Nobility Is No Shame; What Is Shameful Is That We Are Not Noble

In China today there is a strange phenomenon: lofty, noble feelings have become objects of ridicule. This is a manifestation of the decay of our whole society's spiritual civilization. We envy Westerners—their orderly social order, the strong sense of social responsibility of their business people, the inclusiveness of their social institutions, and the nobility of their citizens' morals. But when it comes to doing something noble ourselves, we are ashamed to do it; we feel it is merely making a fool of ourselves to show off, or that it is someone else's business and has nothing to do with us.

And so our society has degenerated into the state it is in today. Morally bankrupt Putian merchants control the great majority of China's private, military, and even some public hospitals; the same morally bankrupt Putian merchants manufacture more counterfeit goods than anywhere else in the world. By rights they ought to be the scum and dregs of society whom everyone spurns. Yet when such wealthy scum appears in our midst, we flock to them, envying their so-called "success," and taking pride in being close to them.

Putian merchants are only a microcosm of Chinese merchants. We once embraced the IT industry enthusiastically, passionately believing it represented high technology, represented the future, and could lead Chinese enterprises onto a path of socially responsible development. But as everyone knows, Jack Ma grew rich by allowing the sale of counterfeit goods, and Robin Li grew rich by colluding with Putian's black-market medicine to cheat patients. Facts have shown that whether entrepreneurs are intellectuals or not, we cannot escape the vicious cycle of moral decay.

Many of our religious figures, once mere parasites on society, have grown into enormously powerful swindlers. They cheat the whole society's pious religious sentiment in order to gain fame and material support, so that religion—which ought to comfort the human heart—has finally become a rat everyone stones.

The great modern Chinese monk Master Taixu was probably the greatest and most honest Buddhist in Chinese Buddhism over the last several hundred years. He read widely, studying not only the Buddhist scriptures but also science, the humanities, and even romance novels, and in the end became the most honest of Buddhists. Under his vigorous advocacy, Chinese Buddhism at last turned, for a time, from a charlatan religion of ghosts and spirits into a Humanistic Buddhism concerned with real life. Regrettably, today's Humanistic Buddhism has returned to the old tricks of playing ghost games. Fake monks on every street blatantly swindle, and solemn-looking real monks deceive themselves and others. As a result, religion's credibility has fallen into a cesspool.

As for our intellectual world, there is truly nothing to praise. True intellectuals, in every dynasty, have been society's "pure stream," representing the conscience of the whole society. It is they who speak out loudly for the vulnerable, who denounce society's ills, and who, in the nation's hour of peril, shoulder morality with iron shoulders and step forward to rescue the people from deep suffering. Scholars may be physically frail, but they have unyielding backbone. It is this backbone that forges a nation's soul. When a nation's soul is ugly, scholars bear an inescapable responsibility. For as Confucius said: "A scholar-official must be broad-minded and resolute; his burden is heavy and his road is long."

The anthropologist Morris said: "Power tends to corrupt, but that is only part of the truth. Extreme submission also corrupts." When Chinese intellectuals use the times as an excuse to evade their responsibility, we should know that the real problem lies in the evil and weakness within our own hearts. Every age is one in which good and evil struggle and the brave prevail; we should not use others' brutality as an excuse for our own cowardice. The natural mission of the intellectual is criticism, not flattery. One who clams up and says nothing is merely a literate coward.

Intellectuals should guide the whole society toward goodness, justice, and honesty, rather than joining in collective wrongdoing. Today, how many of our so-called elites dare say they are not doing the opposite? Frankly, most of today's educated people are just glib, spineless wastes. Worse still, some become the accomplices of tigers, the scum that corrupts society—for example, the senior intellectuals who endorse false advertising, the experts who help the authorities shift blame and talk nonsense. In the past, people called such intellectuals "cultured scoundrels."

As for so many of our politicians—those in prison and those not—while in office most like to open their mouths saying they serve the people, while in their hearts they actually serve the RMB. That is why an honest political environment is so hard to achieve. All the suffering the common people endure is truly the doing of these office-warmers.

This society so suppresses human goodness that human evil acts brazenly. Gradually, in each ordinary person, what shows forth is mostly human evil. China today is experiencing society-wide, pervasive corruption. We dare not eat the grain farmers grow, dare not use the medicines drug merchants sell, live in dread of the houses builders erect, fear going to hospital when ill, and even fear breathing the air outside when we step out. All beings together create karma, and we ourselves are part of it; the final result is that everyone harms everyone, and everyone harms himself.

We often shout about ruling the country by virtue. From ancient times to today, virtue has never been able to govern a country; the dynasties that ruled by virtue ended in moral decay too ugly to behold. Virtue can only govern the heart; to govern a country one must rely on the rule of law. If the rule of law were truly implemented, human evil would be contained to the greatest degree; only in such an environment can virtue—this beautiful, lofty feeling—find soil in which to grow. Otherwise, empty talk of ruling by virtue merely manufactures new hollow, grandiose culture.

Mr. Yan Fu said: "The decline of Chinese customs begins with falsehood and ends with shamelessness." These twelve characters concisely sum up our nation's greatest weakness—falsehood and shamelessness. What most puzzles Westerners dealing with Chinese is how hard it is to tell, from what a Chinese person says, what is true, what is mere polite speech, and what is false. For ordinary Chinese people in ordinary social intercourse, if 40 percent of what they say is truthful, that is already very good. To discern true feeling amid so much distorted speech is truly taxing.

When lying is repeated until it becomes habit, lies come easily to the tongue, and what one hears is mostly lies; we grow used to not trusting people. So in China's social environment we generally judge others by malice, and in the end shameless human evil prevails between people, while beautiful human feeling is extremely rare. I have withdrawn from social activities for years, for no other reason than that at every social gathering I had to listen to endless nonsense, polite phrases, and lies, which I simply could not bear. My state is derided as being out of touch with society. As for this broken society, I have no interest in wasting my precious time tangled up with it.

So I buried myself in scholarship, choosing to study medicine, to learn classical philosophy, and to practice medicine and write. Ridiculously, even while reading I still encountered the same nauseating problems I met in social dealings. So many of our writers—the men of letters of every Chinese dynasty—have inherited our nation's stubborn tradition of forgery, and their works are riddled with fakes.

Doctors' forged medical theories and case histories harm all later students of medicine. As for the Buddhist scriptures and the Daoist classics, they are an even worse disaster zone of forgery. Evidential learning (kaoju) flourished for a time in the Qing dynasty; without it, ancient Chinese books would be almost unreadable, because the great majority are later forgeries, and even those not forged have had their original appearance altered beyond recognition.

My stubborn rectitude makes many people uncomfortable, because I am extremely particular about getting things right and will not readily believe various doctrinized theories. Especially after I took up medicine, I have been indefatigable in seeking facts; a doctor who loses the spirit of seeking truth is a disaster for patients. Though I am interested in Buddhism, I now basically set foot in no Buddhist organization and keep no company with Buddhists; the more pious a believer, the more I avoid him as I would a scorpion—I simply cannot stand these numbskulls brainwashed by fake scriptures and fake masters. The Buddha is alive, but his later disciples are mostly brainwashed dead souls. To put it bluntly, a great many Buddhists have studied Buddhism until they became useless. Exchanging words with them usually feels as if there were not even a whiff of substance.

Fortunately, there has always been a band of straight-talking fellows, indefatigable in seeking truth, whose works are still worth reading. In a vast library overflowing with books, one can always find such works worth reading. My reading now is like panning for gold in sand, seeking out such books. Such books let the mind grow healthily; in choosing what my son reads, I follow the same principle.

I write often; because I am tired of falsehood, I have always written in a spirit of seeking truth. Not to be modest: among contemporary Chinese online writers, few have more readers than I do. But once I grew tired of fame; for years my habit has been to win a modest reputation under one pen name, then quietly withdraw, and after a while emerge under another pen name and repeat the process. The pleasure in this is beyond words, and truly cannot be shared with outsiders.

I suppose this has to do with how exceptionally prominent I was in my youth. Throughout my school years I was almost always in a state of commanding presence, which brought me endless misery and once left me with several psychological illnesses. Afterward, my weariness of fame and fortune was like a homosexual's aversion to sex with the opposite sex.

Yet, damn this broken society: if one wants to accomplish something within it and leave behind something good, without fame and fortune one can hardly move a step. So nearing forty, I finally decided to re-enter society and, with an otherworldly frame of mind, do some things in this world. The reason is simply that, reaching middle age and watching my child grow, I began to realize that everyone owes a duty and responsibility to society. If we continue to shun fame and fortune and enjoy ourselves in isolation, our children will have to live in the filthy society created by their inactive fathers, and suffer all kinds of harm.

So I risk being entangled by all kinds of misery once more and stand forth again, using my writings to urge every member of this society to have more noble feelings, do fewer dirty things, and purify the social environment for our descendants, so they need not live in a filthy world.