Remain calm in the face of honor and disgrace, and idly watch the flowers bloom and fade in the courtyard; have no intention of coming or going, and leisurely follow the clouds as they roll and spread in the sky. This couplet by Hong Yingming from the Ming Dynasty is recorded in Chen Meigong's anthology "You Chuang Xiao Ji". In "You Chuang Xiao Ji", there is such a couplet: "Remain calm in the face of honor and disgrace, and watch the flowers bloom and fade in the courtyard; have no intention of coming or going, and look at the clouds as they roll and spread in the sky." The meaning of this sentence is that one must view honor and disgrace as normal as the blooming and fading of flowers to remain calm; and view the departure and retention of positions as changeable as the rolling and spreading of clouds to have no intention.
Nowadays, most people feel tired and overwhelmed. They are puzzled as to why society is constantly progressing, yet the burden on people is heavier, their spirit more hollow, and their thoughts more restless. Indeed, society is moving forward and becoming more civilized. However, one disadvantage of a civilized society is the increasing separation between humans and nature. Humans sacrifice nature at the cost of being trapped in worldly mire, chasing after external rituals and material desires without knowing what true beauty is. The temptation of money, the struggle for power, and the rise and fall in officialdom exhaust one's mind. Success and failure, gain and loss make people either happy, sad, surprised, astonished, worried, or fearful. Once their desires cannot be realized, once their aspirations cannot succeed, once their hopes become illusions, they will feel lost, disheartened, or even lose their ambition. Loss is a psychological imbalance that needs to be adjusted by a sense of loss; disappointment is a psychological tilt, which is the emotionalization and deepening of loss; losing ambition is a psychological failure, which is complete decadence, the ultimate manifestation of loss and disappointment. To overcome this loss, disappointment, and loss of ambition, one needs to remain calm in the face of honor and disgrace, and have no intention of coming or going.
To become strong, one must first be weak; to rise, one must first be suppressed. As it says in "Tai Chi Chuan Theory": "When others are hard and I am soft, it is called yielding," and in "Thirteen Postures of Tai Chi Chuan": "Extremely soft, then extremely hard." "To be strong, one must first be soft; to rise, one must first be suppressed," "Softness can overcome hardness, retreating is advancing," "Returning strength to softness, transforming softness into strength, with no trace of strength visible" (Chen Xin's "Tai Chi Chuan Theory").
No matter how glorious one's life was before death, isn't it the same to fall into the cycle of rebirth afterward? After Buddhism was introduced to China, the spontaneous superstitious psychology of the Chinese people and their reverence for life and death were integrated into Buddhist theories of the soul, cause and effect, and reincarnation. These theories were used as powerful tools to uphold moral teachings, making people believe that after death, the soul could ascend to heaven as a Bodhisattva due to good deeds in life, be reborn as a human, turn into cattle, sheep, pigs, dogs, or even become hungry ghosts falling into hell.