Why Hangzhou’s West Lake and Beijing’s Olympic Forest Park Feel Less Healing to Me Than a Small County Town’s Park

An online reader wrote:

For the past two years, I’ve been living in a small county town in Yunnan. The unassuming local people and beautiful natural surroundings are just right for my practice within my Marx + Zhuangzi framework.

Sometimes I wonder: I’ve spent time in so many beautiful places—Hangzhou’s West Lake, Beijing’s Olympic Forest Park, and so on—all more beautiful than the park in this small county town. Why didn’t they heal me then?

There are many factors. For one thing, my karmic obstructions were too deep at the time, and I was seeking fulfillment outside myself. For another, those places still stirred up “the ego, attachment to the self, the conception of a self, and the conception of other beings.”

I would always think about which conditions I, someone from a small rural town who had gotten ahead by doing well on exams, had met to be able to make it to a place like this. And the tourists around me stirred up my tendency to draw distinctions and my conception of other beings: those attractive, affluent, cosmopolitan tourists or members of the middle and upper-middle classes. Those fit, stylishly dressed distance runners, calling out to their friends, constantly reminded me how provincial, fat, and lazy I was.

I would always see it this way: West Lake is so beautiful, so special—it really lives up to its name. Hangzhou is so special—it really lives up to its name. What I was seeing was “Hangzhou’s West Lake” and “Beijing’s Olympic Forest Park,” rather than nature. I had become attached to the “form” of West Lake. I was also absorbed in and fixated on “taking photos” and “capturing memories.”

In the park in this small county town, I don’t think about having to meet any “conditions.” The ordinary people in the park, in their simple clothes, also show me that everything exists in unconditional harmony. I see nature: trees, leaves, birds, fish, flowers, dead branches, fallen leaves, clouds. I immerse myself in the details and in the whole. There is no conception of a self, no conception of a “park.”

Daoism teaches us not to prize what is hard to obtain, and to return to simplicity and authenticity.