There was once a young soldier who stood at the edge of a burning field and asked his teacher, “What does it mean to love one’s country?”
The teacher sat down among the ashes and said, “Let me tell you what the wise ones have said.”
In ancient China, Qu Yuan — the poet-minister of Chu — loved his kingdom so fiercely that when it fell to corruption and conquest, he walked into the Miluo River clutching stones, his final poem still wet on his lips. The people threw rice into the water so the fish would not eat his body. They mourned him not because he died for his country, but because he grieved for it — which is a harder thing.
Confucius would have understood. He taught that love of country begins not with flags or armies, but with rén — humaneness. A patriot, in the Confucian sense, is one who cultivates virtue in themselves so thoroughly that it radiates outward: to family, to community, to the realm. “To put the world in order,” he said, “we must first put the nation in order. To put the nation in order, we must first cultivate our personal life.”
The patriot, then, is not first a soldier. The patriot is first a gardener of the self.
But Laozi sat in the opposite corner and laughed softly.
He had seen what happens when love of country becomes hunger for power. In the Tao Te Ching he warned: “The more sharp weapons the people have, the more troubled the state.” He saw patriotism as a lesser virtue — something that arises only after the greater harmony is lost. “When the great Tao is forgotten, goodness and piety appear. When the country falls into chaos, patriotic ministers appear.”
To Laozi, the truest service to one’s land is to live simply, to not disturb the water, to govern so lightly that the people say, “We did it ourselves.”
Across the mountains in India, the Bhagavad Gita posed the question differently. Arjuna stood on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, facing his own kin, and wept. “I cannot fight my own people,” he said. And Krishna answered not with nationalism, but with dharma — sacred duty. “You grieve for those who should not be grieved for. The wise grieve neither for the living nor the dead.”
Krishna did not ask Arjuna to love his country. He asked him to love what is right — even when it tears the country in half. The patriot of the Gita is one who acts from righteousness, not from tribal loyalty.
Gandhi, centuries later, would walk this same razor’s edge. He loved India with an aching tenderness, but he declared: “My patriotism is not an exclusive thing. It is all-embracing. The patriotism of my conception is nothing if it is not always, in every case without exception, consistent with the broadest good of humanity at large.”
His patriotism was not a wall. It was a door.
The Sufis understood this widening. Rumi wrote, “I am not from the East or the West, not from the land or the sea.” For the mystic, all borders are drawn on water. Yet this does not mean the Sufi loves no place — only that love of place is a doorway to love of the Divine, not a stopping point. Ibn Arabi taught that the heart of the true human is vast enough to contain every form — every temple, every church, every pasture where gazelles wander. The patriot of the spirit carries their homeland inside their chest and finds it everywhere.
Yet even Rumi lived in Konya. Even the mystic walks on particular soil.
The Greeks, too, wrestled with this. Socrates refused to flee Athens even when the city sentenced him to death. He drank the hemlock willingly — not because Athens was right, but because he had made a covenant with its laws. His patriotism was not blind obedience. It was integrity. He had lived under the city’s shelter; he would not abandon its judgment merely because it turned against him.
And yet Diogenes, that wild dog of a philosopher, when asked where he came from, declared: “I am a citizen of the world.” He mocked the patriots who puffed their chests for their city-states while ignoring the suffering at their feet.
Between Socrates and Diogenes lies the entire spectrum of what a patriot might be.
The young soldier listened to all of this and was quiet for a long time.
“So which is right?” he finally asked. “The poet who drowns for his kingdom? The sage who says borders are illusions? The warrior who fights for dharma? The philosopher who dies for his city’s laws even when those laws are unjust?”
The teacher picked up a handful of ash from the burned field and let it fall through his fingers.
“A patriot,” he said, “is someone who loves their country the way a good parent loves a child — not by telling the child it is perfect, but by wanting it to become worthy of the love it is given. Qu Yuan wept because Chu could have been better. Socrates drank the hemlock because Athens was supposed to be better. Gandhi marched because India deserved to be better.”
He stood and brushed the ash from his hands.
“The false patriot says, ‘My country, right or wrong.’ The true patriot says, ‘My country — let me help it find what is right.‘ One is a cage. The other is a compass.”
The soldier looked out at the burned field, where already, in the black soil, small green shoots were beginning to push through.
“And what of those,” he asked quietly, “who love the land itself — the rivers, the rice fields, the mountain where their grandmother is buried — and want only to protect it?”
The teacher smiled. “That is perhaps the oldest and most honest patriotism of all. Before there were nations, there was home. The word ‘patriot’ comes from patria — the land of one’s fathers. It is the love a farmer has for the earth that feeds their children. It is what Kuntowijoyo, your own Javanese thinker, might call the quiet duty woven into the soil of belonging.”
He paused.
“Love the land. Serve the people on it. Tell the truth to power, even when power wears the mask of the nation. And never let anyone convince you that love of country requires hatred of another’s.”
The soldier bowed and walked away into the green that was already returning.
And the ashes, knowing nothing of borders, drifted where the wind carried them.
For the patriot’s heart is not a fortress — it is a field. And what matters is not the fence around it, but what you choose to grow.
Bhyllabus l'énigme 
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