Slowly Achieve Yourself in the Long River of Years

On the evening of January 22, 2022, the WeChat Public Platform sent me a message saying I had qualified for custom red-packet covers. I did not know what WeChat red-packet covers were for, nor did I plan to learn about this novelty unrelated to my work, but opening the message still warmed my heart.

The WeChat Public Platform faithfully recorded my work in 2021. In 2021 I published 344 original articles. Actually there were more, because some articles forgot the original tag at publication and were not counted; some articles involving sensitive current events were deleted and not counted either. Throughout 2021, I missed writing only the week I took an exam in my hometown; every other day I wrote an article. Considering how professional these articles are, such a number is indeed considerable.

Why do I insist on writing every day? First, because I love writing; second, because such persistence keeps me from degenerating in life—as everyone knows, middle-aged people easily degenerate and become greasy. To write so many articles, one must constantly read, learn, and think. By insisting on writing daily, I implicitly also insist on learning daily. As far as I know, few people can persist like this; among my relatives and friends, I am the only one. So although I am slow-witted, diligence can make up for clumsiness, and through day-by-day accumulation I improve myself.

When I was young I also longed for success, but success seemed to have no use for me and always stayed far away. After turning thirty, I was no longer so eager for quick success. One day I was visiting my teacher home, and he said to me: Zhiyuan, you must accumulate thickly and blossom slowly; great talents mature late. Do not be impatient. Perhaps because I had reached the right age, I immediately accepted these words when my teacher said them.

I know I am not a genius; in this life I can only rely on thick accumulation and slow blossoming to achieve a few small accomplishments. My family did not have the conditions to let me startle the world overnight, so I chose to slowly achieve myself in the long river of years. Since then I have lost interest in short-term goals and focus only on causes I can devote my whole life to. This transformation turned me from a restless youth into a calm middle-aged man.

I have now passed forty. Our era has grown restless because of a pandemic, but with more than ten years of experience behind me, I can remain calm in this restless era. When a person heart is no longer restless, no matter how big the storms outside, the effect on him is limited.

Besides keeping up reading and writing, every day I also strike a Buddha singing bowl a few times and silently recite the following sutra: Beings fare well through ten things and fare ill through ten things. What are the ten? Three of body, four of speech, three of mind. The three of body are killing, stealing, and lust; the four of speech are divisive talk, harsh speech, false speech, and frivolous speech; the three of mind are envy, anger, and delusion. These ten things, not in accord with the Noble Path, are called the Ten Bad Actions. If these evils are stopped, they are called the Ten Good Actions.

I am no Buddhist master, nor do I believe in Buddhism; I need not know so much of the vast Buddhist canon, still less grasp doctrine so deeply. So silently reciting these few simple lines, reminding myself to avoid the Ten Evils as much as possible, is enough. Remembering and learning too much actually makes it harder to achieve unity of knowledge and action. To be honest, these Ten Evils are hard to avoid; I have more or less fallen into nearly every one. I can only use this simple repeated recollection to admonish myself not to touch the Ten Evils.

I recite these sutras because at my age, many of my understandings of life coincide with the Buddha. In middle age, if you stir up less trouble, avoid the fray, and contend with neither the world nor others, you can salvage precious time to do interesting things and learn interesting things. As experience and knowledge accumulate, the inner world naturally becomes rich.

Moving forward in the long river of years requires this perseverance and steadfastness; of course, more than that, it requires interest. My son has recently been buying math books to read—books unrelated to the college entrance exam and unrelated to math competitions, purely because he is interested in math and wants to understand and learn it more deeply. I fully support him and do not feel he is wasting time. I am glad to see him persist in what interests him, not caring what practical returns such effort brings. Many people never find anything they are interested in their whole lives, only constantly calculating the returns of everything they do; I feel such a life, with no interesting cause to pursue, is incredibly dull and boring.

I myself am full of interest in the life sciences—curious about how humans evolved, how disease arises, how illness should be treated, and how to help others escape physical and mental suffering. The life sciences are full of unknowns, but human nature makes us more interested in the unknown than the known. The long river of years winds onward; as we keep seeking along the road of exploring the unknown, unaware that old age is approaching, is that not itself a joyful thing?