Life Insights ⁽³⁰⁵⁾

The first thing I do every morning is watch the sunrise from my balcony. When I was a child at home, I never felt that the sunrise in my hometown was beautiful; after wandering abroad for so many years, returning to watch the sunrise and…

Tao Yuanming's attitude toward life and death was broad-minded. He wrote: "Floating freely in the great transformation, neither joyous nor afraid. When it is time to end, just end; there is no need to worry unduly." He regarded death as part of the "great transformation…

We often speak of truth, goodness, and beauty together because the three are linked. Truth is the foundation of goodness and beauty: goodness without truth is hypocrisy, and beauty without truth is sham beauty. The false may win for a time, but in the end…

In the blink of an eye, eight and a half months of the Year of the Ox have passed, and over these months I have been pestering you all with an article a day for more than two hundred days. Today is the Mid-Autumn Festival,…

Every day I witness the deaths of roughly 3–10 cancer patients. This is because my articles carry considerable influence among cancer patients, so many cancer patients and their families add me on WeChat. I often see obituaries posted in my Moments; each obituary means a…

On September 1st the children went back to school and my wife went back to work; the house was left to me alone again, far quieter than during the summer break. I like quiet. Alone at home, after striking the singing bowl a few times…

Unnoticed, I have reached forty-two years of age. The number forty-two means much to me: my favorite Buddhist sutra is the Sutra of Forty-Two Sections, a scripture as plain as the Analects that has greatly influenced me. Though I am not a Buddhist, I have…

After a year of growing vegetables, my rusty farming skills have gradually come back a little. Because of my inexperience, each time I simply broadcast the seeds and let the vegetables in the plot grow on their own, rarely doing transplanting or thinning. So many…

Stillness within stillness is not true stillness; stillness found amid motion reveals the true state of innate nature. Joy within pleasure is not true joy; joy found amid sorrow reveals the true workings of the mind. — Cai Gen Tan (Conversations from the Cabbage Root)…

My wife is always on duty once or twice a month and cannot come home at night. On those days the child has to eat "bachelor's meals" with me, his father. My cooking is not great, and I have always liked light food, so the…