A feeling recorded from the slight and the ordinary
Written May 19, 2025
Note: dated in the original as the twenty-first day of the fourth lunar month in the Yisi year.
What stains the night? I cannot say it clearly. I only know the wish is urgent, while disaster remains disaster.
The heart wants quiet, yet quiet is not always granted. From plainness, a life is born; from small hopes, even hope itself grows faint.
Winds move in every direction, clouds rise and change together. One stands looking ahead, and the road is long, the burden heavy.
What the heart leans toward—why must it still feel so boundless and unclear?
If one would establish the self, one must first stand upright. What is seen in others often marks what is lacking in oneself. Why else would it trouble the mind?
If one would settle the heart, one must first learn to bear. In the midst of disorder, peace is hard to hold, and what one longs for remains out of reach. What, then, is there to talk about?
A person has hopes, yet the will remains dim and far away.
Speaking calmly is easy. To stir oneself, much less to rise above the crowd, is harder. To remain only a simple, plain person—this too has become a condition of the present.
And yet one still wants to move forward, to stand nearer the front, not to lose the direction of the heart.
There are times when a person prepares inwardly to advance. The resolve has already taken shape, but the steps stay only in thought.
There are times when a person burns with effort inside, yet stops at the edge and leaves that fire buried.
There are times when a person sighs in grief over small matters, then wonders whether right and wrong have already gone too far, and feels shame in the heart.
When the mind is cluttered and the will in disarray, how can one speak of striving? When thought itself is divided, how can strength gather enough to move?
Even knowing, even doing, can begin to feel like mere labor. And in the end, perhaps on some later day, one is left only with self-pity.
Hanzhezi
Minor talk
Notes on feeling, motion, and the trouble of affection
Written June 3, 2025
Note: dated in the original as the eighth day of the fifth lunar month in the Yisi year.
Youth is brief. One drifts through intervals of pleasure, walks idly, enjoys leisure, and lets the years pass.
Days are wasted for the sake of comfort. There is delight, but no reflection; ease slowly turns into laziness.
This also leads to thoughts of feeling and companionship, and to the separate matter that follows from them.
What I think is this: when two people take joy in one another, when affection, conversation, and friendship begin to intertwine, something in the nature of the self is stirred.
But for one who still intends to strive, it is like dragging a stone. At some point, something must be cut away, broken off, resisted.
If one is not yet anchored in proper work, and instead gives the mind over to other things, then emotion itself becomes a source of pleasure and distraction.
For someone in the middle of the road—not fallen, not yet arrived—there must be force, thought, and a decisive break before effort can deepen.
There is, of course, another side to this.
If two people strive together, and can provoke and encourage one another toward better things, then they may indeed walk the same road without harming either one.
But if one of them falters and stops, the structure collapses on its own.
That is why I think this way. At present there is feeling in motion, and the heart does tremble because of it.
Rules can be written for oneself. Common distractions can be marked out for removal. Even so, the wish circles back.
Perhaps three things are required: to cut off, to relinquish, and to depart.
Cut off the defeated mind. Remove its shadow. Gather the heart elsewhere. Whether one advances or retreats, one thing at least must not happen: one must not be ruled by it.
Relinquish the tender feeling. Extinguish the path that feeds it. Clear it from the field. Whatever comes of it, life itself should still be treated with respect.
Depart from the figure, the trace, the daily nearness. Put distance between them. Even if retreat is hidden within that distance, it may also make the truth of feeling clearer.
Though I write it this way and understand it in the heart, to put those three into action is never the same as setting them down in words. Can theory really erase affection?
I only hope so. I leave the matter to what comes in practice.
Hanzhezi
Minor talk
Untitled, Yisi Year (I–VI)
I
Written on the twenty-ninth day of the fifth lunar month in the Yisi year.
My life runs beside a long river eight feet wide, and I still have not exhausted the joy of this passage.
Born amid brightness tilted elsewhere—where is the end of it?
II
Written on the twenty-ninth day of the fifth lunar month in the Yisi year.
In a light and ordinary world, day after day turns without end.
Yet looking back at others and then back at myself, I seem to meet only mast-flowers in the rearward glance.
III
Written on the twenty-ninth day of the fifth lunar month in the Yisi year.
A light frost cuts across; households gather in the deep of winter.
The long river need not fear fish or shrimp.
Whatever is spoken, whatever is remembered—who can say where it ends? Better to wait for the flowers, until their fragrance passes through the countryside.
IV
Written on the twenty-ninth day of the fifth lunar month in the Yisi year.
Heaven and earth are in accord—but what is true harmony? There is an argument below, and it waits to be heard:
Look at heaven, earth, and humankind in concord. Some people value results and move according to heaven; some value the course itself and keep faith with the thoughts of earth.
But how is living harmony, or sage-like measure, to appear? Some make light of results and are punished; some make light of the path and become obscured.
I do not know what real accord is. I only know one must keep walking.
V
Written on the seventh day of the sixth lunar month in the Yisi year.
One gust rises, one river holds, one soft snowy wind passes through with a clear chill.
A slight sound, a lightly drunken note—at flowers, at wine, where does brightness finally fall?
VI
Written on the tenth day of the sixth lunar month in the Yisi year.
Desolate, vast, faint and uncertain—the road ahead gives no clue what to choose or leave behind.
And yet there is ease, and plainness: flowers, wine, and a sail in the wind.
On the sorrow of Ning
Written on the tenth day of the sixth lunar month in the Yisi year.
In the summer of 2025, before final exams, there was someone malicious who, during an exam, sat in Ning’s place.
In the midst of wind, in the middle of whatever it was, there was no mercy in it.
A pity for health, a pity for life—grief lingered for many hours.
A small thing may be forgotten by others, dismissed at a glance, but its consequences still move forward.
By good fortune, the class teacher later told Ning that another arrangement could be made, another person could replace that position, and the matter passed.
Untitled, Yisi Year (VII)
Written on the fifth day of the eighth lunar month in the Yisi year.
Still and solemn, heaven receives the waters; forcefully the wind rises and moves on.
No matter how rank and movement are discussed, their true condition remains unknown.
The brush seems clear in an old style; the small argument, however, goes astray and grows thin.
How broad the world’s ways are—yet even so, their true nature cannot easily be spoken.
Heavenly indictment: the truth of the heart
Written on the seventh day of the eighth lunar month in the Yisi year.
What the heart turns toward is what it wishes to do, and yet life appears bound by fixed fate—how sorrowful that is.
Deluded deeds are done, and still they do not decide enough; one can only wait for the turning of another cycle.
Beyond the ninefold dark river, something must still be at work.
Within the heart remains a cold grief, remembering former wrongs.
What a pity that there is no longer any vessel for this moment. The crime belongs to human hearts.
Remembering what has passed: preface
Written on the eighth day of the ninth lunar month in the Yisi year.
I keep returning to earlier days, and so I raise a new title for them. What had been spoken before is now stored once more as a single feeling.
Heaven presses the past onward and offers no continuation. Because of this present bond, the brush is lifted again.
Old affairs, once recalled, can no longer be remembered whole. If there is a chance, then let tea and water lead to drunken rest.
When the measured divisions of time have all been poured out, one seems unable to return home unless invited in.
All such speech can perhaps be told again: yang and yin, death and life, all return within the same way.
Lost at Ya Hai: table of recollections
Written on the seventeenth day of the ninth lunar month in the Yisi year.
Lost at the cliff-sea—there are always tens of thousands of confusions, wave after wave rushing forward and following behind.
On the road, apes cry out; the desolation is no less real. The path is narrow, covered with thorns and vine-tangles that scrape against what remains.
Let the drunkenness of today and yesterday put an end to raising old matters again.
Let tea and intoxication close it off. From now on, perhaps the road ahead will thin and clear.
Pavilion by the mountain shore: one written account
Written on the twenty-first day of the ninth lunar month in the Yisi year.
This is the Yisi year, the twenty-first day of the ninth month. What is written here is a small, incidental discussion: disordered words, idle speech, no grand design.
At the edge of mountain and shore there stands a pavilion. Along the road there is a narrow path, and somewhere in that path a written trace remains unbroken.
Far off, on the road appointed by heaven, it is unclear whether one goes on or not; there are chapters of return, bent paths, labor folded back into waves.
People are not inclined to judge their own deficiencies. Yet there are methods of reply, thousands of them, all suited to the affair at hand.
Benefit and profit do not alter the root of one’s nature. In remembering the past, law and discipline may cut back at the self, but they do not easily condemn it from outside.
One must make preparations completely on one’s own, without expecting protection for the self. Better to place one’s own concerns silently outside the center of the heart.
If one looks on the shared way as though it were only elegant paper, then all outside matters become a plunge into confusion—falling into deep water, never reaching the proper road.
On sequence and order: a chapter of feeling
Written on the twenty-third day of the ninth lunar month in the Yisi year; the feeling itself belongs to the twenty-second.
In the Yisi year, on the twenty-second day of the ninth month, something pressed upon the chest until it almost cried out.
The long river continues day after day, and within the heart there is always some hidden sense of time and order.
Everything changes by way of systems. Rules and frameworks, their secret principles and visible restraints, sustain the world in subtle ways.
Freedom may be named the highest thing, yet in practice it is pared down, revised, halved, and mixed with compromise.
So-called justice is often no more than the prevention of crime under the commands of the age and its politics.
Words carried by a graceful walk
Written on the first day of the tenth lunar month in the Yisi year.
By the cliff, drunkenness clings beneath a crying sky; at dawn, a dry river turns with the passing years.
The affairs of the native place feel ancient in their loneliness, and feeling circles there without rest.
Lamplight falls across official ground; in solitude one enters the human world alone.
Heaven and earth do not assist what has come to pass. One can only gaze into the distance, clear and far.