Three Knowledges for Health Cultivation: Know When to Stop, Retreat, and Yield

In Laozi's Daodejing, the way of health cultivation he advocates is: attain the utmost emptiness; hold fast to genuine stillness. Utmost emptiness is the state of being utterly void. Genuine stillness is the state of being unmoved and secure as Mount Tai. If a person can cultivate selfhood to this degree, the external world can affect him only slightly, while his inner spiritual world becomes exceedingly strong. But for a person to reach such a state is far from easy.

Daoism has always been regarded as world-fleeing. The word world resembles the Buddhist red dust and living beings. Why did great thinkers like Laozi and Sakyamuni flee the red dust? Why flee it?

A Buddhist colleague once told me that the Buddha was frightened into being. That single word frightened gave me an awakening. Having been immersed in the dusty world for over thirty years, my greatest feeling is precisely fright. If a person becomes afraid of worldly life, he is not far from the Buddhist way.

When the world calls beauty beauty, that is ugliness; when the world calls goodness goodness, that is ill. This Laozi saying is often misread. I have seen many interpretations, each convinced it understood Laozi—yet none truly does. In my reading, it is the insight Laozi reached after he became frightened.

The literal meaning is: what the whole world calls beautiful is not truly beautiful; what the whole world calls good is not truly good. But to truly grasp and embody the profound meaning requires rich life experience.

In today's world, only someone who has endured the cold stares of the world, watched with detachment the warmth and coldness of human relations and the ups and downs of worldly ways, and seen through the fawning faces of people everywhere, can utter words of such great wisdom.

Poor in the busy market, no one asks; rich in the deep mountains, visitors come from afar. In today's world, what all call beautiful is money. Once everyone agrees money is good, what it carries is all worldly strife: some stop at nothing, using every means to get it; some are heartbroken when they cannot; some fawn on the rich and treat the poor with coldness. This is the basic way of the world.

Once one has no money, one is wretched, restless, day and night ill at ease, and disregarded in life. Once one has money, the mindset changes at once, and those around one alter their former attitude to respectful deference. Yet behind that deference lie calculations and scheming. The novel The Scholars portrays the world's fawning faces vividly; millennia later, this human shortcoming remains unchanged.

Fame and gain are public objects; everyone wants them. Whether obtaining them is fortune or misfortune is hard to say. Laozi's fortune dwells on misfortune; misfortune leans on fortune is often misread as an accidental pattern, but fortune and misfortune interweave as an inevitable law. When good fortune shines upon you, beware of the knife hidden behind your back.

Once fame and gain are obtained, one at once becomes a target; for fame and gain are public objects everyone aims to seize, and everyone wants to grab them. Striving for the fame and gain admired by all also entails entirely unforeseen sacrifices: personality, dignity, freedom, privacy, and personal safety may all be sacrificed.

Without experiencing the peaks and troughs of life, without having tasted brief glory and then returned to plainness, without taking a few hard falls, without suffering major losses in the world, without known great sorrow and great joy—how can one fathom the profound wisdom behind Laozi's world-fleeing attitude?

The monk chants the sutras with mouth but no mind. This saying originally mocked Buddhists who go through the motions without genuine practice. But it applies equally to most people reading books. To be mindful requires not so much an attitude as life experience. Especially when reading classics of deep life philosophy, without deep insight into life one cannot understand them.

Having something to fear is the beginning of genuine thinking about life. Fearlessness that follows fear is true fearlessness, total fearlessness. What one fears are the natural and social laws hidden behind phenomena. What one is fearless of is: once seen through, one is no longer trapped in the net of the red dust, and need never again worry about falling into the endless cycle of fortune and misfortune.

Hence Buddhism says: the bodhisattva fears causes, while ordinary beings fear effects. The Buddha was frightened into being. He too saw through this karmic cycle in the world, saw through how living beings entangled in fame and gain bind themselves in a cocoon, bring suffering on themselves, and live out futile lives—and then leapt beyond the three realms, outside the five elements.

Each of us, from some unclear moment, suddenly and muddledly falls into the worldly circle, where we are constantly tormented by the eight sufferings: birth, old age, illness, death, parting from the beloved, meeting the hated, not getting what we seek, and the overwhelming blaze of the five aggregates. We seek much and receive little, constantly shrouded in disappointment, anxiety, and sorrow.

Such life is misery itself; what joy is there? Russell said that on the streets, among the crowds coming and going, few faces show an unburdened expression. Who knows how many people will in their lives lament countless times: What joy in being born? What suffering in dying?

Living beings suffer thus, and the Buddha experienced it; Laozi experienced it too. Before their enlightenment, they were ordinary people like us, trapped in worldly afflictions. The difference is that they wanted to leave these afflictions, and ultimately succeeded in doing so.

The first step of this leaving is knowing when to stop. Stopping in life is not easy; the world knows advance but not retreat. All long for the good ahead, and few think of halting the pursuit entirely, for few doubt the belief in going forward. Ordinary beings assume that only moving forward holds hope for solving their present problems. They do not realize that in life, stepping back one pace is often more perfect.

Knowing when to stop, one can be resolute; resolute, one can be serene; serene, one can be at peace; at peace, one can reflect; reflecting, one can attain. This passage comes from the Great Learning. Confucians hold that knowing when to stop is the beginning of wisdom. One of the six Buddhist paramitas is samadhi (giving, precept-keeping, patience, samadhi, prajna, and diligence are the six basic Buddhist practices, the six paramitas). To practice samadhi well, one must practice stopping and observation (zhiguan).

Stopping is the beginning of thought; knowing when to stop is the first step of life's settling. Stop and ask: Is all this I pursue truly meaningful? Why should I live this way? Is what I strive for what I truly want? Can all this truly bring me happiness?

Du Fu wrote, your names and bodies shall both perish, yet the great rivers flow on forever. Zhuangzi, expansive and untrammeled, was the poet among thinkers, accustomed to interrogating his own heart in sweeping parallel sentences, finally concluding: the multitude value profit; the incorruptible value fame; the worthy cherish ambition; the sage values essence.

Sometimes we watch monkeys perform tricks and find it funny. But standing at a height beyond the human, to watch humanity toiling, chasing fame, gain, wealth, and lust, would give the same feeling we have watching monkeys perform tricks.

Laozi said, heaven and earth are not benevolent; they regard the ten thousand things as straw dogs. The sage is not benevolent; he regards the people as straw dogs. We live in this world, manipulated by natural and social laws; unawares we fall into one pre-set trap after another. Carefully considered, most of what we do are expectations imposed on us from outside, eventually internalized into personal wishes, ideals, and desires. Can all this truly bring us happiness?

The anthropologist Malinowski's great contribution was his functional theory of society. He held that each individual in society is like a part of a machine; living in society, one's function has long been locked in—people are born into society to satisfy society's own developmental needs. We are tools manipulated by society. All those inspiring fame, repute, and renown are the most powerful weapons society has set to manipulate humanity.

The greatest difference between Western and Eastern thinkers is that Western thinkers like to make problems clear and explicit, while Eastern thinkers prefer vague and broad generalization. Malinowski's social thought is essentially identical to the Buddha's and Laozi's, only expressed more clearly.

In the final analysis, we are just small chess pieces in human society. The achievements we glory in are, invisibly, candies set by an unseen hand of God to reward us for being better enslaved. These candies are, as the Buddha's metaphor has it, honey on the tip of a knife: not enough to fill the stomach, but with the great risk of cutting the tongue. Yet living beings all lap them up, willing to take the risk.

Only after knowing when to stop can one deeply sort out these connections between self and world. Once understood and fathomed, one can then know when to retreat.

Knowing when to retreat means: I no longer play this game. I will not be the monkey performing tricks; from now on I leap beyond the three realms, outside the five elements, all four elements empty, the five aggregates devoid of self, untouched by the dusty world. As Zhuangzi said: an owl that has at last found a piece of rotting flesh sees a divine bird fly past and at once bristles, striking a pose to frighten it off—but has the divine bird the slightest desire for that rotting flesh? If we can be like the divine bird, not coveting the fame and gain that living beings chase, then retreat is the unequaled choice.

The Buddha's attitude to life is giving and yielding. Whatever everyone contends for, I will not take. I do not join the excitement or grab the popular; when I can retreat three hundred paces, I do. In dealings with others, I give and yield. Laozi says: the way of heaven benefits but does not harm; the way of the sage acts but does not contend. Both Sakyamuni and Laozi advocate this attitude: I take the loss, you get the credit; I do the work, you enjoy the blessing; when help is needed I give my all; when fame and gain are contended for, I stand aside. Without the wisdom to see through the essence of worldly fame and gain, such equanimity is hard to attain.

Knowing when to stop, when to retreat, and when to yield—only then can one be truly calm of heart, at peace in body and mind. The outside world never ceases its storms; no one in this world ever has everything go as wished. It is impossible to first have all one's wishes fulfilled and then enjoy inner peace. Happiness should only be sought deep within the heart. This is the true meaning of cultivating Buddha and Dao by cultivating the mind.