Essays ⁽³⁴⁹⁾

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…

A monk asked the Buddha: What is the greatest strength? What is the purest light? The Buddha said: Forbearance under insult is the greatest strength, because it harbors no harm and is also peaceful and sound; one who endures has no evil and is sure…

Among all the gentlemen who wrote intellectual history in the Republican era, I like Hu Shi best. This thinker, brimming with the spirit of the scholar, had both a naive, simple side and a broad-minded, generous side. He dared to criticize, yet could modestly accept…

Everyone has their idols; my idol in literature is Mr. Wang Xiaobo. On April 8, 2016—the first weekend just after the Qingming Festival—I took a bus alone to the Foshan Cemetery in Yangfang Town, Changping District, to tend the grave of my idol, the gifted…

Around the year 2000, a classmate of my brother's, then a student at Northern Jiaotong University, recommended Wang Xiaobo's works to me. At that time the Wang Xiaobo craze was rising among college students, gradually forming a fan community known as 'the running dogs at…

Sister Ruoyu, who lived with me for many years and had breast cancer, has passed away. For fourteen years of fighting cancer she had always been optimistic and full of goodwill toward the world. Shortly before the Spring Festival, when we chatted, she told me…

The bright moon over the Huainan, cold over a thousand peaks; into the dark unknown she goes, no one to tend her. —Song dynasty, Jiang Kui, "Treading on Grass" (Tasha Xing) Take just these last two lines of Jiang Kui's ci-poem and read them alone;…

This is an old piece of mine, written on a whim long ago; it still suits my temperament today, so I pick it up, lightly revise it, and amuse myself. In recent years I have passed through several partings of life and death; while trading…

An old piece, written in 2013. During the Qingming Festival tomb-sweeping visit, I saw in the neighboring village an old tree so broad that five or six people could barely encircle it with outstretched arms. It stirred in me a longing for my maternal grandmother's…