• The two passages below offer advice on how to prosper and avoid common mistakes. The first is a short passage from a longer work by a Chinese official, Zhang Ying (1638–1708), addressed to his son. The second, also from a longer work, is by a Japanese contemporary, Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693), and aims as much to entertain as to inform its audience.

Zhang Ying, On Permanent Property

“As regards the things of this world, those that are new invariably become old. Houses after a long time collapse in ruins, clothing eventually wears out. Serfs, cattle and horses after lengthy service grow old and die. Something which in the beginning was bought for a heavy price may not be old after ten years, but after another ten years its value has depreciated to nothing. Only land is a commodity which even after a hundred or a thousand years is always as good as new. Even if agricultural labour is not intensive, if the land is poor and the produce meagre, as soon as it is manured and irrigated it will be renewed. Even if the land is gone to waste and the homestead is covered with weeds, once it is reclaimed it will be renewed. If you construct many ponds, poor land can be enriched, and if you vigorously uproot the weeds then barren soil can be made fertile. From ancient times to the present day there has never been any fear that it will decay or fall into ruin, nor anxiety lest it abscond or suffer attrition. This is really something to be treasured! . . .

In the present age the young men in a family have elegant clothing and spirited horses and are always dancing and carousing. The cost of one fur garment may go up to several tens of taels and that of one feast may be as much as several taels. They do not reflect that in my home area for the past ten years or more, grain has been cheap, and that more than a full ten shi are insufficient to provide one feast and a full hundred shi or more are not enough to pay for one garment. How can they know the farmers’ sufferings? Labouring all year round with soaked bodies and muddy feet, how can it be easy for them to get those hundred shi? How much less so when there is unseasonable rain or drought and one year’s harvest cannot be made to last until the following year?”

Ihara Saikaku, This Scheming World

“When a man becomes rich, people always say he’s lucky. But this is merely a conventional expression, for in reality he becomes rich and his household thrives solely on account of his own ability and foresight. Even Ebisu, the god of wealth, is unable at will to exercise power over riches.

But be that as it may, our wealthy merchants, for whom the discussion of a pending loan to a feudal lord is a far more engaging pastime than carousing or any other form of merrymaking, have recently organized themselves into the Daikoku Club. Shunning a rendezvous in the red-light district, they gather in the guest room of the Buddhist temple in Shimotera, Ikutama. There they meet every month to discuss the financial condition of each individual applicant for a loan. Though they are all well along in years, they take pleasure only in ever-increasing interest and in mounting capital, utterly heedless of the life to come. Although it’s quite true that there’s nothing more desirable than plenty of money, the proper way for a man to get along in the world should be this: in his youth until the age of twenty-five to be ever alert, in his manly prime up to thirty-five to earn a lot of money, in the prime of discretion in his fifties to pile up his fortune, and at last in his sixties — the year before his sixty-first birthday — to turn over all his business to his eldest son. Thereafter it is proper for him to retire from active affairs and devote the remainder of his days to visiting temples for the sake of his soul.”

Sources: Hilary J. Beattie, Land and Lineage in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) pp. 141–143; Ihara Saikaku, This Scheming World, trans. Masanori Takatsuka and David C. Stubbs (Rutland, Vt.: Tuttle, 1965), p. 42. Copyright © 1965 by Charles E. Tuttle Publishing Co., Inc. Used by permission of Tuttle Publishing, a member of the Periplus Publishing Group.

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