Life Insights ⁽³⁰⁵⁾

Before writing this, I must state that I am not a qualified father myself, and the education I give my son may not be right. The views here are for reference only and open to debate. I write because parents troubled by family education have…

Zen Master Hakuin was the restorer of the Rinzai school in Japan. Near the temple where Hakuin practiced lived a family with a young unmarried daughter who had an illicit affair and bore a child. This enraged her parents, and her father pressed her to…

After the Start of Autumn, the eggplants, loofahs, and cowpeas in my vegetable garden clearly stopped growing much, truly fulfilling the old saying: "A person lives a lifetime; plants live an autumn." Living in the concrete jungle of the city, we have grown numb to…

"Summer Reflections" A thousand books in the home, idly tilling half a plot of field.My heart's affairs I entrust to the zither, lodging them in this world.Not striving to be first under heaven, I keep to diligence and frugality.In the morning I plant a few…

Ouyang Xiu had a couplet: "There are books I have not read; there is nothing I have done that I cannot tell others." The couplet means that although there were still some books he had not read, there was nothing he had done in his…

This is a very dangerous age, with natural and man-made disasters following one after another. Viewed from the perspective of grand history, this is an age in which population, resource, environmental, economic, and political crises erupt together. In such an age, it is inevitable that…

A homeless monk who has cut off desire and cast aside love, who understands his own mind-source and comprehends the profound principle of the Buddha, awakening to the law of non-action: within, he has nothing to attain; without, he has nothing to seek. His mind…

In Chan Buddhism there is a koan called "the plum is ripe." Da Mei, a disciple of Master Mazu Daoyi, asked Mazu: "What is the Buddha?" Mazu answered: "The very mind is the Buddha." Hearing this, Da Mei was immediately enlightened. A few years later,…

Liang Qichao said of himself: "Ten years of iced drink cannot cool the hot blood." Society does smooth down many people's edges, but some people's edges can never be smoothed, no matter what. I myself am a person with sharp edges; no matter how many…

I like climbing mountains. Every time I reach the summit and gaze into the distance, the buildings far away look like ants, and people are like specks of dust, invisible at all; the human world seems as if it is in some distant other place.