What I Miss Most Is the Countryside

If you ask me where I most want to be right now, I would say: in my rural hometown.

I really want to advise the young and middle-aged people who are now unemployed and back in their rural hometowns to start businesses in their own villages over the next year or two, and not to come out again. In the countryside there is plenty to do; growing grain and cultivating medicinal herbs are both very worthwhile pursuits.

Over the past two years the urban job market has been grim. Growing grain and herbs back home can at least solve the problem of food and clothing. Survival comes first; other questions can be considered later. Rural population mobility is limited; as long as one avoids close contact with neighbors, most country people will be far safer than city dwellers.

I have always preferred rural life. Last year and the year before, I each set aside some time to read in a small temple in my hometown. The temple is no longer as thronged with worshippers as it once was. When I read alone in that little temple halfway up the mountain, I felt there could be no greater happiness under heaven and earth.

Occasionally a pilgrim would turn up, and I would temporarily act as temple keeper, striking the bell. Some days no pilgrims came at all. But a stray dog at the temple grew familiar with me; every time it saw me arrive it was especially warm, throwing itself at me and following me from the foot of the mountain up to the hillside.

On sunny days I would read in the sun at the temple gate, and that abandoned little dog would lie at my feet and sun itself alongside me. The world was vast and empty, with only one person and one dog halfway up the mountain, keeping company with the pine wind and the hundred birds. Below, the fields stretched in a crisscross of paths, and the golden rapeseed blossoms blazed bright and dazzling.

In such moments I felt a relaxation I had never known. The year before last I lived that way for a whole month. Because I had stayed so long in the little mountain temple, the abbot of the big temple at the foot grew worried that I was up to some illegal activity, and once came up to check. Seeing me quietly reading there, he stopped worrying.

At the foot of the mountain was a larger temple, home to four or five monks. The monks had themselves opened a vegetable garden to grow vegetables and farmland to grow grain, and were largely self-sufficient. Several times I chatted with the monks; from their accents I could tell they came from different provinces—some from Shanxi, some from Hunan.

Beneath the temple eaves hung wind chimes; when the wind blew, they gave out a melodious sound, very pleasant. I do not much like experiencing monastic life in the big temples with so many rituals; I like borrowing a temple freely to read in. Halfway up the mountain stood an old temple, which the monks down below basically never went up to.

The mountain was full of medicinal herbs: Maidong (Ophiopogonis Radix), Dangshen (Codonopsis Radix), Pugongying (Taraxaci Herba), Diding (Violae Herba), Jinyinhua (Lonicerae Flos), Tiandong (Asparagi Radix), Banbianlian (Lobeliae Chinensis Herba), and a hundred other common medicinal herbs could all be found on the back hill. Sometimes I would take the stray dog and roam the whole mountain looking for herbs.

My bond with Brother Dog (or perhaps Sister Dog) was deep. One person and one dog came together through karma, and then will part through karma—truly practicing the Buddha's teaching of following conditions.

Many people nowadays probably think someone like me is utterly bizarre, actually going off to live this kind of life.

Few can understand that a person like me even exists. From birth to now, I have basically lived a free life untaxed by heaven or earth.

God must have forgotten me; when he sorts everyone into categories and manages them, he always overlooks me. I am just a wild-born book lover; I will live whatever life I take a liking to. I have no desire for material things, fame, or wealth; I only love living on my own impulses. In my own limited lifetime, among all the bizarre people, I have encountered only myself.

I think my greatest life harvest is that I have understood what kind of creature human beings are, and what human beings ought to value most. To my mind, life has only three characters: live—die—be. As long as you firmly remember that the starting point is being born and the end point is dying, the "be" in the middle becomes carefree and easy, with nothing to agonize over.

Anyway, everyone from birth onward is just lingering on to eat and wait for death; so why not choose the way of lingering on and waiting for death that you like most and that relaxes you most? Whatever way we choose, we cannot escape Du Fu's famous line: "You lot—when body and name are both gone, the great rivers and rivers flow on unchanged, age after age."

When I read Du Fu's line in middle school, I was overwhelmed by its piercing accuracy. I seemed to see Du Fu saying, with a trace of mockery: You fellows jump up and down, fuss over so much fame and fortune, and when you croak nothing will remain of you, but the rivers and lakes will flow on unchanged for eternity. This attitude of Du Fu's made me lose interest in fame and fortune at a very young age.

Fortunate in this life to be born a farmer—and the poorest kind of farmer at that. As a child, my family of five—my parents and us siblings—had at most one or two vegetable dishes per meal; in seasons when the countryside had no fresh vegetables, we ate pickled vegetables.

When I started junior high, I carried rice from home to school to exchange for meal tickets, bringing my own bottles of pickled vegetables; basically every meal I ate was washed down with those pickles. Everyone in my era lived this way, and it did not feel especially bitter. At university, because I was poor, I even once begged for food.

These hardships I have eaten have given me a tolerance for suffering with no lower limit; as long as a breath remains, I can lingeringly and contentedly wait for death. When my mother was alive, she often told people I was the sort of fellow who, after eating one meal, never worried about the next. This nature is truly wonderful; under heaven there is nothing worth fretting over, and nothing worth hustling and bustling for.

This is how our ancestors lived; when humanity was still in a gathering society, people lived off the weather. The year my son was four, I took him onto the street to collect mineral-water bottles. I said to him: "Even scavenging, we won't starve, so Daddy hopes you will never worry in your whole life."

I love reading anthropology; I have read the books of many great anthropologists. The early anthropologists had the chance to encounter different peoples around the globe, and they recorded the many ways of human society. In many primitive tribes, people had no idea what poverty or worry even meant.

Poverty and worry are by-products of advanced human civilization, webs that modern people weave to bind themselves. We are tightly bound by modern civilization, always thinking about buying and paying for a house, marrying and having children, earning a pension. Few question whether such a life is meaningful; everyone simply feels they cannot survive otherwise.

I am indifferent to all this. If I had not married and had children, after all these years of reading and collecting books (my collection is enough to last ten lifetimes), the thing I would most want to do is ship my books back to my rural hometown and take pleasure in farming and reading. I think sooner or later I will go back to that life.

Our ancestors have a saying: "Farming and reading pass the family on; poetry and books continue the generations." A few mu of poor fields, two or three tile-roofed rooms to keep out the wind and rain, plus a roomful of books; beyond self-sufficiency, reading, writing, playing the qin—even a god could not be more carefree.

I am not someone who craves comfort; I have been used to hard work since childhood, so I do not feel labor is suffering, nor poverty. So living the farming-and-reading life in the countryside is, for me, truly like a fish in water. I hope I may realize this wish soon.