Tasting the Spirit of Traditional Chinese Culture Through the Character "Yi" (Elegant Freedom)

In traditional Chinese art theory there is a view that the "elegant" (yi) grade is the highest form of art. The highest realm of the scholar-official is likewise the recluse who achieves merit without dwelling on it. "Yi" is a pictophonetic character, composed of "rabbit" and "run"; its original meaning is a hare running away. Extended, it symbolizes a quality of being beyond the vulgar and standing apart from the crowd. Yi means departing, transcending, soaring gracefully. Yi is an attitude of leaving the world and avoiding it; the reason people love yi and long for it is that they are weary of the dusty world.

The reason the dusty world wearies people lies in the destructive side of human nature. Through bad habits—selfishness, greed, love of ease and hatred of work, vanity, pursuing gain and avoiding harm, loving the new and tired of the old—people do not hesitate to harm their fellow human beings for their own ends. This pattern of human relations has existed since antiquity and may persist until the day humanity is destroyed.

The Bible says there is nothing new under the sun. Judging simply by certain human commonalities, little has indeed changed from antiquity to today, and most of what people do is indeed not new. This is probably why the writings of the ancients still make delightful reading for us today. And the reason religions are so attractive is probably that the selfless, universal love they generally preach is precisely the quality humanity lacks.

So people get along like two hedgehogs huddling for warmth—too close and they prick each other, too far and they feel cold. The relationship between the individual and the group is much the same: apart, it is hard to survive; absorbed into the group, one inevitably feels all sorts of discomfort. As a person lives on, they gradually grow into a kind of wisdom, knowing how to maintain a measured, now-close-now-distant distance from others and from the group, living in a state of "yi," at peace with the world.

The ideal personality of Easterners is also embodied in kindly, helpful, generous, and peaceable elders. We can sense this from the statuary art of Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism. The bodhisattvas, sages, and immortals in the temples are all kind and gentle, looking the sort who would not harm a fly.

In ancient China, if a person spent a lifetime living peaceably and helpfully, attaining the realm of an "elegant" among people, then after death they might well be enshrined in a temple by the people of some region they had benefited. In my hometown there is a Medicine King Temple, enshrining a Sui-Tang dynasty physician—the Medicine King Sun Simiao, who is said to have practiced medicine and saved people there in his lifetime. In Anhui, Fujian, Shaanxi, and elsewhere there are some "flesh-body bodhisattvas" enshrined in temples; these flesh-body bodhisattvas were also local practitioners in their lifetimes.

I believe most people, reaching a certain age, are willing to be kind to others and dislike competing to win; those who spend a lifetime making things difficult for others are, after all, few. But for a person to grow to this point takes a very long process. Confucius said that at forty one is free from doubts; I think that in today's age, for many people it is still hard to reach that state of freedom from doubt, because there are too many things around us stimulating our senses. And as long as one remains sunk in sensory stimulation and cannot extricate oneself, it is hard to make a real break with the worst roots of human nature. Without breaking with these roots, we remain forever confused and controlled by them; once controlled, we inevitably sink, as Buddhism says, in ignorance (wuming).

So for a person to enter the state of yi, they must first see everything through clearly: suffer enough losses, be fooled enough, hit enough walls, experience life and death partings, have been greedy, have renounced, have gained, have lost, have known joy and pain, sorrow and delight, been arrogant and been humble, and finally reduce everything to plainness. Only thus can one master one's own heart, so it no longer bolts about like a runaway horse. Only thus can one transcend the worst roots of human nature, no longer chasing fame and gain or courting the crowd, no longer liking to profit at others' expense or harming others.

As the anthropologist Morris said, besides the worst roots, human nature also has a beautiful side. Confucius named this beautiful side "ren" (benevolence); Mencius named it the "mind of commiseration"; Laozi named it "ci" (compassion); the Buddha named it "cibei" (great compassion); modern people call it simply love.

From a psychological point of view, this beautiful side of humanity comes from people's capacity for "understanding and sympathy." Precisely because every sound individual among humans is capable of feeling pain, and, having felt pain themselves, sympathizes with others in pain, does humanity possess this side that moves others—the side Buddhism calls the spirit of "great compassion for all beings." Without this side, the world would be left only with bloody scenes of mutual slaughter. This is also why most people live out their lives in the dusty world rather than dying as recluses in the mountains.

Even among those who live as recluses in the mountains, this beautiful side of human nature is hard to sever; they do not become dead as withered wood. A living person, wherever they go, retains the ability to feel their own emotions; joy, anger, sorrow, and happiness can be muted but hardly extinguished. To spend a long, long life utterly without feeling would be worse than prison. So by a certain age, a person may naturally come to taste the joy of treating others kindly and taking pleasure in helping them.

One flaw in the development of human civilization may be that it has placed this spirit of kindness and helpfulness in the category of morality to be commended, rather than in the category of human nature, as a normal thing. Commending and encouraging this trait seems, on the contrary, not to help preserve its original richness. As Laozi said, where there is great goodness there is great hypocrisy; in the world, deeds that wear the skin of kindness while practicing self-serving deception are simply too numerous to count, and behind the foremost good may lurk the foremost fraud.

In fact, whether inborn or learned from the environment, people all possess the seeds of good character. Hence Mencius said: the heart of commiseration is in everyone. Laozi held that compassion is nature. Buddhism holds that everyone has Buddha-nature; wipe away the dust covering the mind, and Buddha-nature manifests of itself. From an anthropological point of view, the helping spirit is the development and extension of the most primitive human cooperative spirit in hunting.

So the truly elegant (yi) is an elegance that returns to original nature; it is so of itself, without adornment. One does things not putting on airs to win praise, nor refraining from them out of self-interest. Daoism calls such people "zhenren" (the true person)—the truthful, non-deceptive person; the pure, unaffected person; the person like a sheet of window paper that bursts at a single poke. Caigentan says: the ultimate in being a person is simply authenticity. In the world of an authentic person, everything is natural; in the eyes of such a person, people differ not in high or low, nor in superior or inferior, only in who has transcended earlier.

With my own child I rarely moralize; instead I let him experience everything, taste things, and slowly grow on his own, making his own wrong or right choices, bearing the good or bad consequences himself, judging for himself from the consequences whether the cause was right, and gradually forming his own code of conduct. I believe a code of conduct formed this way is more humane, more solid, and more real. A tree grows a strong root not because it is quick to mature but because it grows for a long time. The word "morality," even if not a shameful, utilitarian word, is one not worth bringing to the table to be trumpeted about.