The Longchang Enlightenment
I was recently moved by a video from Luo Xiang: “Should we persist in integrity or choose worldly sophistication?”
He recounted Wang Yangming’s death: “On January 9, 1529, Wang Yangming died in Dayu County, Jiangxi, at only 57 years old. On his deathbed, his disciples asked if he had any last words. He replied: ‘This heart is luminous; what more is there to say?’ After his death, Emperor Jiajing not only refused to honor his achievements but condemned him, calling his teachings improper and accusing him of inciting chaos. The emperor stripped him of his title and banned the School of Mind. The empirical world offers nothing but repeated disappointments. Only by transcending experience and stepping out of Plato’s cave can we achieve inner coherence.”
The more I’ve experienced, the more I’ve come to see that materialism is fundamentally mistaken. Searching for truth and meaning in the empirical world is a fool’s errand—like trying to catch fish by climbing a tree.
Reality is nothing but endless conflict and contradiction. This is what existentialists mean by the absurd nature of existence. The notion that we should “follow natural law” is pure fallacy. External nature is cold, indifferent existence; it’s human consciousness that mediates and interprets the experiential world. The world itself has no color—our senses and consciousness paint it.
There’s a line from an online novel I read in college, Blasphemy: “All things in the world, with their myriad colors, are merely the veiled human heart.” Back then I found it striking without quite understanding why. Now I recognize it as an expression of Kantian philosophy, the same insight Van Gogh captured in his paintings.
Luo Xiang continued: “Later, when Wang Yangming served as an official and offended the powerful eunuch Liu Jin, he came to grasp the true meaning of gewu(investigation of things). The essence of * gewu* isn’t to understand heavenly principles by studying the external world, but to explore the Way of Heaven by examining one’s own heart.”
Home and Freedom
These reflections resonated with me because I’ve been living abroad, recently adrift and purposeless.
Mountains are hard to cross—who grieves for the lost traveler? Meeting by chance, we are all strangers in a foreign land.
Why do we spend our lives wandering?
I remember a conversation with Qin Ju at Zijing Cafeteria as graduation approached, talking about what we’d do after college. I said I wanted to throw a backpack on and wander until I found somewhere I liked, then settle down. It was just talk, of course—the day after graduation I reported for duty at a state-owned enterprise back home.
But looking back over the past decade, I’ve somehow been living out that throwaway remark. A prophecy I never meant to make.
The pursuit of freedom. The longing for home.
Freedom drives us to flee places that cannot contain us, to drift and wander. The longing for home kindles hope again and again, propelling us forward.
I recently read Existential Psychotherapy, which captured it well: finding a home, a sense of belonging with others in this world, freedom, resistance to oppression, enlightenment, self-realization.
Cultures of Love and Hatred
Have I found belonging in Europe? I’d say things are somewhat better.
A rough theory has been forming in my mind: cultures fall broadly into two types—those that cultivate goodwill and those that breed hatred. I’m not entirely certain of this, since purely antagonistic civilizations probably self-destructed long ago. Those that endure must contain some measure of mutual aid; they differ only in degree and scope. The broader the scope, the more civilized the culture. One metric, as economist Yang Xiaokai noted, is unprovoked kindness toward strangers.
I recently saw a question making the rounds on Twitter: If there’s a fire, would you save your eight-year-old cat or an eight-year-old child you don’t know? I tracked down the original post on Xiaohongshu—80% chose the cat, and the comments were nearly unanimous. The coldness, the faint malice toward human life—it was genuinely shocking. I posed the same question to European friends. Some would save the cat, naturally, but most said they’d save the child. This aligns with my experience: in Europe, I occasionally encounter unprovoked kindness from strangers. Looking back on thirty-plus years in China, I struggle to recall even a single instance of such kindness, yet I can easily summon numerous memories of unprovoked hostility.
These seem like trivial observations. But when you grow weary of everything and begin questioning life’s meaning, these small things suddenly loom large. What’s the point of living in a jungle among beasts, even if you’re the jungle’s king?
The True Homeland
So we drift and wander, moving from place to place, sampling the world’s different customs and cultures.
But perhaps the ideal state is ultimately impossible to find on earth. Our true homeland may lie in heaven.
Everyone’s ideal world is different. I think of a South African friend—born into a wealthy white family, yet a fervent Maoist. The more concrete our visions become, the more they clash. Those unquestionable moral truths probably exist only at the metaphysical level, like the logic behind “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” A perfect world capacious enough to contain us all can probably exist only in the transcendent realm outside Plato’s cave.
As Luo Xiang quoted: “The individual’s inner self is an experiential thing, mixed with good and evil. We must await a kind of miracle—moving from experience to transcendence, leaping from inside the cave to outside, transcending individual experience. In the experiential world, we cannot draw a perfect circle. But outside the cave, the perfect circle exists.”
My Problem
What strikes me most about Europe is that the world finally feels normal—there aren’t so many absurdities violating my will. Away from those troublesome people and situations, the world has grown quieter.
Now the problem is mine alone. In the past, external disturbances drew my attention outward. But now I must face my isolation directly, confront the desolation rising from within, beyond all the noise.
My problem is a severe emotional blockage. I seem to have lost the capacity to feel and desire. I can barely appreciate simple pleasures.
Then there’s my ability to love. As someone who learned to treat life as a survival game, I’m not afraid of hostility—I’m accustomed to malice, even expect it. But what truly disarms me is unprovoked kindness and joy. These are foreign to me. They leave me at a loss.
I can’t help lamenting that the life lessons I absorbed in my first thirty years were all wrong. The cultural difference between love and hatred I described earlier is rooted in assumptions about human nature. To assume everyone else is bad while making yourself the sole exception—this is philosophical cowardice. The complexity of human consciousness lies in how our assumptions about others are projections of our own self-conception. As the saying goes: “How others see you doesn’t represent who you are, but how you see others does.” Take that survival-first mentality: assuming others are bad doesn’t mean you’re bad, but it does reveal that your vision of others is a projection of the dog-eat-dog worldview you yourself have internalized.
Perhaps this is the cure for my emotional blockage: presenting myself honestly, practicing unconditional love. Choosing sincerity and integrity after weathering life’s storms—not because “suffering loss brings blessings,” not even out of some utilitarian hope for reciprocity, but from self-respect. To give others the greatest respect is to respect yourself, to respect the projection of your own consciousness.