WARNING

I have been reading Tao Yuanming lately, and the one remark I cannot stand is: Tao Yuanming? He is the original lying-flat guy. It sounds clever, and it makes him smaller than he was, and makes the phrase "lying flat" lighter than it is.

What is lying flat? It is quitting, and giving up on expecting anything — a letting go downward, a surrender. Tao Yuanming’s return to the fields was a breaking free upward. The rhapsody “Return Home” opens with “Since I let my heart be servant to my body, why should I grieve alone?” — the root of his pain was not tiredness but a heart conscripted by the body to do what it did not want. There is a very strong sense of self in that line: he knew exactly who he was and what he wanted, and only then did he resign his post. In today’s vocabulary, that is a choice driven by values, not a system crash after being beaten down at work.

That is the whole difference. A person lying flat cannot work up interest in anything; Tao Yuanming was full of drive — planting beans, brewing wine, reading, writing poems. “Up at dawn to clear the weeds, shouldering the hoe home under the moon”: out before daylight, back after moonrise, a heavier workload than a county magistrate’s. It was not that he did nothing; he would not do what he held in contempt. It was not that he refused to compete; he would not compete on someone else’s track. Otherwise, how would a man who “loved wine by nature and was too poor to have it often” have found the spirit to write the finest set of pastoral poems in Chinese literature?

More absurd still, the people who enshrine him as the patron saint of lying flat are usually the least willing to accept his kind of poverty. After returning to the fields Tao Yuanming was genuinely poor — “short jacket patched and knotted, baskets and gourds often empty”, poor enough to go begging, and he wrote a poem about it. He paid the full price of his choice, and what it bought was one unhurried moment: “picking chrysanthemums by the eastern fence, at ease, I see the southern hills.” When people quote those lines today they usually want the ease without the half-lifetime of hardship that came first. That is not longing for Tao Yuanming. That is wanting the peach without planting the tree.

I would go further: the fact that “Tao Yuanming-style lying flat” has caught on is itself a symptom. We no longer quite believe that a person can give up security purely for the sake of what interests them, so every withdrawal has to be explained as giving up. Stay long enough inside a single system of valuation and you lose the ability to imagine another way of living — not the ability to understand Tao Yuanming, but the nerve to. Because to admit that he was clear-eyed and brave and paid his own bill is to admit that your own compromise right now was not the only option.

Of course I am not urging anyone to resign and go live in the hills. Tao Yuanming himself said “wealth and rank are not what I wish for”, and that was his wish, not a wish everyone has to share. What bothers me is the flippant borrowing: taking a deliberate decision and dissolving it into a lazy joke. Misreading a figure is not fatal; what is fatal is that the misreading takes the weight of thinking off our hands — well, if that is all the ancients amounted to, why should I bother?

Reading late, closing the book, I think what Tao Yuanming left us that is most valuable may be neither the fields nor the poems but the gesture itself: to walk another road, seriously and at a cost, outside the one everyone assumes. Lying flat is letting go of the handle. He changed hands — took the other hand, to hold what he actually wanted to hold.

What separates the two is not how much courage you have, but whether you have thought it through. Think it through and going back to the fields is a returning. Do not, and lying down is just lying down.

Written by Bu Shi