Without Being Driven to Despair, How Would You Know How Beautiful Life Is?

I got up in the morning, strolled around the yard, and by the way took the household's recycled water to water the potted vegetables in the yard. The potted vegetables do not grow very well, bearing few and small fruits, but they still have a proper shape, and looking at them gives quite the feel of a vegetable garden.

The ancients said: make the highest vows, form middling karmic conditions, and enjoy the lowest blessings. When I planted vegetables in spring, my heart was full of hope for a rich harvest. By the time of the summer harvest, that eager heart had cooled before reality. So I instead felt that having this little landscape before me was also beautiful.

This year the economy is sluggish and unemployment is high; reportedly the unemployment rate among urban youth aged 16–24 reached 18.4%. The economies of the two leading cities, Shanghai and Beijing, have both been greatly hit; the GDP growth rate in the second quarter was negative in both—a situation that, in my lifetime, seems unprecedented.

Then there must be many people whose livelihoods are hard. I too have lived a life without enough food or clothing, and I know well how bitter that tastes. Around the age of twenty, for two or three years I often went hungry. By going hungry I mean truly being hungry, sometimes going several days without a square meal. When I was hungriest, I stole unripe peaches from an orchard near the school; after eating them I had diarrhea without end, truly reduced to dire straits. Another time I begged at Jinan Railway Station but did not get a single cent and was subjected to a great deal of humiliation. So my university teachers always kept me in mind, worrying that I was not doing well. Now that I have no worries about food, clothing, housing and transport, it makes them very gratified.

Those years of life could only be described as wandering and destitute. Fortunately, as a farmer's son, I had a very strong will to survive—which is why I am especially grateful that fate arranged for me to be born in a farming family. The experience of that time taught me that, as long as I have a plot of land and a pair of hardworking hands, at least I will not lack food and drink. People fill their stomachs first before thinking of anything else; those with empty stomachs are the clearest-headed people in the world, knowing that food is what matters most, happy just to have something to eat and never picky. Back then I often wanted to return to the village to live, growing grain and vegetables with my own hands, so that I would not starve.

The philosopher Seneca said: "I have never trusted Fortune. Whatever she has bestowed on me—money, office, power—I have set aside in one place where she can take it back at any time without disturbing me. I keep a wide distance from them. That way she can only take them away, rather than wrest them from me by force."

I think similarly. Now I have a house to live in, food to eat, and books to read; compared with the hardship I once experienced, it is a world of difference. But I have never dared to pin my happiness on these external things; I think that maintaining real working capacity and the habit of diligence is the most reliable. With these two in place, everything can be lost, but my sense of happiness will not be lost.

I still love planting and dare not forget my roots. In my heart I always think that one day I will return to the countryside and grow enough food to fill my stomach with my own hands; that will be enough. I have only the most basic survival needs of life; in those difficult days I already grew accustomed to finding joy amid hardship. I have also seen clearly that there is not much difference between poverty and wealth; we live in this world merely extracting the elements and compounds our body's cells need from food and water. However gorgeous the external forms may be, they cannot change this essence.

Now I live neither servile nor arrogant; heads of state and wealthy magnates are, in my eyes, merely sentient beings who, like myself, are tiny as ants and sometimes quite foolish. They cannot make me bow and scrape or grovel before them. If they wish to seek medical treatment from me, they too must respect and trust me, and understand and accept the uncertainty and risk of medicine; otherwise they too will be politely refused. Pedlars and porters I can treat on equal terms; if I meet someone in a pitiful plight, I may even open my purse to help.

One must learn to stand up immensely strong in the worst of lives; the hardships that cannot defeat us will surely temper us into a will of iron. On the question of the essence of life, anyone ought to think it through to the bottom. Once you have figured out the essence of life, nothing in this world can trouble you.

Under any circumstances, calmness, strength and diligence can help us walk out of hardship. An incident from childhood remains vivid in my memory: once I nearly drowned, and in my panic I felt under the water a large stone. I calmed down, lifted that big stone and let myself walk in one direction; walking and walking, I reached the shallows. Recalling it now, I marvel at the wonder of creation, which endowed even a small child with a calm head that, at the critical moment, saved his life.

We are born into a nature fraught with danger; the instincts our ancestors evolved while surviving in the wild for generations allow most people to survive in adversity. Our ancestors were once a fish in the sea, evolved on land into a vertebrate, then into a mammal, and then into present-day humans. In the course of evolution we overcame countless hardships, many of which were enough to snuff us out, but the will to survive helped us reach today.

Fortune is always so capricious; we need that detached, otherworldly attitude of Seneca to avoid being manipulated by this capricious goddess. I have always lived a lowest-cost life, because I know this is the thing Fortune is least likely to take away. Even if one day I lose my house, my social status, my wealth, I can still survive with my own two hands.

I would rather control my own fate than have fate manipulate me. When we feel we can control our own destiny, happiness is right before our eyes, because most of human suffering comes from worry about the uncontrollability of fate.