Chapter One · The River World

In my own mind, I have several ways of looking at the world. I call them little worlds. You can think of them as frameworks for understanding, almost like the underlying frame through which an AI understands things. The first time I shared my little worlds and my worldview with Jason, he got excited and told me that this was essentially the underlying logic behind eighty percent of AI. The earliest little world I ever built was the "River World," and it shaped not only my life, but also the work I would go on to do.

When Wenjie and I were fifteen, we were desperate to join the army and fulfill our ambitions by serving the country. By sixteen, we were already thinking that I might be going for a military physical the following year. We lied to our families and said we were heading to Wudang Mountain to study martial arts, then slipped off to Shenlongjia instead. Before we left, each of us set a goal for the trip. During those ten days, I would find the raw original stone of the He Shi Bi, while he would quit smoking. He had started smoking at twelve, and after that trip to Shenlongjia he almost never smoked again.

I never found my own He Shi Bi, but I did open the door to a little world through which I could think independently about the laws that govern the world. Let me say this clearly: the terms I use here were also shaped by my reading of fantasy novels such as Shrouding the Heavens and The Sword Comes. They carry absolutely no occult meaning. I oppose all mysticism.

All right. The story begins with a small river.

One morning in Muyu Town, each of us bought a box of Wuhan-style doupi, and we carried them down to the riverbank for breakfast. The stream was so clear that if you stood on the bank and looked down, you would feel as though you were already seeing the riverbed. But if you looked carefully, you would discover something else: you could see the bottom, but you could not make out the bottom clearly.

According to legend, the He Shi Bi was found in Chu territory, and it was thought to be either turquoise or moonstone. Water flowed above the stone as it pressed upward from below. The surface kept churning, flashing, twisting, and distorting, giving off that strange blue sheen unique to moonstone and labradorite. I knew the stone was down there, yet I could not see what it truly looked like. Staring at that river that day, I slipped into a very strange state. All at once I felt that human thought was just like a river. Not merely like a river, but almost literally one. Later I slowly began to line things up, one by one.

It may sound hazy at first. Let me give you three examples, and it will become clear at once.

Take a young man who scrolls Douyin every day. He knows a great many things. Today he watches a little finance, tomorrow a little history, the day after some relationship content, then later some entrepreneurship. One moment he is reading philosophy, the next he is skimming military affairs. You would say that he has broad information exposure. And that is true. His river is wide. But his problem is that the water is shallow. He knows a little about everything, yet nothing deeply enough. Add just a few more stones to the riverbed, a little more craving and fear, and the whole surface is thrown into disorder. Today he is impassioned, tomorrow dejected. Today he understands, tomorrow he is confused again. Today he thinks life ought to be one way, tomorrow he is convinced it ought to be another. It is not that he lacks thought. Quite the opposite: his thoughts are too many, too scattered, too fast. He has breadth of knowledge but no density of knowledge. The river is wide, the water is shallow, and the flow is heavy. So the surface never settles. It is all emotion, self-reconciliation, and reasons.

Now take an oncology professor. He may not understand everything, and he may not read in every field, but in one or two directions he has dug very deep. This kind of person's river may not be especially wide, but the water is deep. And when the water is deep, even if there are stones underneath, they do not so easily stir the surface at once. Such people usually do not swing so violently between highs and lows, not because they have no emotion, and not because they have no cravings or fears, but because their water is deep enough.

Take another example: my friend Teacher Chen Changwen, who has fourteen million followers on Weibo. His informational range is extremely broad. He reads widely and knows a great deal. Yet after a betrayal cost him a huge fortune, he became deeply disappointed in human nature. Gradually he no longer wanted to engage with people, nor to let too much outside information into his heart. He wrote his own things and lived his own life, becoming more and more like someone deliberately reducing his own flow volume. This is interesting. His river was originally broad, and the water was not shallow. But later he began to control, on purpose, where the water came from and where it flowed to. So the surface came to look calmer, not because the world itself had gone quiet, but because he no longer allowed so much disordered water to pour in.

So even if thought is like a river, different people can still look entirely different:

If a person truly wants to see himself clearly, the first step is not to hurry and ask what he craves or what he fears. The first step is to determine what kind of river he is. What kind of river are you? It sounds like a simple question, but most people never seriously ask it in all their lives. Every day they stare only at the water's surface: today I am in a bad mood, today I feel anxious, today I am suddenly full of drive, today I suddenly feel like doing nothing. They assume the problem lies in emotion, and so they start trying to manage emotion. Some study psychology, some listen to motivational lectures, some meditate, some chase success doctrines. But after exhausting themselves for a long time, many people still end up back where they began. Not because those methods are completely useless, but because they have been spinning on the surface all along. And the surface moves by nature:

If you stare only at the water's surface, you will always feel that there are endless problems. But if you step back and look at the entire river, you begin to see that many things are actually quite simple. Some people are anxious not because they are overly sensitive, but because their rivers are too shallow, so even a small matter strikes the riverbed. Some people obsess and circle in the same knot not because they cannot think something through, but because their rivers are too narrow, so every problem gets jammed into one tiny channel and spins there. Some burn hot one moment and turn pessimistic the next, not because their personalities are contradictory, but because their flow volume is too great: information pours into the heart like a storm, and the whole river never has a chance to slow down. Some have every outward advantage and still feel life is chaotic, not because the world is particularly targeting them, but because their current is too fast. The water keeps rushing. Before things can settle to the bottom, the next wave has already carried them away.

Later I increasingly felt that many people make life more complicated than it is. They always want to find an answer, a single method that will solve every problem. But in reality, many problems have already been decided at an earlier point.

Some people keep pouring more water into the river, assuming that knowing more will solve the problem, when in fact it only makes the surface more chaotic.

Some people try desperately to control the speed of the current, but if the river is too shallow, then even a slower current leaves it in disorder.

Some try to block off one troubled patch of water, never realizing that the real problem lies on the riverbed.

So later I slowly formed a simple habit. When I see a person in a state of inner disorder, I do not immediately think about that person's emotions. I first ask myself: what is that person's river like? Too narrow, or too shallow? Too much water, or too much speed? Once you see that clearly, half the problem is already solved. But as I kept following the thought downward, another question arose:

Of course people exchange it. You listen to one sentence from me, I read a book you wrote, we talk for a single evening, and water flows from one river into another. But if exchange were only that, it would vanish quickly. Many thoughts do not exist only between two people. Some thoughts live a very long time. Some live for hundreds of years. Why? Because human beings have, in fact, always been doing one thing:

Now people call it the large language model, "AI." But all these things are, in truth, doing the same thing: taking the water from one river and placing it in a container. A book is, in essence, a stretch of river that has been preserved. A person's decades of thought, a lifetime of observation, will quickly vanish if spoken only in conversation. But once they are written into a book, that river has been placed inside a container. Hundreds of years later, someone may still open it and let that river flow once more into his own heart.

When others draw near, that river flows again. History is even more so. History is not merely a pile of dates. It is the shadow of countless riverbeds: the thoughts, choices, desires, and fears of countless people, compressed by time and left behind as the riverbeds themselves.

So later I slowly came to realize something: humanity has been able to keep advancing not because each generation starts from zero, but because the waters of the earlier rivers did not disappear. They were placed into containers. So when a person reads, he is letting river water from centuries ago flow into his own river. When he looks at history, he is looking at riverbeds that have already dried up. When he encounters art, he is touching the former movement of another river.

The breadth and calm surface of my own river come from the knowledge of the sages of antiquity. They did not arise from nowhere. Many people mock me by saying I want to become a sage. I have never thought that. Their work was to open up and create. Mine is to inherit and carry forward. I know I have received an immense gift, and for that reason I also owe an immense debt. Before I leave this world, I have both the obligation and the responsibility to gather my own river into a container and return it to the world. Even if I can pay back only one percent in interest, I still feel that life among human beings is worthwhile. That is why I joke that I am a bankrupt man, repaying what I owe. And one who is paying back a debt has no standing to demand that others refrain from criticizing or cursing him.

So when I later began to write, I also kept asking myself a question: if I write my own river into a book, does that mean I have let all the water out? Will my river one day run dry? Later I slowly discovered that the answer was no. When water is placed into a container, it does not disappear. It simply changes its mode of existence. The water in a book flows toward others, and their rivers in turn undergo new changes, and then something of that flows back again. Thought is never one-way. It is more like an integral system: countless rivers exchanging, branching, converging, and washing against one another's beds.

So when a person begins to express himself, he is not consuming his own river water. On the contrary, he is allowing the entire river to begin truly flowing. And once a river begins to move at high speed, the riverbed is slowly scoured. Many places that once seemed solid are carried away. Many places that were once invisible are exposed. That is how a river grows deeper. But as the river deepens, you also begin to see things you could not see before: those things that truly change the direction of the flow, those things always lying beneath the surface, rarely seen by anyone.

That day, by the little stream in Shenlongjia, I had not yet fully understood all this. But I had already dimly sensed one thing: if a person truly wants to see himself clearly, then looking only at the water is not enough, and looking only at the river is not enough either. Because the things that truly alter the direction of the current are always underneath, at the bottom.

And that is the next story in the River World: the stones of craving and fear.