Chapter Three · The Coin World

This chapter on the Coin World is important, and it is also difficult. Once you understand it, you will see why craving turns into fear after failure, and how fear quietly makes us lose interest in the world, leaving us confused, depressed, and in pain.

I have always been someone deeply fascinated by old coins. Beyond their monetary function, coins have often stood in history as symbols of "heaven's will." The apparent justice of that heavenly will became one of the most important steps by which I learned to see my own fear and craving clearly. More and more I felt that many things in the human heart are very much like a coin. Fear and craving, knowing and doing, the two faces of a coin always exist at the same time, yet you cannot see both at once. The earliest time I became aware of this was not through reading books. It was because, when I was a child, I really lived through a foolish and very real story involving a coin and a bicycle.

When I was twelve, my father came back from Sichuan and gave me a panda commemorative coin. It was golden, and I always thought it was real gold. Later, for a period of time, I desperately wanted to buy a better bicycle. My parents would not agree, and I had no money of my own. So I began staring at that coin.

As I looked and looked, a thought slowly surfaced inside me: should I sell it?

The moment that thought appeared, things became interesting, because from that point on there were already two forces standing inside me at once. One wanted. The other feared. Wanting the bicycle, wanting to turn "I like it" into "I have obtained it" — that was craving. But I also knew that the coin was a gift from my father. If I sold it, I feared being asked about it later. I feared regretting it after selling it. That was fear.

So I began tossing the coin.

At first I made myself a rule: if I got heads twice, I would go sell it. The result was one head and then one tail. So I thought, fine, then I will change the rule to two tails. But then I got one head and one tail again. Then I changed the rule once more. Again, and again, and again.

I kept changing the rules. Two heads, no good. Two tails, no good. One head and one tail, no good. In short, I could never toss the result that would let me feel "at ease" with heaven's will. In the end I actually already knew that the hard part was never the coin. The hard part was myself. I was not waiting for an answer. I was waiting for a reason — something that would let me carry this through without having to fully admit, "This is my own decision." It is very much like many of the fans who talk with me live now. They too are waiting for a reason that will let them do something while avoiding the full burden of acknowledging that they themselves chose it. Later I changed the rule one more time. I said: then let it be three tosses. If the three tosses are not the same in sequence, I will sell it. And in the end, I really got head, tail, head.

So I took that coin and went to sell it. But when I got to the shop, the owner took one look and said it was not real gold. It was only a silver coin plated with gold. I felt devastated. I had struggled for so long beforehand, tossed again and again, changed the rule again and again, persuaded myself again and again — and in the end, what I got back was not even the thing I had imagined.

And yet in that very instant, I suddenly understood something. All that time I had been staring at the front and back of the coin, thinking that I was waiting for "heaven's will." But what truly determined my action was never the coin. It was me. More precisely, it was the two forces inside me that had been fighting all along.

From then on, whenever I saw the word "coin," I found it difficult to treat it merely as an object. It became one of the angles from which I observed the world, one of my little worlds. Many years later, when I watched the old story in the television drama The Young Marshal involving Zhang Xueliang, Yang Yuting, and Chang Yinhuai, I immediately felt the same thing all over again.

Many people tell that story by focusing on how many times the coin was tossed, whether someone cheated, whether it truly was heaven's will. Later I came more and more to feel that none of those things mattered. What mattered was this: why did he need a coin at all?

Many times people do not actually fail to know what they want to do. What they cannot bear is the sentence, "This is my own decision." So they begin searching for many reasons, trying to find one that appears not to be "me."

But these things are often only the surface. What truly presses underneath is still those same two forces: one that wants to move forward, one that wants to retreat; one that wants to obtain, one that fears losing.

That is why I later grew more and more accustomed to using a coin to understand many things. For a long stretch of time I loved sitting in places with wish pools so clear that one could see all the way to the bottom. Whenever I was caught again in hesitation and concern, I would go there, sit quietly to one side, watch people throw in the coins that belonged to their own fear and craving, and think about my own cost and structure.

When I stood there watching, as they tossed coin after coin — cheering with delight one moment, sinking into disappointment the next, laughing something off here, trying again and again there — I would enter my own Coin World. In that instant, the lights of ten thousand homes seemed like a single coin.

They do not come in turns. It is only that, at a given moment, one face is up. When you charge forward, you think you are only craving, but fear is there as well. Perhaps you fear poverty, fear losing, fear spending your whole life as an ordinary person. And when you step back, you think you are only afraid, but craving is there too. Perhaps you still want it, still feel unwilling to let go, still cannot quite bear to lose it. It is only that you fear paying the cost even more. So a person's true state is never "I have only craving," nor "I have only fear."

The true state is this:

By this point we can begin to think more clearly about the "stones at the bottom of the river." Stones on the riverbed are not all the same. Some are large stones; some are little broken stones.

Craving is a large stone. It is more obvious, easier to see, and more likely to alter the flow directly. A person wants to make money, wants to turn his life around, wants success, wants to prove himself, wants some kind of future — these things are usually plain to the eye. From the bank, you can see them immediately: yes, this is what I want. Yes, this is what I am rushing toward. Yes, I am pushing this hard because I want it so badly.

That is why I say craving is like a large stone. This has nothing to do with whether it is noble or base. It is simply because its influence on the current is so readily visible. When water rushes over it, the surface rises at once. Human beings are the same. When craving is strong in a person, the movements are quick, the emotions intense, the decisions fierce. You can see it very easily.

Fear is different. Fear is more like a small stone — small, broken, inconspicuous, and better at hiding. It rarely says, "I am afraid." More often it says, "Wait a little longer. I am not ready yet. Better to be more cautious." It says: "It is not that I do not dare; I just want to be clearer first. It is not that I am shrinking back; it is only that now is not the right time." So people very easily feel the effects of fear. But they find it much harder to recognize fear itself.

You know that you feel unwell. You know that you stepped back. You know that you hesitated. But you may not know that what is pressing underneath is fear: fear of failure, fear of losing face, fear of trouble, fear of wasted effort, fear of being laughed at, fear of having to admit that you are not really as capable as you hoped, fear that you are just an ordinary person after all.

Later I increasingly felt that what people usually see are only the large stones. They feel how badly they want something. They want to win, to prove themselves. But what truly traps a person is very often those small broken stones. They do not stand out in ordinary times, but they pile up.

One stone of fear of failure, one stone of fear of losing face, one stone of fear of wasted labor, one stone of fear of rejection, one stone of fear that others look down on you, one stone of fear that you do not really deserve what you want. Most people never look at them at all. And in being ignored, those stones slowly drive things to an irrecoverable point. Fear can pile itself into a landslide dam lake. That is what makes fear so terrible.

Many people say that after encountering Human Choice, Heavenly Choice, they do not dare read further, because they feel unable to act, unable to choose. This is a typical case in which fear has temporarily formed a dammed lake. So many people are not without desire, not without motivation, and certainly not without craving. They are simply being blocked, little by little, by those small stones. Gradually they slip into a strange state. On the surface they are still alive, still thinking, sometimes still excited, sometimes still envious, sometimes still saying that they want to change. But when it is finally time to move forward, they do not move.

It is not that there is no road. The river is blocked. The most troublesome thing about a dammed lake is not that the waves are large. Quite the contrary. It looks calm. Calm enough to resemble rationality, maturity, detachment, and composure. But if you look beneath, you discover that it is none of those things.

The water is still there, and the river is still there, but the water no longer flows. It can no longer flow in, and it can no longer flow out. The banks rapidly widen. The more frightened a person becomes, the more he studies; the more he studies, the more he knows; the more he knows, the more he realizes what he does not know; the more he realizes this, the more frightened he becomes; and the more frightened he becomes, the more blocked the river grows.

Once a person is piled over by the small stones of fear, the most common state is not madness, but delay, self-reconciliation, and numbness. Nothing holds interest anymore. Life begins to feel as though hope itself has gone out of it.

That is why so many people are lost. It is not because they lack goals, but because their river has already been blocked by these small stones. So where has craving gone? Why is there so much fear? This is the most frightening cycle of all: the large stones of craving can shatter, but the small stones do not turn themselves back into large ones.

When a person is young, craving is often huge. He wants to win, wants speed, wants to change his fate, wants to prove that he is different from everyone else. That is why the stone is so large, and why there may be many such large stones. The moment water crashes over them, the surface fills with waves. But if he collides again and again, fails again and again, pays cost again and again, that large stone will shatter into many smaller stones. What was once "I want to succeed" gradually breaks apart into: I am afraid of losing again, afraid of losing face again, afraid of doing all this for nothing, afraid people will laugh at me, afraid that perhaps I was never meant for that life.

So many people are not no longer craving. Rather, after repeated impacts, their craving has shattered into countless tiny fears.

This is also why some people are ferocious when young, and later become more and more cautious, more and more inclined to say, "Forget it." Others say they have matured. But many times it is not maturity. It is that the large stone has been smashed apart by reality. There is another point here that many people overlook. Even the act of beginning to observe ourselves, study ourselves, and try to understand this whole structure is not neutral in itself. Many people assume that they began studying their inner life because they are rational, or mature, or because they want to become clear-headed. But often that is not so. Some people observe themselves because of craving.

That is craving pushing from behind. Others observe themselves because of fear. They do not want to win. They are only afraid of paying dearly again in the future. Afraid of falling into the same pit again. Afraid that something will suddenly happen and they will be unprepared. Afraid that if they do not understand these things now, a greater problem will arise later. That is fear pulling from the other side.

So later I came to understand more and more clearly that people rarely observe themselves out of pure curiosity. That is also why so many people oppose me, or deliberately refuse to understand what I am saying. Very often, either craving has given them a shove, or fear has given them a yank. And that means even "observation" itself has already been influenced by the coin. You are not standing in a completely objective place looking at yourself. You too are holding a coin that is still flipping as you lower your head to look into the riverbed.

That is also why, later on, I attached more and more importance to how one observes. If you want to see craving directly, it is actually not so hard. Look at yourself when you are most excited, most impulsive, most eager to prove yourself, most unwilling to let go, most desperate to "get it."

That is how large stones work. They push the water up directly. It is difficult to miss them. But if you want to look at fear more neutrally, it is not nearly so easy. You cannot look when everything is at its most intense. You have to look when the surface of the water is relatively calm — when you are not so excited, and not so panicked.

For example: after a run, when you are tired. After a shower. When you sit down to write. At such times the water slows a little and the surface quiets a little, and it becomes easier to see those small stones that are usually invisible. That is why I later felt more and more strongly that craving is best observed when the waves are rising, while fear is best observed when the water is level.

By the time I reached this point, I no longer felt that craving and fear were especially complicated things. They are too ordinary for that — ordinary to the point that everyone has them, ordinary to the point that they are present every day.

They never take turns. They are there together at all times. It is simply that, at a given moment, one side grows heavier and the current goes that way. So the real human problem is never whether craving exists, nor whether fear exists.

The real question is this: when they coexist, can you see which face of the coin is turned upward?

When thought is first born in us, our thinking is like the advancing edge of a river, and everywhere there are huge stones. As our lives move toward old age, there are only smaller stones left in the river, perhaps even only sand. That is why I am so fond of one particular line:

Many people spend their whole lives talking about the world, talking about destiny, talking about other people, talking about opportunity. And yet they never lower their heads to look at the coin in their own hand, to see which face has turned upward. That, and only that, is where confusion truly begins. Because why is a person confused? Not because there is no road. But because both sides are there at once, and he cannot see them.

That is the next chapter: "I have one sword, and with it I cut through confusion."