There is a dark joke that no white shrink can cure the psychological problems of people who grew up in East Asia.
Culturally, suffering is elevated to a virtue, praised and reinforced as the path toward achievement. People are taught early that to endure bitterness is the primary credential of character, while comfort is inherently suspect. Obligations and expectations from social conventions and connections leave less space for personal freedom and expression.
It seems that the culture has plenty of ways to teach people to endure suffering, but fewer ways to dissolve it. So how did people, before psychology became the main paradigm for dealing with mental conditions, deal with their troubles?
On Tragedy
Before suffering became something to diagnose, it was something to interpret, mainly through literature and myth. In this sense, tragedy provides the key inspiration of modern psychology. From Oedipus to Sisyphus, figures from Greek mythology have become conceptual prototypes for interpreting certain symptoms or conditions of human existence. The interpretation of the human condition through tragedy offers a way to recognize, examine, and give shape to otherwise obscure suffering.
When the concept of ‘tragedy’ was first introduced in the early 20th century, similar to what happened with aesthetics, Chinese scholars of the time reinterpreted stories and myths in Chinese literature and explained them as something pertaining to the color of tragedy. In 1904, Wang Guowei famously described Dream of the Red Chamber 红楼梦 as a complete tragedy. The subsequent influence of the Russian tradition also created stories and characters centered around the tragic nature of life.
When I first encountered the concept of ‘tragedy’ as a Western drama genre for savoring suffering encountering fate, I wondered why tragedy was art. My naive childhood theory was simple: Westerners didn’t have enough real misery in daily life, so they had to invent a stage to simulate it. Applying the formula of tragedy to the east asian condition, there would be just endless ‘monuments’ that couldn’t be counted.
Chinese history is soaked in catastrophe: war, famine, dynastic collapse. And Chinese literature is hardly short of tragic stories. Yet tragedy did not develop into quite the same independent aesthetic category that enshrines human agony. Suffering was not always the endpoint to be examined and dissected, but often something to pass through, something that could give rise to another way of seeing life.
The Aesthetic Preference for ‘Zooming Out’
Instead of documenting the immediate scene of suffering, one recurring preference in Chinese literary is focusing toward deep time and vast space.
In Tang dynasty frontier poetry, the fate of soldiers is framed against “the bright moon of the Qin, the mountain pass of the Han” 秦时明月汉时关. The same moon, the same mountain pass, just as the fate of soldiers at this moment might not be any different from that of hundreds of years ago. A particular war becomes part of a history of wars, and an individual death becomes part of an enduring human condition.
In 王维 Wang Wei’s verses, the frontier and war get dissolved by space: a single plume of smoke rising straight into the desert sky, a round sun setting over the Yellow River. 大漠孤烟直，长河落日圆. The poem turns attention away from the immediate circumstances, and presents the vastness of the landscape, which express the indifference to the human affairs taking place within it.
The aesthetic quality often captured by the word 苍凉 (cāngliáng): the weathered old pines under the blue and grey twilight. The temperature cools the fever of grief until the universe itself seems to absorb the blow. The world uses its immensity somehow makes the grief more bearable.
Similar aesthetic preference also appears in exile poetry. When a scholar was purged and exiled, it’s rarely to see direct expression of rage against the unfair fate. If one dwelled on bitter misfortune, he would be dismissed as narrow-minded and fragile. The admired response was to find a sense of freedom within circumstances that could not be changed.
Su Shi 苏轼 famously wrote about his feeling after being exiled, which still appears in the textbooks of every Chinese student,
Don’t listen to the rain beating through the forest leaves. Why not whistle and chant, and stroll at ease? Bamboo cane and straw sandals are lighter than a horse. Who’s afraid? A straw cloak amidst mist and rain lets me live out my life in peace.
莫听穿林打叶声，何妨吟啸且徐行。竹杖芒鞋轻胜马，谁怕？一蓑烟雨任平生。
Caught in the rain with only shabby clothes and a cane during his exile, instead of expressing discomfort and disappointment, Su Shi expressed optimism and satisfaction with his current condition.
This aesthetic tradition doesn’t dissolve the very misfortune or suffering of the moment, and one still needs to endure the weight. However, it suggests the possibility of changing the scale of the world in which that weight is carried.
The Confucian Retreat
What are the underlying thoughts or theories that create such an aesthetic preference? For most of Chinese history, and even today, the respectable path to a meaningful life has been broadly Confucian, achieved through diligent study. One was expected to cultivate oneself, fulfill obligations to family and society, then, contribute to good government. This is famous sequence from the Great Learning (大学), 修身齐家治国平天下.
The self is just the first step of pursuing (修身). The following worth pursuings are realized through relationships and responsibilities with family and society.
This vision provides life tremendous meaning. It’s a ladder that hard to climb, and also hard to escape. How to reconcile, when the court rejects you, when family demands more than you can support, when history destroys the ideal order that you have worked toward?
If one measures Confucius’s life by his achievements in governing a state and promoting his ideas, his life was a total failure. He spent years traveling between states, trying to persuade rulers to adopt his political ideals, with no success. But Confucius did not regard his failure of political ambitions as the failure of his life. He separated what one ought to do (yi, 义) from what one could actually achieve (ming, 命). One does what one ought to do, while the outcome depended on circumstances. A failed endeavor did not necessarily make the endeavor worthless.
The Confucian path was also a reversible ladder. Confucius said, serve when called upon, withdraw when set aside. 用之则行，舍之则藏. This was later elaborated by Mencius that When circumstances allowed, one could work toward improving society; when they did not, cultivating one’s own character as a meaningful pursuit. 穷则独善其身，达则兼善天下. Retreat was always an option but not an admission of defeat.
After failing to realize his political vision, Confucius devoted his later years to teaching and organizing the ancient classics, which became the very legacy that has influenced the entire discourse of Chinese culture and history.
Confucius also expressed a sentiment similar to Daoist thought. He once said, 'If the Way cannot prevail, I shall take a raft and float out to sea' 道不行，乘桴浮于海, which is somewhat close to the ideas of Zhuangzi.
Daoism: What Makes a Tragedy?
Confucianism offers some advice on preserving oneself during failure and suffering. Daoism is more like a coherent system for dealing with them. It goes beyond how to deal with reality, and starts questioning the very standards and meanings of the events people encounter.
In the Daodejing, Laozi challenges the pursuit of more: "In pursuit of the Dao, one subtracts daily" 為道日損. "Know sufficiency, avoid disgrace; know when to stop, avoid danger" 知足不辱，知止不殆. Suffering comes from expanding desires and ambitions. Instead of enduring more, the wise choice lies in knowing when to stop and when to reduce.
A failure might not be a failure at all. In Zhuangzi, he presents his famous idea of the usefulness of the useless. A huge, crooked tree survives precisely because no carpenter considers it useful. What appears to be a failure by one standard becomes an advantage by another.
Even death, the ultimate human tragedy, could be understood differently. When Zhuangzi’s wife died, he beat on a tub, sang, and celebrated. Zhuangzi explained that he had grieved at first, but then considered life and death as transformations of nature, like the changing seasons. By placing the death within a larger process, grief turned into joy. Tragedy is not merely what happens to us, but also how we interpret what happens.
Laozi and Zhuangzi were not originally part of a single philosophical school. Yet their ideas were increasingly brought together in later centuries, offering Chinese intellectuals ways to navigate an uncertain world.
Buddhism: Why Do We Suffer?
Confucius offers retreat. Zhuangzi tells that events could be understood alternatively. Buddhism offers a way to confront suffering directly by acknowledging suffering as an unavoidable part of human existence. It asks why those experiences cause us so much distress.
Buddhism arrived in China from India during the Han dynasty (1 CE). It brought a different understanding of suffering. The Four Noble Truths 四谛 begin with dukkha, translated as suffering (苦 in Chinese). Beyond ordinary suffering, it also encompasses dissatisfaction and the instability of happiness. Life is filled with things we cannot hold permanently: health, relationships, wealth, and success. Yet we continue to expect them to last, which creates dukkha.
People tend to treat a career and major event as the center of one’s life. Once it fails, the suffering might go beyond the event itself, since personal identity, social expectations, and even the meaning of life are all attached to it. Even success, the happiness would remain vulnerable because it depends on something that can change or be lost. This is dukkha. And Buddhism identifies craving and attachment as central causes of suffering.
While Impermanence (无常) could remind that everything changes, and no-self (无我) questions the fixed identity people struggle to defend. Once understanding the impermanence and no-self, one may realize that one’s worth and identity need not be defined by things that could change.
In China, Chan Buddhism (禅宗) developed a tradition emphasizing direct experience and the examination of one’s own mind. One of the famous verses reads:
Bodhi has no tree; the bright mirror has no stand. Originally there is not a single thing. Where could dust settle?
菩提本无树，明镜亦非台。本来无一物，何处惹尘埃。
The verse questions the tendency to have a constant self that needs to be protected, improved, and defended. Rather than changing the world to satisfy the expectations, Chan asks to examine the expectations themselves.
Beyond Buddhist thought, Buddhist monasticism also offered an alternative to ordinary social life, which became the main retreat for people who would like to be away from social distress and obligations. Being a monk 出家 is the most common option for those who search for peace in a turbulent environment.
Traditions without Practice
For centuries, Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism offered different ways to understand a meaningful life. One could pursue a political career, retreat into the mountains, or seek liberation in a monastery. These paths often overlapped, allowing people to move between different understandings of suffering and misfortune.
Modern China transformed this arrangement. The social expectations of Confucianism persist, alongside the examination culture and family obligations. Under the name of meritocracy, they have been smoothly integrated into modern daily life. However, the alternatives don’t really land in daily life.
Daoism and Buddhism have survived under the name of religion. Even though traces of their thoughts, ideas, and conventions still persist in daily life, the lifestyles of these alternatives have become the practice of professional monks, which is somehow distant and even strange to ordinary people.
This is not meant to replace modern psychology with Daoism and Buddhism. But it might explain why experiences in Daoist and Buddhist monasteries are as ‘popular’ as going to see a psychiatrist in China.
Returning to the dark joke at the beginning, a recent post on social media suggests that for Chinese students in America, if you want to see a shrink, you had better see a shrink with an Indian background.
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immense population + scarce (good) opportunities + high cost of failure = hyper-intense stack ranking