Insights and Updates

I used to think I understood the meaning of the line "a confidant within the four seas makes the far horizon like a neighbor," until one day I found that my previous understanding of it had been superficial and wrong. Only when a true confidant,…

On a sudden impulse, I casually wrote an essay called Studying the Buddha, One Must Know the Harmful Side of Buddhism and posted it on Toutiao. I did not expect it to become a hit; the readership instantly passed ten thousand and within a few…

Xiaojin Dan is a formula from Waike Zhengzhi Quansheng Ji (Complete Compendium on the Diagnosis and Treatment of External Diseases). Like Xihuang Wan, it is a secret ancestral formula of Wang Hongxu, a famous Qing-dynasty TCM external-medicine physician, and a famous TCM formula still widely…

In the evening, I went alone to the park and sat cross-legged on a bench beneath the mottled old pagoda. In meditation, a voice rang in my ears and said to me: "Zhiyuan, come home with me!" Home—how warm those two words are—but where is…

What is the soul? The soul is an independent subject that adheres to the body, but the bonds the body undergoes cannot bind the soul. The soul is the core, deepest part of a person's whole spiritual world. The body is perishable, but the soul…

Kushen (Sophora flavescens, shrubby sophora root) is one of the Chinese herbs with relatively strong anticancer activity. Not only TCM doctors but most Western oncology doctors acknowledge its anticancer effect; Kushen injection is a new herbal preparation commonly used by Western oncologists. Modern pharmacological studies…

Life is like the ebb and flow of the tide, always spent amid rises and falls. After great winds and waves, the heart returns to calm. Having gathered one's composure in calm, one must still set out again and step back onto the breaker, not…

It is said that Li Ka-shing's desk has not a single scrap of paper; whatever must be done that day is done that day, leaving nothing to linger in the heart overnight. That a businessman so successful could be this composed is no wonder that,…

Goethe called the "insight" in discussing art: "able to enter, able to encompass, able to penetrate." To encompass is to be unbiased; to penetrate is to be unobstructed; entering yet able to exit, one may then avoid being blinded by insight. —Qian Zhongshu, Limited Views…

On May 16, 2016, after a fifty-day long meditation on the various problems of life, I suddenly realized that, without my noticing, I had cut off all sensual desire. This does not mean giving up sex from then on, or abandoning my wife and children,…