When Ignorance Ends, Peace Arrives

A monk asked the Buddha: What is the greatest strength? What is the clearest light? The Buddha said: Forbearance bears the greatest strength, for it harbors no evil and adds tranquility and vigor; he who forbears has no evil and is sure to be respected by others. When the defilements of the mind are utterly extinguished and it is pure, without spot or stain, that is the clearest light. From before heaven and earth until today, among all the ten directions, there is nothing unseen, nothing unknown, nothing unheard; he who gains all-wisdom may be called clear.

— The Sutra of Forty-two Sections Spoken by the Buddha

The joys and sorrows of human beings are not shared, but the wisdom with which they handle joy and sorrow is the same.

In high school, the way my beloved teacher taught me to read was utterly different from the conventional education of today. He had a large library and would often pick out an armful of books from his collection and set them on my desk, leaving them for me to browse at will. He imposed no requirements; he simply chose some books suited to the me I then was, and let me make my own second selection. Those I liked I kept and read; those I did not, I passed by. Once or several times a week he would bring me books, and I would often return the ones I did not want to read or had finished.

This method of reading was an unspoken understanding between us. My teacher always insisted that education should not be utilitarian; reading is a process of enriching one's own soul, and only the soul knows what the soul needs, so reading according to one's own will is the most efficient. He had almost no demands of me; his only expectation was that I read widely, master both Chinese and Western learning, and become a synthesizer.

After I graduated from high school I kept up this habit, but the current education system does not support such a way of learning, and so I did not accept it; I left the education system and dropped out of university.

I became a practitioner of my teacher's educational philosophy. From nineteen to forty-one, when I read at the National Library of China, my range of reading was extremely broad: medicine, sociology, philosophy, history, religion, psychology, anthropology, information science, library science and literature—I sampled them all; my figure passed before many a shelf in the National Library's reading rooms and stacks. When a person sets aside degrees and titles to read, his reading is purely hobby-driven rather than utility-driven.

I began reading at the National Library at nineteen, and for more than twenty years thereafter read there by my teacher's method. At the same time I often browsed bookstores, buying home whatever books took my fancy. Now my own library is large; I rarely go to the library, and when I do, I still read by this free-and-easy method. I never force myself, for some purpose—an exam or a certificate—to read prescribed books I may not like.

I do not know of any method of reading superior to this. Perhaps one day human education will finally return to simplicity, coming back to this simplest method I use. A person's thirst for knowledge is endogenous; in the process of seeking, only he himself knows best what he wants. So the best state of education is one in which the student, not the educator or teacher, leads the direction of learning.

I regard my own life as very fortunate; searching all of China, there may be few who, like me, have freely and happily roamed a sea of books for half a lifetime. Such reading brings a person a great harvest of the things best suited to himself; at critical moments, everything we have learned will come into play.

I have studied Buddhist scriptures since I was seven. At nineteen I began to study psychiatry. Seven years ago I began to study depression in depth and to help depressed patients out of it. I have very rich theoretical knowledge and practical experience of depression. I am familiar with the whole program of healing depression—psychoanalysis, cognitive therapy, and religious training.

While helping depressed patients as an observer, I collected a great many methods for dealing with depression. In my view, depression can be completely cured with a single sword-stroke that cuts through three thousand tangled threads, and it should happen very quickly.

The reason a person becomes depressed is that some kind of stress is at work. If we stand in the wrong posture, a certain stress arises inside the body; over time the side effects of this stress are great and may lead to a whole series of spinal problems such as uneven shoulders and legs of unequal length.

The key to curing depression is to find this stress and release it; once that is done, depression is cured. Few diseases do not already germinate early in life. Biology calls the changes organisms undergo under environmental influence early in life "epigenetic variation"; usually these are methylation processes. For example, a person who has been used since childhood to eating high-carcinogen foods like pickles has actually planted the root of cancer in childhood, though the disease only manifests in adulthood.

Depression is the same. That is why the psychoanalytic school attaches so much importance to searching childhood for the cause of depression. A person subjected to some repression in childhood forms an unhealthy behavioral or thinking habit; once the cause is found, depression can be cured at the root. But this search is not simple; it requires powerful powers of introspection. Introspection is a special ability, not everyone has it.

Moreover, the causes of depression are quite complex, and childhood hurt is not the only one. Certain exceptional geniuses, with an extremely strong spirit of adventure and exploration, also experience depression as they venture and explore. In this regard the most typical examples are Churchill and Feynman.

Churchill was tormented by depression all his life. He was an ardent, energetic adventurer and orator; his speeches were immensely infectious and moved many. Many of his decisions, such as the Dunkirk evacuation, were bold yet far-sighted. His famous speech that brought tears to British eyes paired perfectly with the Dunkirk decision and played a huge part in the final victory of World War II.

Churchill said: "Even though this battle has been adverse, we shall not parley, we shall not surrender, we shall fight on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender. Even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle."

So ringing and inspiring was this speech that it came from the mouth of a depressed man. Churchill's equally transporting work includes his massive History of the English-Speaking Peoples. If we read this book and then look at the works of Tang Degang, Huang Renyu, Xu Zhuoyun, even the sinologist Jonathan Spence and Will Durant, who wrote the Story of Civilization hailed as a modern Records of the Grand Historian, we readily find that Churchill is their ancestor; their works all bear, more or less, his flavor.

Few people have Churchill's genius and boldness. He was both a great statesman and a great writer, wielding the English language with consummate skill. Was Churchill's depression true depression? Or was it simply that a person of towering genius, living among people, was fated not to be understood, and this incomprehension caused people like Churchill to suffer constantly? Or does a creative person like Churchill naturally oscillate between surging passion and deep melancholy?

Similarly, when Feynman was depressed, was it true depression? This great physicist made outstanding contributions to the creation of humanity's first atomic bomb, but when the mushroom cloud rose over Hiroshima, he fell into deep depression. At that moment Feynman saw no hope; he saw that the bridges and high-rises humanity had built with its own hands would all at last be destroyed by the atomic bomb, and the tragic prospect that human civilization would itself perish in nuclear fire.

This pessimistic expectation left him interested in nothing; sadness attacked him from time to time, and it took him a long time to come out of it. So was Feynman being needlessly anxious, or will what he feared one day actually come to pass, so that he merely, like a prophet (people with a depressive temperament are often truly prophetic in this way), foretold the outcome? We cannot know.

We only know that when Feynman was depressed, John von Neumann, who worked with him, almost fell into the same state; the great genius finally comforted himself and Feynman with the words: "Don't take the responsibility for all mankind onto our own shoulders."

The various current books interpreting depression are none of them flawless. Some 20-40% of people (the reason the statistics vary so widely is that people still do not understand depression) will experience one or more bouts of depression in their lives, and unremitting sadness will assail them and strike them down.

I have a sufficiently rich store of knowledge, and this lets me resolve my own depression with ease.

On the evening of August 17, looking down from upstairs at the ten thousand lights of Beijing, I suddenly realized I was no longer sad. The fatigue and sadness that had tormented me for so long vanished all at once without a trace. I could again feel the beauty of the human world and genuinely marvel—how beautiful the night outside the window is!

I no longer had any desire to cry; I had rediscovered the joy of thinking. Most of Feynman's life was immersed in thought; for him, thinking was the source of joy, which is why he titled a book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. There is a group of people in this world whose greatest pleasure is thinking. Though I cannot stand shoulder to shoulder with figures like Churchill and Feynman, I am fortunate to share their hobby.

Before this, for a long time I had lost all interest and my life had no anchor. But on the evening of August 17, I found myself back in that familiar state, immersed in the pleasure of thinking, calm and content. Because I had at last lit the lamp of wisdom in every dark corner of my inner depths; when ignorance ends, peace arrives.

I have always had a strong spirit of adventure and exploration. In my thirties, chatting once with my mother, she said: You don't know how great your fate is; you are a person who has lived several lives. At over a year old you set the house on fire, nearly sending you and your brother into the flames; from five to seven you were unbearably naughty, jumping off every high place and splitting your head open several times, leaving scars that are there to this day, so that as a child people laughed and called you Scarface; as soon as you started primary school you went and caught all kinds of snakes with your bare hands, frightening me out of my wits; in primary school you always carried a hoe and dug everywhere, and uncovered an abandoned biogas pit, nearly poisoning yourself to death. You were far harder to raise than ordinary children; don't blame your dad for punishing you as a child—I think you were punished too little, you still aren't afraid of death at all.

For a long time I suspected that it was not I who set the house on fire but my older brother. But now I have to believe the family is right; judging by temperament, this sort of thing should have been me, not him. My whole life has been full of curiosity, and I have dared to venture all sorts of innovative experiments; I have never grown up in a routine way.

Looking back over my own past, I have to admit I am an unusual person, fundamentally different from the great majority in this mortal world. Recognizing and admitting this is important to me, because only by accurately positioning ourselves do we avoid mental derangement.

Actually, the hurts I suffered as a child were nothing much. My uncle by marriage was also good to me; in recent years his praise of me has been more than I can bear. He even thinks it hard to find a second person like me in our county—at once filial to his parents and clever—no longer wrongly accusing me of stealing from his home. The village chief's son, after fighting with me, soon played with me; we later became among the closest of childhood friends. His own story was pitiful: he had hardly known a few glorious days before his mother died of illness; when she died he was only in second or third grade. After his father remarried, his stepmother treated him poorly. Sometimes he would weep to me about his misfortune, and I would silently comfort him.

All beings suffer; everyone has a side worthy of compassion. I bear no grudge against anyone. Had my father known what I went through then, I believe the first to stand up for me would have been him; I simply did not tell him. This event also taught me strength and independence; so on the positive side, it was also fuel for my growth.

The reason I recall all this is only that, from a medical point of view, all the obstacles we suffer, though they seem to arise today, actually began long ago; they simply had not yet built up enough to detonate. It is like two lovers breaking up: it seems to happen in an instant, but the parting actually began long before. If we do not find the root of the problem, we cannot thoroughly cure the disease. Many healings are only superficial coverings that recur when the time is ripe again. To cure depression at the root, one must trace the question all the way to the end.

So what do you find when you trace it all the way to the end? Well, I personally found that everything is empty. The Buddhist theory of dependent origination and the emptiness of nature beautifully explains all the gratitude and grievance in the human world. The origin of all things is "emptiness"; only through the convergence of causes and conditions does "being" arise, but this "being" is actually a "provisional being" born of the convergence of conditions, not true being.

Put plainly, the above can be understood colloquially as: this is nothing at all! Yet an internal stress arose precisely over such a tiny thing and was never eliminated. Once it is eliminated, we are healed. Yes, everything I have done these past days has been precisely to eliminate this "stress" in myself—find it, gaze at it, understand it, and it vanishes.

I am not a severe depressive, because I am a fortunate person: my parents loved me, the teachers I met in school loved me, I have never lacked security in my life, and I have strong self-confidence. But I know that many severe depressives lack all this; they need much nourishment of love to recover.

My mother never once in her life called me by my given name. She had only two ways of addressing me: Xi-de (meaning "the little one" in the Huanggang dialect) and Xi-er ("little son"). As a child I was so playful and mischievous I often forgot to come home for meals. My mother would call across the whole village: "Xi-de! Xi-er! Stop playing, come home and eat!" Her drawn-out cry I still remember vividly. If I was playing marbles with someone, hearing that voice I would say: "This round ends here; my mother is calling me home to eat."

This intimacy from my mother let me know from childhood that I was not alone; behind me stood my mother. Thinking of it now, I have also never called my son by his full name; I have always called him son or kid. This may also have been inherited from my mother. The effect of such an affectionate form of address is great; when someone in the world calls us like that, our sense of security is strong. We know that in that person's eyes and heart we are not a name, not a symbol, but a being of one flesh and blood with him. Many people cannot even accept pet names from lovers; perhaps the root lies in lacking such an emotional bond in early childhood.

Depression is actually not hard to treat; what is hard is the emotional bond the patient lacks and his own store of knowledge. If the emotional bond is strong and the store of knowledge sufficient, depression can heal within just a few days of diagnosis. If these are lacking, then curing depression depends on karma and time.

Today I am very calm, no longer inexplicably sad; my depression scale score is 6—0-11 all being a healthy range. I am very satisfied with the several articles I have written recently; I have long been dissatisfied with my own writing, but lately my writing seems to have reached its best state.

As I write this, my mother's cry rings in my ears again; I feel I have returned to childhood, hearing her drawn-out voice from afar: "Xi-de! Xi-er! Stop playing, come home and eat!"

Goodbye, Mr. Depression! My mother is calling me; I won't play with you anymore. I'm going home to eat. Thank you for coming to see me; you promoted my growth.