Without Abandoning Cultural Arrogance, One Cannot Break Through Self-Limitation

In almost every group, there is a unanimous view that other groups are inferior to one's own.

— The historian Will Durant

Deep-seated arrogance and self-righteousness are an inborn affliction of humankind. Everyone may have his beliefs, whatever they are. A person believes what he believes to be the truest and best, so that it is hard for him to reflect on his own flaws and break through his own limits.

When this psychology reaches its extreme, it stirs strife and even slaughter. Even gentle believers assume their faith is supreme and feel an impulse to remake others in its image.

From ancient times to today, countless wars have been fought over belief.

People raised immersed in a certain culture unconsciously assume it is the best in the world. Few can rise above this self-superiority to think and explore more deeply, so most of us are, all our lives, a little self-righteous and frog-in-a-well.

Zhuangzi says one cannot talk of ice to a summer insect. Why? The summer insect lives only through one summer, never seeing winter; speak of ice and it thinks ice does not exist.

One cannot blame the insect; within its limited "insect-life" experience, ice simply does not exist.

This short-sighted creature has what Zhuangzi calls "small knowledge," knowing so little that it cannot imagine the wider world of "great knowledge." But great knowledge, relative to still greater knowledge, is only small knowledge.

So is there anyone in the world truly like the Buddhist sutras describe—"before heaven and earth, up to today, all ten directions, nothing unseen, nothing unknown, nothing unheard, having attained all wisdom, he may be called illumined"?

Within my limited experience, such a person absolutely does not exist. There was none in the past, none now, and none in the future. The boundless world and the infinitely subtle universe cannot be fully fathomed by any one person.

Zhuangzi says: "My life has a limit, but knowledge has none; pursuing the limitless with the limited is perilous." Life is finite, knowledge infinite; to try to master infinite knowledge within a finite life, exhausting oneself like a dog, is impossible.

So what is to be done? Admit that you are a person of limited knowledge. Forever keep a door open to the world you do not know. Do not reject those who differ, do not assume that what you do not know does not exist; do not be the summer insect that, never having seen ice, refuses to believe it exists.

People often tell me, "You are an aristocrat of the spirit." I find this funny—so there exists this odd species called the spiritual aristocrat.

Well, I must admit: someone like me, who transplanted rice and cut grain in the paddy fields of rural Hubei until age eighteen, can never be any kind of aristocrat. A mud-foot who has washed his feet and come ashore remains, in his bones, a commoner through and through.

I do not recognize material aristocrats; I equally do not recognize spiritual ones. To anyone who wants to be an aristocrat, of whatever kind, I can only offer: "You're nuts!"

Everyone in this world is what Zhuangzi calls "small knowledge" or so-called "great knowledge"; no one knows everything, and no one is a damned spiritual aristocrat. Those who think themselves superior, in the eyes of someone like me who has merely dabbled in medicine, have a mental disorder—their cognition of the world is off.

If the condition is mild, those around them put up with it; if severe, it needs treatment. The philosophical sage Gibran said: I will not befriend the self-righteous. The reason is simple: dealing with such people is too miserable.

As I teach my children and students medicine, I constantly instill this: whatever you have studied, neither think yourself remarkable nor think what you have studied remarkable. It is all just a few ripples in the long river of human history; it is nothing.

I now rarely accept or initiate any cultural debate. Such debates are mostly people with nothing better to do spitting at each other and blowing their own horns. When I publish on widely followed public platforms, to avoid such arguments I usually just turn off the comments.

Well, I love leaving the combative young men and women who get angry at my writing utterly helpless. Is it interesting to do nothing all day but attack each other with extreme words?

Perhaps because I write reasonably well, platforms keep inviting me to opine on this or that issue. I look at the topics and—good heavens—they are all highly divisive, polarizing issues, with extreme, eye-grabbing headlines.

So I block all such things. I already write case histories every day until my back aches; I have no spare time for a war of words.

I do not understand why the world must be a life-and-death struggle, a place where you and I must decide right from wrong and winner from loser. Is it to prove one's own ignorance and vulgarity?

Disrespecting others' cognition and belief is one incivility; flaunting one's own cognition and belief is another.

We all live in a limited world; everyone's cognition and belief have limits. Mutual modesty serves peaceful coexistence and helps each of us break through our limits, accept new knowledge and new things, and improve.