Wishing All Readers, Relatives, and Friends a Happy Mid-Autumn Festival

It is Mid-Autumn Festival again. I wish all my readers, relatives, and friends a happy Mid-Autumn Festival and every wish fulfilled, and hope everyone stays healthy and happy. However circumstances change, I believe that as long as we love life and love living, we can still live wonderfully.

Many people have complained to me this year, mostly feeling that life is harder than before. Indeed, from an economic point of view, the whole world is no longer as prosperous as it was a decade ago; some countries have even, for various reasons, erupted in war, with continuous conflict and the people in misery. But overall, the human condition is not that bad; the age we live in is far from the worst.

Humans have endured conditions many times worse than today, and our ancestors survived them again and again. Living on this planet, we are destined to face environmental challenges; this is our inborn task. Every generation has its inescapable trials. The various problems we now face are what our generation must go through, and we need to grow through them. From the day a person is reluctantly born into this world, they are destined to live alongside hardship; so rather than complain, we would do better to adapt.

I firmly believe that only by adapting to changing circumstances, strengthening our survival abilities through challenges, and facing every trial of life with a positive and optimistic attitude can we live better. Difficulties also remind us to keep adjusting our inner desires, so that our needs match our present abilities. Living driven by desires beyond one's means inevitably leads to suffering.

I was born in the late 1970s, an era neither too bad nor too good. In childhood our material conditions were far worse than today. Our generation had to labor in the fields and endure material scarcity as we grew up. If present economic conditions are bad, my childhood can only be described as worse.

As far as I know, not only myself but many of my peers went hungry as children, yet the friends I grew up with mostly had positive, optimistic mindsets. Creatures living on Earth actually have few true needs; to survive we only need a certain amount of carbohydrates, protein, and fat, and the Earth is fully capable of meeting our basic needs. But desires beyond basic needs can be endless; human pursuit of material gain knows no bounds, and people's suffering mostly stems from extending these desires without limit.

So after reaching a certain age, we should stop and ask: do we really need that much wealth to be happy? Is enormous wealth truly a necessary condition for happiness? I hope every one of my relatives and friends is happy, but happiness is really just a kind of inner self-perception that others cannot help us achieve.

Since I turned thirty, I have gradually focused more on building my inner spiritual world, and my desire for material things has faded year by year. In a blink fifteen years have passed; my inner world has grown ever richer. I have achieved no social status to be proud of, accumulated only modest wealth, and still live in the same cramped apartment from fifteen years ago. Space at home is always inadequate; my mountain of books has no dedicated shelf; I have no study, only a writing desk in the bedroom. Waking early each morning, so as not to disturb my family's rest, I still make do reading and writing at the dining table.

But my sense of happiness grows daily. Over these fifteen years I have overcome many inner desires and poured my time and energy into the cause and hobbies I love. I have also studied almost every day of these fifteen years. Recently, because I again took the college entrance exam, I raised my learning efficiency to the level of my high-school days, and my inner sense of fulfillment has reached an unprecedented level.

My life experience tells me that what makes our happiness lasting is the things we truly love deep inside. Those things may be just a feeling, beyond words, incapable of being turned into material wealth, seeming so illusory and impractical—yet they keep our lives from being dreary.

Buddhism often speaks of "benefiting all sentient beings" and always hopes that all beings will "leave suffering and attain joy." This wish is beautiful, though not easy to fulfill. I am a staunch atheist, not a Buddhist; what I love is natural science, and I have no interest in any religious faith. Still, I sincerely feel that religion also contains much worth learning from. Buddhism holds that the fundamental way for humans to leave suffering and attain joy is to extinguish greed, anger, and delusion, and cultivate precepts, concentration, and wisdom—and this is sound.

Since I turned away from desire, hatred, and rigidity, my life has entered a state of peace and joy, with no major upheavals. Although I have occasionally grieved at the parting of loved ones, I have recovered quickly and continued living positively and optimistically. I believe that mastering the ability to free oneself from desire, hatred, and rigidity is the key to happiness; when we possess this ability, changes in the external environment cannot affect our inner world.

When Master Hongyi died, the lay Buddhist Zhao Puchu wrote a elegiac couplet for him: "Endless rarities offer the world's eyes; a bright moon lights the heart of heaven." On this Mid-Autumn Festival, with flowers blooming and the moon full, I wish that each of you may have a bright moon shining in your heart, and that the rest of your life, lit by that moon, may always be bright and happy, undefeated by hardship.