IN his letter to his son Fu Cong dated July 7, 1961, art critic and translator Fu Lei wrote of the inscrutability of human beings.

"How to know about human nature is a consummate art of the highest degree. The most accomplished philosophers, poets, priests, novelists, politicians, doctors or lawyers may grasp some general principles, but they have their own limitations when it comes to understanding individuals," he wrote.

Five years later, when chaos reigned with the onset of the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), Fu Lei and his wife, unable to survive public humiliation, took their own lives by hanging themselves in their Shanghai home.

Researchers have made considerable headway in knowing the physical world around us, but remain blissfully ignorant of the inner recesses of the human mind.

If anything, the modern tempo of existence - hasty, materially encumbered, and full of distractions - leaves little room for reflection, least of all self-reflection.

Some of the most inspiring religious faiths in the world have been conceived by peoples who were mesmerized by the relationship between human beings and the forces that control them: the shepherds in semi-arid Middle East, and a prince in tropical India.

They could afford the time for reflection.

Apparently such meditation gave them joys and strengths totally inconceivable to the smart and smug modernists today whose eyes are perpetually glued to their snazzy e-gadgets.

Today electronic devices are exercising effective control over our thoughts and emotions.

Each day the godly Internet provides us a steady supply of events to elicit our amusement, envy, rage, or consternation. By comparison, our own life is a fen of stagnant waters, and, as William Wordsworth said 200 years ago, "No grandeur now in nature or in book delights us."

According to Jon Elster in his "Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions," emotions make us who and what we are.

Emotions can also give people reasons to live and reasons to die.

Many emotions are uniquely human, which makes laboratory research difficult.

You can always predict with precision how a computer will respond when given a specific set of instructions.

That's not possible with human beings.

Distinct concepts

There is no way of accurately explaining people's mental experience in terms of their biological makeup.

Rather than science, religion, music, philosophy and literature can be more important sources for understanding emotions, as they afford us insights that are beyond psychology.

Emotions are culture specific.

According to Elster, the ancient Greeks probably did not feel guilt. "The Greeks, by and large, had no conceptions of guilt, or at least not the modern conception of guilt," he observes.

Modern linguistics holds that human thinking is facilitated and shaped by concepts, which can be defined by language.

During the Middle Ages, for instance, people had no word to describe the emotional experience of "boredom." The concept of "boredom" simply did not exist. What people now experience as boredom was, for medieval writers, merely a category of "sloth," a sin that included laziness and "acedia" (spiritual torpor).

The cultural distinctness of emotions can be observed in the fact that certain emotion can be succinctly suggested in one language, but not adequately in another.

In Chinese we have zhengren, which I find to be quite commonly used on the Chinese mainland today, though I am not sure of its etymology.

It has been rendered in a Chinese-English dictionary as "make somebody suffer," or "fix somebody," but these renderings fail to take into account that to zheng somebody can proceed systematically, sometimes with political overtones, and often with serious consequences.

In another of Fu's letters to his son, he deliberated on the rendering of gankai, at his son's request.

He said that while gankai could be plausibly rendered as "Deeply affected," or "To be affected with painful recollections," and so on, he added that gankai is a kind of psychological condition peculiar to Chinese and distinct from Western "Recollection." It's more like a sort of philosophical meditation.

Is it because of the poignant awareness of history on the part of Chinese?

Remember that Confucius, while standing by a stream, said: "Could one but go on and on like this, never ceasing day or night!" Typically, an old-style Chinese scholar could spent his lifetime versifying about withered flowers, birds migrating north, the sense of fall in the air, the first snow, to say nothing of human vicissitudes, and the futility of mortal strife.

Law is a human endeavor to address injustice, but its reliance on physical evidence and disdain for capricious human feelings just creates room for profiteering lawyers.

Human nature

Recently a 30-year-old former flight attendant was sentenced to 11 years in prison for buying makeup from duty-free shops in South Korea, and then smuggling them in to sell at a markup.

She had allegedly evaded 1.13 million yuan (US$178,000) in taxes.

The verdict, when disclosed, created a public furore.

This kind of "smuggling" is fairly common among our acquaintances. Why is the poor woman made a scapegoat for all of them?

Why did the police fail to intervene earlier?

The sense of injustice becomes overwhelming when we are reminded that officials today can be similarly imprisoned for taking tens of millions in bribes.

Ultimately, we must revisit the aphorism that "Man is the measure of all things." The modern Western conception of human happiness is based on material acquisitions ("standard of living"). That proceeds from a distorted view of human nature, which is at once shallow and misleading.

Thousands of years ago, Chinese sages knew much more about human nature.

In Lao Tze's "Tao Te Ching," we read that "If we stop looking for 'persons of superior morality' (xian) to put in power, there will be no more jealousies among the people. If we cease to set store by products that are hard to get, there will be no more thieves. If the people never see such things as excite desire, their hearts will remain placid and undisturbed."

Sadly, rarely do those politicians fanatically obsessed by GDP have any chance to open this little book of 5,000 characters.