Chapter Seven · A Human World Formed Within

When I was in my twenties, I once wrote a bit of doggerel.

At first glance, it may seem a little wild. It sounds as though someone is standing between heaven and earth, lifting a cup toward the sky, wanting to gather sun and moon into his arms.

But it is not a wild poem. It is not even a heroic poem. In fact, it came from many tiny things in my life slowly piling together, until at a certain moment a little clear, curled, not-yet-born thing suddenly grew out of them. And what made this poor language student write this book was a highly venomous "big fly."

That noon, I was napping in my room. I was half asleep and half awake. The dream had not yet dispersed, but the body had already awakened a little. The curtains should have been drawn. The room was dark and quiet. At such a time, a person least wants to be disturbed, because the dream is still there, very light, like a thin layer of mist. It was a beautiful dream. I can probably no longer remember it now, but you know it is about to scatter, so you want even more to keep it. Right then, I heard something flying beside my ear.

Buzz, buzz, buzz.

Round after round. I did not open my eyes, because in my experience, that sound meant a fly. Summer, a room, half asleep and half awake: when that sound appears, the first reaction is simply this: there is a fly, and it is annoying.

I did not want to wake up. I did not want to come out of that dream either. So with my eyes still closed, I raised my hand and swatted. Once, I missed. Again, I still missed. I swatted a few more times. At that moment my thought was especially simple: kill it, then continue my dream world. Human beings are often like this. When something disturbs your comfort, your first reaction is not to observe it, but to eliminate it. Especially when you think you already know what it is. Later, after I had swatted several times and still failed to hit it, I finally grew a little irritated and opened my eyes to look.

With that one look, I woke up completely. It was not a fly at all. It was a large hornet. It was flying right in front of me, very close. Close enough that I could even see those unfriendly tiger-like rings of black and gold on its body. In that instant, a cold sweat broke over me, and there was only one thought in my mind: thank goodness I did not hit it. If those swats just now had really landed, what would have happened, I do not know. Maybe it would have stung me. Maybe it would have fallen. Maybe because of my own confusion I would have paid a ridiculous but very real price. But what truly made me stop was not the hornet itself.

It was another question.

Why had I thought it was a fly? Because the sound was similar. But why, just because the sound was similar, did I think it must be a fly? Because in my experience, that sound equals fly. And I had never seriously thought about it. Even in a room that appears closed, a hornet can still fly in. This is a tiny thing, so tiny that when it is said out loud it may seem like nothing special. But in a human life, the things that truly make you suddenly stop are often tiny things like this.

It flies one circle in front of you, and then you suddenly discover that you were not looking at the real world. You were looking at the world inside your own experience. Someone who has never seen a black swan will think swans are naturally all white. Someone who has never seen a hornet inside a room will hear a buzzing sound and assume it must be a fly. This is the limitation of human beings. People live by experience, but people are also trapped by experience. Knowledge lets us recognize the world, and knowledge can also lock the world inside old recognition.

That is why I later often said: human wisdom begins with knowledge, and very often is destroyed by knowledge. Because the more you know, the easier it is to think you already know. And once you think you already know, it becomes extremely difficult for the real world to enter your heart. At that time I lay on the bed, watching the hornet fly back and forth, and began thinking.

Nor would I have known that I had once been so close to danger. I would very naturally have placed this story into my memory like this: one day, while napping, I was disturbed by a fly, and I swatted it dead.

You see, this is how an "incorrect" world is formed. No one deceived me, and no one harmed me. It was only because I had not seen. So I thought I had seen. It was also from that moment that I suddenly gained a rather deep feeling for the word "heart."

This is not to say there is no world outside. It is not to say the hornet does not exist. Of course it exists. It might even sting me. But before I opened my eyes, in my heart it was not a hornet. It was a fly. It must first enter my heart before it becomes part of my world. So the world in which a person truly lives is not a completely objective world. It is the world formed in your heart after external things pass through your experience, memory, desire, and fear. Every one of us lives in this kind of human world formed within the heart.

Later I thought of a more distant question. If one day I were suddenly taken to a place no one knew, and I could never come back, and I could receive no messages at all, then where would my mother be? Where would Wenjie be? Perhaps they would still be living in the original world. Perhaps from the moment I left, the original world would already have been destroyed. But as long as I had not received news of their death, they would still be alive in my heart.

I would wonder whether my mother was eating now, and whether Wenjie was sleeping. Perhaps they too would think of me at some moment. They could not see me, and I could not see them, but we would still be living in one another's hearts. In that moment I suddenly felt that I understood.

This is the human world. The human world is not simply streets, houses, mountains and rivers, cities. The human world slowly forms in the heart. Some people live in your heart. Some events happen in your heart. Some places you may never visit again in your life, yet they are still lit inside your heart. Some people have not been in contact with you for a long time, but the moment they appear, your heart still tightens and reacts. This is not emptiness. On the contrary, this is the most real place of the human world. And it was around that time that the lines I had written before returned to me.

Since childhood, I have been very good at saving good things for later. I ate that way too. If it was a bowl of rice topped with shredded pork, I would often eat the rice first and save the meat for last. I always felt that good things should be kept until the end. Wine was the same. I am not someone who dares to drink casually. There are many reasons: fear of damaging the body, fear of losing control, fear that if today is too comfortable, tomorrow I will have to repay the debt. If a person knows how to think about the future, life can indeed go a little more smoothly.

There is wine today, but I will not drink it. I will drink it tomorrow and enjoy it then. There is something good today, but I will not rush to eat it. I will keep it for later. This looks like a kind of wisdom, and also a kind of restraint. I firmly believed that as long as I chose hardship, chose to give up today's blessing, I could avoid tomorrow's disaster. But later I slowly discovered that hidden inside this was still a deep attachment. Because it was not that I did not want it. I had merely postponed the wanting. I had not put down the wine. I had only hidden the wine in tomorrow. It was not that I did not seek blessing. I was only using today's restraint to exchange for tomorrow's blessing.

This is a very subtle place. A person may think he has already become very rational, when in fact he may only have hidden desire farther away. But water can be channeled, not blocked. Once short-term desire is suppressed for too long, long-term desire can become the most poisonous medicine in the human world. I will speak about this poison in later chapters.

After seeing clearly this stage of tangled suppression, one feels there is no need to deliberately squander, and also no need to deliberately restrain. Because the purpose of restraint is only a longer-lasting squandering.

Rather than keeping the wine for tomorrow, it would be better to pour it out for the immortals above the nine heavens. I will not drink it today, and I will not drink it tomorrow. I will no longer use today to exchange for tomorrow, and I will no longer use misfortune to exchange for blessing. This cup of wine, I simply do not want it anymore. Let it return to heaven and earth. Let it return to the nine heavens. Give it to the exiled immortal. Return it to the things I cannot control.

This line is not heroic, and it is not carefree. It is more like a person walking to a certain place and suddenly loosening his hand a little. It turns out that choosing misfortune for the sake of blessing is itself also a kind of attachment. The relationship between blessing and misfortune is not a chain of cause and effect that people can calculate and judge. Once someone begins deriving the cause and effect between blessing and misfortune, it will inevitably move toward the opposite of causality. But these two layers, in fact, I had already thought through long ago. Even if one understands them, one may not be able to do them in a lifetime.

What truly made me write the third line was that hornet. Because before it appeared, in my world, it was only a fly. And when I opened my eyes, it became a hornet. That moment suddenly made me understand that the human world is not an external object. Sun and moon are not external objects either. I had always thought I lived in the world, but in fact the world also lives in my heart.

The word "receive" here is not possession. It is not that I seize heaven and earth in my hands, nor that I stand above heaven and earth. It is that heaven and earth are no longer only external things.

Sunrise and sunset, moonrise and moon-darkening, all run within my heart. The human world forms within the heart; sun and moon revolve within the heart. The world you see must first take shape in the heart. The people you love also live only in the heart. The things you fear also grow in the heart. The blessing you pursue and the misfortune you avoid, in the end, also rise and fall impermanently in the heart.

In that instant, my heart seemed suddenly to become very large. Not the kind of "large" that wants to swallow heaven and earth. Rather, it was as though a person suddenly discovered that there had originally been a whole human world inside his heart. Within it were my mother, Wenjie, people I had lost, things that had not yet happened, sun and moon, and myself.

Heaven and earth were no longer distant things. They entered observation. A person was no longer merely standing outside heaven and earth looking at the world, because heaven and earth had originally been born together with me. Yet the truly strange thing is that when the world inside a person's heart becomes very large, he does not feel that he himself has become larger. Quite the opposite. During the hours, or perhaps minutes, in which the hornet accompanied my thinking, I suddenly felt myself to be very small. This is a very wondrous feeling.

That "I" which had always been attached to itself.

That "I" which had always been seeking blessing and avoiding misfortune.

That "I" which had always wanted to save good things for tomorrow.

That "I" which took flies as flies, and hornets as danger.

It turns out to be only a very, very small point inside this human world formed in the heart, like a breathing speck of dust in heaven and earth, perhaps even less than dust. But this "slightness" is not sadness, and it is not nihilism. It is a feeling that, after regret, becomes plain, and within plainness suddenly slows down and becomes light.

It is like a person standing among vast mountains and waters, suddenly feeling that his gains and losses, wins and losses, face, good and bad, have all become a little lighter. So the real story of this poem is not the arrogance of having the power to subdue sun and moon. It is moving from the control of desire, to letting go of blessing and misfortune, then to heaven and earth entering the heart, and finally to seeing oneself.

But the hardest thing for human beings is precisely here: understanding does not mean being able to do it. That day, I did understand some things. But in the life that followed, I would still be greedy, still be afraid, still be attached. At certain moments, I would again hear a hornet as a fly. There is nothing strange about this. A person is not changed by a single sudden realization. A single sudden realization only leaves an echo in the heart.

Later, when you make the same mistake again, when the same desire carries you away again, when you comfort yourself with the same reasons again, it will sound softly somewhere. It will not stop you immediately, but it will remind you: you have seen wrongly again. You have once again mistaken the fly in your heart for the real world. You have once again forgotten that heaven and earth are not outside, and blessing and misfortune are not entirely outside either. They are all within your self-formed human world.

Believe me: those who try to rely on one sudden realization to awaken and change fate against heaven should understand this: "A person does not become another person just because he understands once." A person is changed slowly by understanding once, then failing countless times, and seeing countless times that he has failed.

And this book also grew in this way. Not because I have already done it. But because on a certain afternoon, I once saw it once, later forgot it countless times, and then returned countless times. Only at the end did I slowly come to know that a human life is not for defeating heaven and earth, nor for controlling blessing and misfortune. It is only so that after mistaking the world again and again, one can still open one's eyes again.

To look at what is flying before your eyes, and see whether it is a fly or a hornet.

Whether it is the you I know, or the you before I knew you, or the you after I knew you.