Rereading "Elder Zhang's Hymn of the Hundred Acts of Forbearance"

Forbearance is the breadth of a great person, the very root of the noble; not forbearing over small matters turns them into great ones; not forbearing over good deeds ends in regret. Father and son who forbear not lose kindness and filial piety; brothers who forbear not lose love and respect; friends who forbear not lose loyalty; husband and wife who forbear not multiply strife. Liu Ling ruined his name only because he could not forbear wine; Duke Ling of Chen lost his state only because he could not forbear lust; Shi Chong lost his family fortune only because he could not forbear wealth; Xiang Yu threw away his life only because he could not forbear his pride. All who commit crimes today know not forbearance; and of all who founded fortunes since olden times, which one was not forbearing? With the word "forbear" one may walk the whole world; with it one may build good neighborliness. Forbear in speech and you avoid strife; forbear in quarreling and grudges dissolve. If you forbear when others revile you and answer not back, their abusive mouth will of itself grow quiet; if you forbear when others strike you and do not strike back, their violent hand will of itself lose force. Know that the truly noble forbear and yield; never say forbearance and yielding are folly. Fools of this world laugh at forbearance, but the gods above value it. If I, not otherwise bound, must still forbear, how much more must others? When matters arise, forbearance is most needed; after they pass, forbearance is still needed. Life fears not a hundred acts of forbearance; it fears even a single failure to forbear. Without forbearance, a hundred blessings melt like snow; with one act of forbearance, ten thousand calamities turn to ashes.

— Excerpted from the Old Book of Tang (Jiu Tang Shu)

The "Hymn of Elder Zhang on the Hundred Forbearances" was the first philosophy lesson of my life. I began school at seven; once I had learned Hanyu Pinyin and how to use a dictionary, my grandmother began to make me recite the hymn for her, following the pinyin. My grandmother was a devout Buddhist, but she was illiterate. On the first and fifteenth days of each lunar month she would, on her bound feet (because of the times, her feet had been bound in childhood), climb over hills to burn incense and worship at several temples around our village. She often brought home various sutras; in those days everyone was poor, and the sutras circulated at the temples were usually a single sheet of paper—the temple caretaker or a fellow practitioner would copy a passage of scripture onto paper to give to familiar worshippers to take home and recite.

My grandmother worshipped the Buddha but could not tell whether what she brought back was actually a Buddhist sutra. When I was in first grade, she brought home the "Classic of Elder Zhang's Hundred Forbearances"; someone told her that reciting this scripture would bring great blessings to herself and her family, and she believed it completely. But she needed her children and grandchildren to help her memorize it. Her sons were all busy and certainly had no time to recite scripture with her. She had many grandsons and granddaughters—her four sons each had children—so she asked her grandchildren to teach her.

My older brother and male cousins mostly found this chore annoying and always dodged Grandmother. As a child I must have been an easy child to coax; Grandmother always sweet-talked me, saying that of all her grandchildren, Grandma loved you most, you are the best-behaved good child. My older brother says she said the very same things to him many times, but her approach had only limited effect on him; in the end, most of the time, it was I who taught Grandmother to recite. In the end, perhaps Grandmother really did love me most. When she went out to burn incense, the snacks she brought back were always secretly slipped to me; there were too many grandchildren to share around, so she had the most chances to give her favorite grandson an extra treat.

As a child I did not fully understand the meaning of the hymn, though to say I understood nothing would be wrong; after all, the lyrics are colloquial, and a seven- or eight-year-old can roughly grasp that it is teaching people forbearance. I do not know whether I am so enduring because of the hymn—I have indeed been extraordinarily enduring throughout my life, able to bear any adversity.

But sometimes I suspect my capacity for endurance may be tied to genes on my mother's side. My mother was naturally broad-minded; in her whole life she never had so much as one conflict with her mother-in-law or with her daughters-in-law. She was always cheerful, kind to others, and generous herself. This of course also has something to do with the other two important women in my life—my grandmother and my wife—who are likewise very kind. A man whose three most important women are all forgiving is very fortunate in this life; at the very least, his ears are spared a great deal of noise.

I have little memory of my maternal grandfather, because he died when I was very small. But I heard from others that he too was an extremely broad-minded man, almost never clashing with anyone; he was also gifted, deeply studied the Book of Changes, excelled at reasoned argument, and was strong at analyzing problems, for which he was fairly well known in our area. My uncle's family has a portrait of my late grandfather; looking at it, I found that my mother and I, in appearance, are practically cast from the same mold, so it is no surprise our characters resemble his.

From the viewpoint of modern biology, genes and environment work together; a person's character is shaped both by genes and by the environment in which they grow and live. Broadly, I am a calm, even-tempered person who adapts quickly to new environments and to new changes in life; I think this has to do both with the genes I inherited and with my childhood environment.

My grandmother had a great influence on my early years, because she raised me. I still remember episodes from when my parents worked in the fields and we children were cared for by Grandmother. I remember once my grandfather caught a swallow and amused the grandchildren with it, until Grandmother scolded him: that is a living creature, you are harming a living being. Grandfather was henpecked and, with an embarrassed grin, let the swallow go. I remember too, on scorching summer days, we took the door panel off Grandmother's room to use as a cool bed and lay on it for a nap; when we woke, Grandmother was beside us waving a palm fan to cool us. I have no memory of Grandmother ever scolding or hitting us; I only remember her, white-haired, always beaming. She was well liked; there were many Buddhist old ladies and middle-aged women in the village, and she was a leading figure among them.

What I remember most vividly is Grandmother reciting, one after another, the various "scriptures" she brought back from the temples. Her memory was truly poor, but her will was extraordinary; she chanted them over and over—her way of memorizing scripture was to chant. Her chanting is etched so deeply in me that now, at forty-six, more than twenty years after her death, her rhythmic, rising-and-falling chant still sometimes rings in my head.

I taught Grandmother to recite many scriptures; this early training made me, for a while when I later visited temples seeking monks and Daoists, rather surprising to them, because those professional Buddhists could not have expected I remembered the sutras better than they. Of all the scriptures I memorized in childhood, the one that left the deepest impression is the "Hymn of Elder Zhang on the Hundred Forbearances." It is said to have been left by Zhang Gongyi; when Emperor Gaozong of Tang, who once visited his home, asked the secret of their five generations living together in happiness, he wrote the character ren (forbearance) a hundred times in a row, and this colloquial song thus got its name, "Elder Zhang's Hundred Forbearances Song."

The hymn has circulated widely among China's common people; it was popular in the Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties, and as a child I saw its circulation in rural eastern Hubei. I began reciting it in early childhood for family reasons. After reaching thirty, I have often chewed on it again; it has become the deepest bond between Grandmother and me. Even though she is in the netherworld, I often remember those childhood episodes through this song and feel her love. In my belief system, tolerance and forbearance are the most fundamental beliefs; I think this has a great deal to do with that early experience, though no doubt I also inherited a family gene that prizes tolerance.

I have taken a series of psychological tests; the results show I digest negative emotions very well, and on the Big Five my score on neuroticism is extremely low. Even after major blows and setbacks, given a little time I can fully recover my equanimity on my own; when I later recall the past, there is no longer any clinging, reluctance or resentment.

In immediate dealings with people I rarely have conflicts; criticism from teachers, mentors and peers around me I always listen to carefully and accept sincerely. In middle school my teachers and classmates elected me class monitor and student union president, roles I actually disliked. Because these roles meant I often had to mediate conflicts and stop bullying at school, I was targeted by some students who liked to bully others; they sometimes tried to get revenge and teach me a lesson, which surely affected my studies—all I wanted then was to get into university. But this experience also tempered my courage and my ability to handle all kinds of conflict, so that when troubles arise I stay calm and unhurried.

Still, I think all this may also relate to the upbringing of forbearance I received from childhood. The virtue of forbearance is easily equated with cowardice or swallowing one's anger, and easily linked to unattractive words like mud-fudging and cynicism—though from my own experience I know true tolerance and forbearance are worlds away from these.

I know many people are raised on a different teaching: repay injury with uprightness. Pushed to its extreme, this teaching advocates an eye for an eye, mouth for mouth, tooth for tooth, blood for blood. Both teachings have their reasons, and people raised under them grow into very different philosophies of life and worldviews. The former can develop into compassionate religious figures; the latter into revolutionaries who overturn the old world. There is no saying which is better; society needs all kinds of people.

There is another kind of upbringing that seems to me rather bad: neither tolerant nor daring to repay injury with uprightness, but nursing a silent resentment when treated unfairly. People raised this way easily grow up with all sorts of unpleasant emotions that linger for a long time. In today's popular phrase, they are high in internal friction.

The tolerant person turns every grievance from big to small and from small to nothing, finally dissolving it into clouds, with no ripple left in the heart; the person who repays injury with uprightness feels love and hate sharply and vents resentment on the spot, so they too are not left with lasting unhappiness—though this may well invite hatred and put themselves and their family in potential danger, at least it brings momentary relief; the internally friction-bound person tortures themselves day after day, the least cost-effective of all—and yet they are the most numerous on earth. Some of them easily accumulate depression into illness and live very unhappily.

A person's underlying temperament is fixed in early childhood; most people merely repeat the emotional and thinking patterns formed in childhood, and as adults it is very hard to change them. Only when one meets a setback painful beyond all bearing, and happens also to have an urgent desire to introspect and change, can some qualitative change occur.

But even such people find it hard to completely erase the imprint genes have left on their lives and the force of habit. Personality is most likely to be reshaped in middle age, because people of that age have tasted enough of worldly hardship and have begun to learn reflection, introspection, and a new awareness of the influences of their family genes and cultural inheritance; finally they may be able to repair the parts of themselves that do not fit society.

The great majority of the problems we meet in life are not problems of the external world but of our own inner world—problems of the biological nervous system we inherited and of the basic beliefs we received from our family upbringing. I have passed beyond the stage of judging a person by the simple but unreliable standards of good and bad, right and wrong, high and low. As a physician devoted to relieving people's physical and mental suffering, I value only a person's adaptability to their environment.

I have been working to improve the help-seeker's ability to adapt to their environment, so as to reduce the physical and mental suffering caused by environmental stimuli and improve their quality of life. I venture to say that the medicine of humanity will eventually reach a realm where we no longer distinguish between sick and well, no longer label all manner of patients with disease names, but use every means to help those who feel unwell to adapt better to their environment and to life. The ultimate (and most practical) aim of medicine will no longer be to defeat disease and conquer death, but to help the unwell reduce the various stimuli and impacts their internal and external environments inflict, so that their quality of life improves.

Perhaps, when this way of thinking becomes common, we will realize the great value of forbearance, and realize that the survival experience our ancestors explored on this planet has an intrinsic worth. Whoever you are, training your own endurance in adversity and your own ability to digest unpleasant emotions is never a bad thing—especially when the social environment turns harsh.

One more point is crucial: as human beings we must give up the fantasy that our living environment will be beautiful. Open a history book, and between the lines you see nothing but endless challenge and suffering. Survival has always been a challenging business; species on Earth have already experienced five mass extinctions, showing that no species escapes adversity and no one can live in their ideal state. Only those who can endure the bitter cold of winter stay evergreen. We can try to turn surging emotions into a gentle stream; it makes us feel much better.