"" translates to "Misfortune may be an actual blessing" or more commonly, "Suffering brings good fortune."

Author: Tang Yansheng, Zhou Zhengshu, Wang Bin (Editor-in-Chief)
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-12-01
Features: The reasons greatly influencing life happiness largely come from our human living environment and the limitations of human beings. Objectively speaking, life is unpredictable. Humans are merely parasites on a restless planet in the universe, which cannot reassure the highly intelligent modern people. The realization of many of our own imaginations about ourselves still depends on chance. The frequent natural disasters make life's path rugged and full of obstacles. People need sufficient mental preparation to maintain composure in the face of natural disasters. Human society also creates disasters. In the beginning, people had to unite for survival, but today, driven by personal interests and the happiness of individuals and small groups, they often exclude each other, engage in endless struggles, create wars, incite movements of provoking and harming others, and cause friction between people. All of this threatens and casts shadows over life. To seek true happiness, humans need tolerance, restraint, friendliness, and harmony for coexistence and orderly development.
The path of life is also long. Although, in the universe, where changes span millions of years, eighty or ninety years of human life are as fleeting as a blink, for an individual, it is indeed more than 20,000 days and nights, eighty or ninety springs, summers, autumns, and winters. Life requires one to go through childhood, youth, middle age, and old age, which can also be described as a long journey. In this long life, diseases, death, and various unforeseen events constantly threaten our physical bodies. To truly experience the happiness of life, one must also undergo genuine cultivation and develop an optimistic perspective that views impermanence as constancy.
All the above are the unavoidable realities of life. They make it impossible for one to always advance with the spirit of a sharp sword, achieving everything in one go. Life requires patience, retreat, detours, and transcendence. Even the happiness of life needs to be savored slowly and carefully. This is the spirit of the dull axe. In my view, the spirit of the dull axe is the accumulation and release of human energy, the persistence of an enterprising spirit, the calmness in the face of setbacks, and the satisfaction and moderation in enjoying life. If the "sharp sword" represents an indispensable sharpness in life, then the "dull axe" is the foundation that enables one to endure the hardships of life. By combining the profound and dull strength of the dull axe with the thin and fragile sharpness of the sharp sword, we may truly experience the happiness of life, possessing both the courage to charge forward and the perseverance to endure suffering, as well as the peace that views hardships as part of life's natural course.