Reflections While Dwelling in the Mountains
The first thing I do every morning is watch the sunrise from my balcony. When I was a child at home, I never felt that the sunrise in my hometown was beautiful; after wandering abroad for so many years, returning to watch the sunrise and sunset, I realize that such a life is truly a pleasure.
After breakfast, I take a book and walk about half an hour to the mountainside behind the neighboring village, where I read in the sun. Sometimes I stay there all day, sometimes only half a day, and spend the other half doing farm work with tools. On the way I often pass my mother's grave; sometimes I stay a few moments before it, sometimes I merely offer a silent gaze.
On this return I did not visit my mother's grave as before—no burning of paper, no firecrackers, no incense, no offerings; I simply often stay silently for a while before her grave, thinking of memories of her. The dead are gone. Although I am now as broad-minded about death as Zhuangzi, I would not drum on a basin and sing as he did when a loved one died. My life experience tells me that one need not live so shockingly; expressing unconventional views through silence is safer. Other people's censure is not to be feared, but it is undoubtedly a waste of time. After Zhuangzi lost his wife and drummed and sang, he had to argue at length with Hui Shi.
I am forty-three this year. The first eighteen years of my life were spent in the countryside, and the more than twenty years since have been spent mainly in the National Library. When I was in the countryside, my parents always told me that studying was the only correct path; they hoped I would pass the university entrance exam, escape rural life, and no longer bend over the yellow earth as they did. Later I studied at the National Library for over twenty years—primarily reading, secondarily making a living. Few people live as unconventionally as I. Now I have returned from the National Library to the countryside to live a life of plowing and reading. My life is like a parabola, launched from the origin and often returning to it.
But wherever I am, at whatever point on the parabola, I have never given up the habit of thinking. Countless moments of reflection have finally helped me cast off all intellectual shackles and free myself from the fear of death. Now I live an extremely simple life: walking instead of riding, coarse tea and plain rice, without fear or doubt, immune to both praise and criticism from the outside world. I have gradually returned to the most primitive and authentic state of life: eat when hungry, drink when thirsty, get along harmoniously with those around me, and spend time on what I enjoy doing.
When I was a freshman, my counselor was puzzled by my endless, seemingly sprawling reading. He asked me: "Zhiyuan, you read so many books, and the authors' views often contradict one another; doesn't that leave you at a loss?" This was a very good question, so I have remembered it for over twenty years, often wondering how best to answer. Now my memory is fading and I have basically forgotten the books I read, so I can answer wittily: "Teacher, don't worry; although I read many books, my memory is poor and I have forgotten it all, so I am not affected by any of it."
Keeping the human spirit independent and free is no easy task. I see many people, supported by some idea, ideology, or sentiment, holding aloft the banners of justice and truth, either harshly attacking others or working themselves into a fever of activity. As an onlooker, I do not see much light of justice and truth in them; instead I see them filled with selfishness, prejudice, and indignation. And these often make them both ignorant and bloody, straying far from justice and wisdom.
If we read history, we find that in human history, bigotry, ignorance, and bloodshed are the mainstream. If we abandon anthropocentrism and view humanity as a whole from the perspective of other species, we see that humans are nothing more than a horde of naked, insatiable plunderers. Every brick of the civilization we have built is stained with countless crimes and blood. I do not subscribe to most of the truths, justice, and values that humans proclaim about themselves, and so cannot accept them. I do not believe that what the majority agrees on is necessarily right, nor that what everyone praises is necessarily virtue.
Knowledge and ideas are actually not important; what matters is the ability to think. But compared with a relaxed, joyful life itself, even the ability to think is not important.
The birth and evolution of life on Earth is a highly random chemical phenomenon. Humanity's brief evolutionary history on Earth is fleeting compared with Earth's 4-billion-year history; and Earth's brief history is but a flicker in the history of the entire universe. We have created many lofty words to guide our lives and struggles, and countless ideas to settle our hearts; in fact, these are all burdens.
Life is both complex and simple: we need only food, water, and sunlight to survive, and we cannot avoid death. But obviously modern people's needs go far beyond these, and everyone is far from accepting death calmly. We are plunderers; the glorious journey of human civilization we proclaim is nothing but a path of evolutionary suicide that we have taken, consciously or unconsciously. Because brilliant civilization consumes vast resources, when resources are exhausted, the day our species goes extinct will be near.
We have gone too far down this evolutionary-suicide road to turn back, so climate disasters and ecological crises are arriving one after another. Of course, I am not anxious about this; this is the destiny that living things cannot escape in the process of evolution. The individual from birth to death, the species from emergence to extinction, even the planet we inhabit from formation to destruction—all are perfectly normal natural phenomena. If this process can be slowed, that would of course be better; if it cannot, it is no great matter. There have been five mass extinctions on Earth (perhaps more), and there will be countless more in the future. Why may other species go extinct but not humans?
If we shift our perspective on the world's great achievements and those thrilling grand goals, all of this can also be regarded as crime and insignificance, while those misfortunes that grieve us most may look more like acts of goodness. Therefore good and evil, right and wrong, are not so easy to distinguish. I do not plan to guide my life by justice and truth, nor do I set any grand life goals for myself. I have my own standard for judging life, and it is simple—only ten characters: authentic, simple, light, interesting, harmless. At this moment I am on the mountain, bathed in sunlight, living precisely such a life.