had unexpectedly been preserved. At the time some relatives suggested he pocket the money and tell the village committee it had all burned. My father flatly refused. He said greed is enough to cost a man his life; moreover, both my grandmother and my aunt were Buddhists, and the family tradition had been influenced by Buddhist culture, so he could never do such a thing.

He carried the account books and the cash to the village committee and told the village party secretary: The house has burned to the ground, but the money and books are intact, and my sons have been snatched out of the fire. As he said this he broke into sobs. The secretary said to him: Don't grieve. You have many brothers, and our village has plenty of timber; however many mountain trees you want to cut, I will approve it. We will get everyone to help rebuild your house as quickly as possible. By the Spring Festival it will be restored to just as it was before the fire. With all of us here, we won't let you come to ruin.

The secretary's words were kept. During the Spring Festival our house really was hastily rebuilt, little different from before. It was a very loving era; and because my father's character was respected by the villagers, the ill effects of that fire, which should have brought our family to ruin, were dispelled so quickly. This is probably why my father so believed in the principle of "abundant virtue carries all things," and why he hoped this family tradition would be passed down.

My father said my great-grandfather was a renowned "Xiansheng" in our hometown (an honorific for an educated man in those days), very learned and of fine character, respected by all. He taught away from home; in the past, whenever the village had an intractable matter, people would go and ask him to come back to arbitrate. Perhaps our family tradition had been like this since my great-grandfather's generation. Now my father is old, and he especially wants, through word and deed, to pass this tradition on. For there is an old Chinese saying: Loyalty and goodness sustain a family long; books and poetry prolong its line. Many people accept this idea, and I deeply believe in it myself. One of the purposes of writing this essay is to hope that my child, in reading it one day, will feel our family tradition.

The underlying tone of every person's life cannot be changed, and our life's tone may originally come from family tradition. My parents were not unaware of this. I am their child; my temperament was formed by absorbing theirs. My parents were pained that I would sacrifice myself, toiling all my life, in order to protect the people I love, eating and dressing poorly myself so that those I love might eat and dress well—but were they not themselves exactly like that?

Yet a lifetime of experience also taught them that a loving person carries too much, and can easily be worn down by an overheavy load. So they hoped I might balance things, and also learn to love myself, so as not to be wounded by my own temperament. Perhaps only the years can teach us how to strike that balance.

I once wondered what exactly I believe in. Now I have gradually come to understand that my creed is really just one word: love. Love is our only salvation in this suffering world. Love gives us security, gives us strength, and gives us the courage to overcome all manner of difficulties. Though love does sometimes impose a measure of pressure on us, without love our spirit would scatter and fall into disorder, and we would lose the strength that carries us forward; life would become bewildered and adrift.

So love is never wrong, even when it sometimes brings us hurt. Love is the most correct choice we can make. Never let go of the hand of the one you love; as long as a shred of strength remains, devote it to holding the hand of the people we love. Life is indeed a sea of bitterness, but if someone walks it holding our hand, that sea of bitterness becomes a paradise—or at least becomes less unbearable.