Chapter 17: I Want to Go Back

“I want to go home.”

Sometimes this means that flat. After a tiring day out, squeezed into the subway, there is only one thought in your head: get home quickly, kick off your shoes, collapse on the sofa. Home is a place where you have nothing more to prove: scruffy, ugly, in a temper, home is still home.

But sometimes this sentence doesn’t mean that flat.

Someone has everything—a flat, a job, a family—yet inside he has always had a drifting feeling he can’t explain, as if he had always been outside, far from some original place. He says: I want to get back to myself. I want to be the real me again. I want to find the place I belong.

Someone has read many books, practiced for many years, and in his heart there has always been a road: from this muddled, suffering self now, step by step, to a clear, free place. He says: I’m still on the way. I’ve a long way to go. Once I’ve practiced to that point, all will be well.

Someone has spent his whole life waiting: for the children to grow up, for the mortgage to be paid off, for retirement, for this busy spell to be over. He says: once I’ve got all this done, I can really start living.

Someone, in very hard days, has a hope in his heart: once times are better, once conditions are right, once everyone has improved, life will be easier.

And someone, late one night, is crushed by a bigger question: what am I alive for, in the end? What use am I?

Some of these sentences carry an “I,” some don’t; some speak of home, some of a road, some of a destination, some of meaning. Different as they are, they often assume the same thing: I am outside now, and the real place is elsewhere.

That place some call home, some the real self, some the other shore, some later, some meaning. Whatever it is called, it is elsewhere: inside the door, at the end of the road, in the future, in a place where everything can be accounted for. A person now is outside the door, on the road, waiting, in a place where nothing has yet been accounted for.

So people spend their whole lives hurrying there. While hurrying, the days before their eyes become a road, a transition, a making-do, the stretch that hasn’t yet begun.

“Back” is a word with two ends. To go back, you must first have left; to go back to a place, you must first not be in it. So the moment a person says “I want to go back,” he has already settled one thing: he is outside now.

Said of a flat, this is often true: you are at the office, home is on the east side of the city, after work you take the train back, and the road is traveled stop by stop. But said of being, there is a problem.

Search as you will, you can’t find a position standing outside being. There is no one behind holding being, no ground beneath holding it up, no doorway to stand in. Then if a person wants to “go back” into being, where does he set out from? This “outside” he is standing in now: where is it?

This outside can’t be found. Yet that drifting, that empty sense of being far away, is real. Where does it come from?

It was said earlier: the moment one asks, one has left; where the asking rests, one is.

Ask “how can I get home?”, and in this very asking one has first put oneself outside home. Before asking, one didn’t feel outside; ask, and it is as if suddenly there were a road, home at that end, oneself at this end. This road was asked into being, not measured out step by step.

That sleepless man kept asking “why can’t I sleep?”, and the more he asked, the more awake he was. He was in that bed all along, awake, asking, not sleeping. That sleep didn’t come was real; but the sleepless night didn’t push him outside being either; it was the asking that made him feel he was outside the door. The drifting man is the same. Sometimes home really can’t be gone back to: the old house pulled down, those people gone, that city changed. Home can really be beyond going back; but being has no place to go back to. The place he stands in has not shut him outside being; it is the asking “I want to go back” that has made him feel he has been outside the door all along.

Now look at “the road.”

“I’m on my way!” Everyone has said it, mostly when late. And there is a bigger use: life is on the way, dreams are on the way, “I’m still on the way.” Said with a touch of modesty, and a touch of not being content: not there yet, still a long way off, the real stop is ahead.

People spend their whole lives hurrying forward like this, stop by stop: as children they long to grow up; grown up, to pass exams; then to marry, to build a career, to buy a flat; finally to retire, longing for the day when at last there is no more hurrying, and they can live well for a few days.

Someone sits on his balcony on the day he retires and thinks: right, now at last I can start living. The next morning he makes a cup of tea, sits on the same balcony, and finds the day no different from the Sundays of all his working years. The “beginning” he waited forty years for is just a morning like this. Yet in those forty years he married, raised two children, saw his parents off, ate thousands of youtiao at the breakfast shop by the office gate; which day doesn’t count?

Hidden in “on the way” is a picture of time: the road has a starting point and an end point, and the stretch between is walked for the sake of the end. The end is the purpose, the road the means; the means itself doesn’t count; only arriving counts. Following this picture, people naturally feel that being has an end point too: at some stop, being is at last complete, at last truly being.

The road in the practitioner’s heart is often this picture too: level by level, step by step, from ordinary to holy, from delusion to awakening, from this shore to the other shore. Each level higher than the one below, each step a little nearer the end.

Suppose there really were such a stop, at which being is complete. Then on every day before arriving, what is being? Incomplete being, being with a piece missing. But every time of being is full: the moment a candle is half burned is not a whole candle minus half; it is the burning of this moment, lacking nothing. If a time of being could have “a piece missing,” where is the missing piece? At the end, waiting to be filled in? The end hasn’t come; it is not now; how can something that is not now make now lack a piece? To say now is lacking is only to take an imagined end point, measure now backward from it, and come out with not enough.

And the end point? The last stop of a human life everyone knows, only no one likes to say it: the last stop is not being. By the picture of “on the way,” this stop should be where being is at last complete; but it is no completion; it is only this time of being reaching its end. When the road is walked to the end, the whole way is all there is. There is no stop at which being is made up in full before people are let off. The end point is not completion; the end point is only the end; completion was never at the end point; it is in every stretch of the road.

The other shore is like this too. If the other shore were elsewhere—across the river, after the practice is done, after death—then every day on this shore would become a boat for crossing, days not yet arrived. But every day on this shore is fully being; not one day hangs in midstream, uncounted. The other shore is not elsewhere; this place, now, this time happening, was never lacking that other side.

This is not to say the road of practice is useless, nor that people shouldn’t go forward.

Going forward is real. Roads have directions, people have places they want to go; wanting to go, go; a person heading toward what he wants to become—this “toward” is leaning, is how being alive looks. Practice is real too: someone who has practiced for many years really has a better temper, a really quieter heart, really sees people and things more clearly. Getting better is a solid change, with its weight and its consequences. Only, getting better changes the days, not being. The point he has practiced to is not more being than the day he first started; that first day was already a full day.

Climbers mostly head for the summit; at the summit they take a few photos, stand ten minutes, the wind blows, and they go back down; if being were only at the summit, that day would have been being for only ten minutes. And someone has never traveled far in his life, lived eighty years in his village, the farthest he has been is the county town; his road is the dirt track from home to the fields, walked for eighty years, with a carrying pole when young, with a stick when old. Every day on this road is as wholly being as every day of someone who has traveled the whole world. A long road or a short one is not more being or less.

And the one waiting for times to get better.

Progress is real: illnesses can be cured, people eat their fill, what couldn’t be done before can be done now; none of this is false, and people keep pushing forward. But if it is imagined as a road with an end point, that picture is put up again: the days of generation after generation before become road laid for the end, not counting, counting only as capital. The man planting rice seedlings in the field hundreds of years ago: that spring of his was not preparation for people hundreds of years later; the spring he lived was full. Pushing forward is real; the ones who push and the place pushed to are not means to each other.

Days in bad times don’t wait for good times to count either; poor days, hard days, are all fully being. Those who will fight still fight, those who will change things still change them; only this life was never staked on a good year not yet come.

People today often have a farther end point in their hearts as well.

Technology speeds up year by year. Some say that in a few more years all illness will be curable and people will live to a hundred and fifty, two hundred; further on, worn-out bodies can be replaced, what is in the brain stored in machines, and people need not die; further still, people will fly to other planets and become something far higher than now. Those who say it have shining eyes: that is the direction humanity should go. As if it were a road everyone has agreed on, the further along it the more right, and at its end, done.

This picture is the same picture as in the hands of the one waiting for times to get better, only painted farther out.

Faster, longer, higher are real changes. More illnesses curable, many people spared much pain; living longer, one can see a few more times the grandchildren’s grandchildren. All this is solid. But these are changes of being, not the completion of being. An afternoon in the hundred and ninety-ninth year of someone who lives to two hundred is not fuller than an afternoon of someone who lives to thirty. A day of a civilization that can fly back and forth between planets is not a bit more being than a day of someone tens of thousands of years ago warming himself at a fire at the mouth of a cave. He squats by the fire, the firelight on his face, snow falling outside the cave; that night is full. He is not a draft not yet grown, waiting for those after to complete him. Those after are not his end point either.

That direction “everyone wants” is not wanted by everyone either. Some, hearing they could live to three hundred, are overjoyed; some hear it and frown: so long—what would I do with it? Some can’t wait to go to other planets; some want only to tend the patch of land by their door all their lives. Each is the leaning of its place: whichever way it leans, that end weighs more in that place. But being doesn’t head toward either end. Which way to head is leaned out by each place itself; no end is the road being itself points to.

Generation after generation, there is something else that is not laid forward like this.

Someone has an operation and loses a lot of blood; the nurse hangs up a bag of blood, and it drips, drop by drop, into his arm. The blood is a stranger’s; he doesn’t know whether it was a man or a woman, what city they live in; perhaps one Saturday they passed a blood donation van and rolled up a sleeve. He wants to thank them, and doesn’t know whom to thank; wants to repay, and there is nowhere to repay.

What parents give is like this too: getting up in the night to make up milk, running to the hospital with a feverish child in their arms, keeping all the best for him those years. What can repay this? Money, going home to keep them company, however much is done, it is not the same thing; night after night was given to that very small child who knew nothing, and that child grew up long ago. Giving like this, once reckoned as exchange, becomes a debt that can never be cleared, and a person carrying it is bent under it.

But later the one who received blood gives blood himself, to someone he will never know; the child carried running to the hospital later gets up in the night to make up milk for his own child. Some things are not paid back; they flow on. Each stretch of the flowing is not for the sake of the next: those hours of that bag of blood flowing in an arm, that bottle of milk made up that night, are full.

Last, that late-night question: what am I alive for, in the end?

When people do things, they often say a thing zai yu something: success lies in persistence, happiness lies in contentment, the problem lies in his not listening. Zai yu, “lies in,” is literally “is in”: every matter is in another matter. Follow this thread down: happiness lies in a stable life; a stable life lies in a good job; a good job lies in ability, opportunity; opportunity lies in luck, in whom you meet, in what year and what family you were born into. Further down, you are asking about things no one can control. Small children are best at asking like this: why do we have to eat? To grow. Why do we have to grow? To grow up. Why do we have to grow up? By the fifth, the sixth question, the grown-up can’t answer and has to say: that’s just how it is, there’s no why. Saying it, the grown-up is often a bit embarrassed, as if he had lost. In fact it is the most honest sentence in the whole string of questions and answers.

There is no “lies in” that is the last one.

Then being? What does being lie in?

In being alive? Being alive is one time of being. In having meaning? Meaning grows within being too. In some greater thing holding it up? That ground can’t be found. Being does not lie in anything.

The question “what am I alive for?” seems to say: being must first be held up by a meaning; without meaning, being shouldn’t be, or doesn’t count as being. That grass growing out of a crack in the wall: what does the meaning of its being lie in? It has no meaning, and grows perfectly well. Meaning is something that grows within being; there can be many, they can change, a life can have several: raising a child, tending a field well, finishing a book, caring well for a sick person. They all matter greatly, but they are fruit that being grows, not the root of being. Without a meaning, a person still is.

Push one step further down. Doing a thing has its purpose: cooking is for eating, saving for buying a flat, studying for passing; all this is real. But to say this time of being itself must be for something in order to count, there would have to be two things: this time, and a meaning outside it to be cashed in later. While these two stand apart, now is forever a means, and meaning forever one step ahead. Yet look for the place where now could be cashed in, and what you find is another now. Then only one account still stands: the meaning is the thing itself. In the moment of feeding a child, the meaning is this moment of feeding a child; on the afternoon of staring into space, the meaning is that afternoon’s staring; bedridden and turned over once, the meaning is that one turning over. It is not that behind these things there is another meaning waiting for them to be exchanged for it; it is that they are happening, and that is already everything; they need not be for anyone else. They are this place’s real time, and so need not lie in anything else either. The moment the sentence “living like this has to be for something to count” comes up, now is pushed back onto the road again, and meaning goes to stand ahead again; but no one has ever reached that ahead.

Nor does this mean things have no weight relative to one another. Raising a child, keeping a promise, and casually deceiving someone differ in meaning and in weight; these differences are real, struck out in this place. To say the meaning is the thing itself is only to say: being need not first exchange a meaning for a qualification.

Reaching “there is no final meaning,” a person may fall into nihilism: since nothing lies in anything, nothing is worth anything, and living is for nothing. Look closely at how this fall happens: it first assumes being must be held up by a final meaning to count; then finds there is none, and so judges that nothing counts. What falls is that premise, not being.

Being was never held up by meaning, so without a final meaning nothing collapses: the grass grows all the same, the rice smells good all the same, a person’s heart still tightens for another all the same. Nihilism too is a shape being shows: an afternoon when nothing is worth anything, empty; that empty afternoon is fully being too. Nihilism and the idea “there must be a final meaning” are a pair: one is the idea full of hope, the other the same idea after disappointment. That premise never stood up; since it doesn’t stand, the two fall away together.

An old man bedridden for many years, able to do nothing any more, fed by others, turned over by others, often says: what use am I alive, I’m a burden to you all. The family are hurt to hear it, yet don’t know how to answer.

Once his granddaughter, sitting by the bed peeling him a tangerine, said: you’re not here because you’re useful.

Rivers and birds never leave, and so need not go back.

A river flows from the mountains to the sea. Not for a single day does it feel it is outside and must go back to its source; nor for a single day does it feel it hasn’t arrived yet and must hurry to the sea to count. The stretch flowing through the valley is the river; the stretch flowing through the city is the river; the stretch at the estuary, mingling with seawater, is the river too. Every stretch is full.

A migrating bird flies every year from north to south and back from south to north. Does it have no home? Its home is the water it has landed on now, the tree. Flying all the way, it is at home all the way.

A tree grows on a hillside and never moves in its life. It has no end point, nor a starting point to go back to; it is just there, growing year by year. It grows toward the light, it has a direction, but it never “arrives.” Every year of growing is already it.

Of these beings, not one is outside the door, not one waits for an end point, not one must first find a meaning before it will be. They are always at home, always on the way, always not lying in anything. Being has always been like this: no outside the door, no end point, no final “lies in.”

Someone rents, moves every year or two, never dares put a nail in the wall. Someone asks him: where’s home? He has to think a moment to know which place to name. He feels he has no home.

Yet every evening he pushes open that rented door, turns on the light, boils water, kicks his shoes to one side, and lies down on the bed.

At that moment, where is he?