How to Take the Path of Farming? Reference on Agricultural Development Paths and Directions

(On the eve of the harvest)

It has been a long time since I last tapped out life on a keyboard. Sometimes I want to sketch the mood of the moment and the scene before my eyes in words, but alas, there is never paper and pen at hand. Trying to recall what happened over the past month or so, my skin remembers the dense, sweltering heat of midsummer. (At this very moment, as I strike these keys, a fierce convective current sweeps down from the mountains and brings a sudden, torrential downpour - it has been so long!) My eyes and ears see cicadas clamoring in a mango tree heavy with fruit, and my nose and tongue recall the rich fragrance unique to ripe native mangoes and the taste of their flesh melting in the mouth.

Summer is so full of vitality.

If you start wanting to drink beer, wanting to throw all caution aside and leap into a cool stream, it usually means summer has already arrived beside you. But more perceptive people, as early as when the mango trees, wax apple trees and longan trees bear fruit, have already heard the footsteps of summer approaching. Today marks nearly 110 days since Momomi was transplanted, and the rice field has long been a sheet of gold. Because the seedlings were raised anew this season, the transplanting was later than everyone else's, and now it feels as though only Momomi is left unharvested; the sparrows, not knowing where else to go, have no choice but to gather and frolic in my field every afternoon. As the sun sinks lower in the west, both the light and the temperature of the rift valley begin to soften, and I am harvesting soybeans in the field beside Momomi.

I rented two fields, each about five fen in size. I racked my brains over how to grow rice using natural farming. The reason I want to try this is that I am searching for a way to live my life, something worth pursuing for a lifetime, a path through which I can find the meaning of life. That is a vague way of putting it; let me try to describe it differently:

I have a vague sense that the natural world has a source, or perhaps a rule. The sun is the source of all life and energy, water and soil are mother-like presences that nurture life, all living things are children of nature, and the existence of all living things has only one purpose, and that is "to live." Yet their earnest struggle to live does not seem to stem from fear or from coveting a hundred-year lifespan; on the contrary, life strives to push out green leaves, strives to bloom and bear fruit, strives to breathe in and fly, strives to graze, strives to run and hunt, strives to sleep, strives to build nests and mate - everything seems already prepared, ready at any moment to let its own life fade away and give rise to the emergence of another life. These individual beings, one after another, from birth and growth to death, these individual lives appearing and vanishing in unbroken succession, create the flowing river of nature. I feel this atmosphere is more balanced than setting oneself up as the wisest of all creatures and the master of the universe, and it更容易 lets one attain calm. However clever humans may be, we should never forget that we are, in the end, a small part of nature - not especially high, nor especially low. Our existence is possible because tens of thousands of lives have already made it so, and the purpose of our lives is also to continue flowing within this great river of nature.

When I say I am a part of nature, this is the feeling I hold.

Thinking this way, even if I recognize that my own life is insignificantly small within nature, still, like a dewdrop condensed on a spider's web, or a ripple dropped into still water, my own life and all the lives in nature are at once insignificant and at once of vital importance. This seemingly contradictory yet simultaneously coexisting feeling is precisely, I think, what makes nature most fascinating.

Nature itself possesses no duality. That is to say, nature cannot be compared, nor can it be defined. Within nature there simply does not exist any relative term such as "big" and "small," "light" and "heavy," "real" and "illusory" nature is all, and yet all is denied. Nature exists in our hearts, utterly beyond words. Before it there is no such thing as life's failure or life's victory; every person, and indeed every living organism, is equally "small" and "vast."

And I have found that the reason a person is a person is that the most basic cognitive system of the human world is one of binary oppositions. In other words, all feelings in the human world are derived through comparison. If you do not believe it, try describing the things or feelings before your eyes, and you will find that almost every descriptive word is a term that arose through comparison. I once heard this exchange in a talk by a lama from Bhutan:

The lama asked the audience: "If you feel cold right now, what would you do?"

Everyone in the audience answered that they would go somewhere warmer, and so on,

but the lama replied: "What if you went somewhere even colder and then came back?"

The human perceptual system is derived through comparison; a person who loses binary opposition becomes as if unable to speak, unable to set foot on the ground, weightless as though the soul could not exist. Sometimes I even feel that duality is humanity's original sin, the shackle that makes humans lose their way and transmigrate endlessly, for after all, comparison is an endless affair. And those who see through this often begin to pursue a constant transcendence - put another way, they are all seeking a way to escape continuing to be "human."

The natural farming in which I place my hopes is my method for pursuing constancy and transcendence: to live with the awareness of "being a part of nature," to eat the food nature gives me, to build a nest like a bird, to keep digging into and elevating my own humanity, to find a way to obtain constant satisfaction and joy without relying on "comparison." But how easy is that to say? It is simply impossible. What is wondrous is that, in the hierarchy of human satisfaction, there is a state called the "superego" - in other words, the self one wants to become but cannot become. Then again, is not everything pursued with this feeling exactly the "something worth pursuing for a lifetime" I wrote at the beginning?

To appear, and then to vanish.

(By the time I finished writing this, Momomi had already been fully harvested.)