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The Three Types of Destructive Energy used in Martial Arts The
Hidden Meanings Behind The Flash
The King, the Fool, and the Fox Reading and controlling non-verbal communication in the sparring ring Do
you know what you're really learning?
Balance
and the Martial Arts
Learn
the deadly combination of strategy and attitude
Strategy for the Streets What would Sun Tzu do in a
Street fight?
Two
Man Staff Drills from China
Spinning
Staff Techniques
How
to Do a Pole Vaulting Side Kick
Stefan Traces The Origins
of Kung Fu to Thailand's Mountain Tribes
No
nonsense advice on what works in real life.
Books
A Case
Study of Sensory Enhancement for the Blind and
Vision Impaired
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Lin Yutang and the
Importance of Living
 Although
much of the writing on this site is about urban
survival, this is often from the perspective of East
Asian philosophy and teaching. This post is going to
be about a less martial aspect of survival - the art
of actually enjoying life. One great modern Chinese
writer on this subject was Lin Yutang and one of his
most famous books was 'The Importance of Living'. Yutang was born in the town of Banzai in the hills of Pinghe county in Fujian province, in the year 1895. His father was a Presbyterian Minister and he went to St John's University to study theology. Although a clever student Yutang was more interested in what interested him, rather than what the professors thought was most important. After teaching in Shanghai for some time, Yutang took an MA in Harvard and then a PhD. at University of Jena in Leipzig, Germany. Through his life, Lin Yutang wrote a number of books and moved from the Christianity of his birth to Daoist/Confucian approach and back to Christianity. Although he had a varied life and wrote widely, he is perhaps best known for The Importance of Living, written in 1937. The book talks about some basic principles that can be applied to all our lives, whether we're learning a martial art, trying to improve our Partypoker technique or hiking through the woods. For Yutang the spirit of reasonableness was more important that logic or reason. He felt that logical people tended to be self-righteous and thus usually wrong, while reasonable people realised that they might be wrong and so paradoxically tended to be right. He characterised his thought as encapsulating the best of the ancient Chinese approach to life; it was an 'idle philosophy' born of idle life. This idle life was the slower, more relaxed pace of the past that acknowledged that all people are all alike under the skin. Considering Yutang wrote over twenty books, we can assume that he was not idle in the conventional sense, but just took his life easy. And that is something we all have learn to do if we're going to survive in the modern world. |