"Being rigid without desire" comes from Lin Zexu's famous sentence "Being rigid without desire", which means that a man's strength and integrity (using this word only refers to a certain personality that both men and women can have, and has no gender meaning) stems from his lack of desire.
Since there is no desire, there is no need to ask for people for desire, and naturally it is easy to be strong and upright. As Buddhists say, "the last straw". Since we can't bear it, it doesn't exist.
Extended data
The unprecedented invasion of the powerful enemy of western capitalism prompted Lin Zexu to "wake up from the sleepy state of feudal isolation and open his eyes to see the world with a brand-new attitude". After Lin Zexu went to Guangzhou to preside over the ban on smoking, he realized his lack of western knowledge and China people's ignorance of the world outside the dynasty in the practice of fighting against invaders.
He was eager to change the situation that "all the officials in the coastal area were unfamiliar with foreign countries and were shocked by English names, but they really didn't know the source", so he began to consciously and purposefully collect foreign newspapers and books for translation, so as to obtain valuable information and deepen the understanding of the "West" by the imperial court and Chinese people.
By analyzing foreign political, legal, military, economic and cultural aspects, he realized that only by learning from western countries can he resist foreign aggression.
Lin Zexu was the first great patriot and outstanding national hero in China's modern history. He took the lead in understanding the world and studying the West, and became a leading figure in spreading western culture and promoting the spread of western learning in modern China.
From the perspective of China's history of international law, he was not only the mainstay of upholding the principles of international law during the Opium War, but also the first person to introduce international law into China and the pioneer of modern international law in China.
Baidu Encyclopedia-Lin Zexu