拔苗助长
Helping Rice Grow by Pulling Up Rice Shoots

A farmer grew rice year after year. He thought his rice was growing too slowly. One day he thought, "I feel that I can change the speed of rice growth. I will pull on the rice shoots and help the rice grow quickly.”

So he did it. Then, he went home and said to his son, "I can change the rate of rice growth. I can pull on the rice shoots and help the rice grow quickly."

Upon hearing this, his frightened son ran back to the rice fields. When he arrived, he saw that the rice was already dead.

(This story is an excerpt from my book Chinese Chengyu)

According to Mencius (孟子), there are few who would not want to help their shoots grow. The ones who are not willing to help, simply do not weed the fields. However, not all who wish to help their shoots grow begin with a clear understanding of sound principles. These are the ones who try to help by pulling the shoots, and end up doing more harm than good.

Morris¹ suggests that parents would do well to understand this saying of Mencius. Many parents who have failed to be successful in their own lives often will be the same ones that interfere in the lives of their children, pushing them constantly to do all the things that they themselves have failed to accomplish. All this seems to do is produce anxiety in the child, ultimate rebellion and finally alienation from the parents. One should ask at this point if it is worth the terrible toll on the relationship between parent and child when parents pursue their own lost ambitions through their children. In fact, such unfulfilled ambitions really speak of lost opportunities in the lives of those parents.

In one episode of the popular “Law and Order” series, New York City police were following up leads on the untimely death of an appendicitis case. It was a routine procedure gone awry, and a nurse’s aide appeared to be at the center of it. Further investigation revealed that this nurse’s aide was performing surgeries using his steady hands at the direction of a doctor heading a large foundation taking in thousands of dollars for charity work in New York and Central America. The doctor’s parents had pushed their daughter, now a thirty-something with blurred vision, into medicine at an early age to follow in the footsteps of their other child, an aspiring fund raiser for charity who had died of leukemia at the age of thirteen, nine months before his sister’s birth.

The parents of the dead thirteen-year-old produced a child, a daughter, with the express purpose of grooming (forcing?) her to be what the dead sibling could not be due to his young death. The sister got her medical education and started the charity just to fulfill her parent’s expectations. Yet few knew that this surgeon had an eye disease, so she perpetuated a fraud through an ignorant nurse’s aide who would perform the surgeries under her direction. When the police finally caught up with the doctor and arrested her in front of her parents in her parent’s home, she screamed at them, cursing the memory of their beloved dead son and threw a drink at a large portrait of him over the fire place. The scene ends with the police escorting her out and the parents lovingly wiping remnants of the drink from the portrait of their beloved son. Their ambitions for their daughter would remain unfulfilled.

The author of Ecclesiastes suggests that everything has its own season (Eccl. 3:2). There is "a time to plant and a time to uproot." Trying to force our will on others and on God will not work. Our ambitions for ourselves and for others can never trump the purposes and direction of God. The theme of the book of Ecclesiastes appears to be that everything has the stamp of temporality. History is nothing more than a succession of events, and all things are pointless and vain. The author concludes that the best one can hope for in one’s life is to simply enjoy life under the circumstances because this life is much bigger than the individual.

Sometimes we hear about someone who has many personal accomplishments or made notable achievements in life. Then he or she dies, and we hear someone say that the person’s memory will live on through his or her accomplishments. Oh, really? But just like the people who make them, the idols of men will perish. Look at the example of the flood (Genesis 6 and 7). The rains came and washed everyone away. The only ones saved were the ones who believed God and went into the ark. Look at Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19). To this day, do we have a record of the achievements of the men of Sodom and Gomorrah? It was all burnt in the flames. Yet the anxiety of men everywhere is felt in the pursuit of things at the expense of values. We are so anxious to give our lives meaning through our efforts. We are busy “pulling the shoots” in an effort to make things happen.