Now Liping sat quietly in the dark room practicing structured thought according to the directions of his mentor. First he reflected on the fact that even though his body was restrained in a small dark room, his thought could not be locked up and prevented from going out and about.
With this in mind, Liping deliberately focused his thought on his father. What was he doing now? Liping pictured his father at work, his desk and everything on it—pencils, calculator, drafting tools, a cup half full of hot water, an ashtray containing several cigarette butts. Now Liping mentally saw his father, cigarette in his left hand, slowly exhaling a plume of smoke as he wrote on a large chart, making circular and square notations.
Right now his father was absorbed in his work, a job that was, however, terribly dull and boring. Still not finished even by lunchtime, his father continued on through the afternoon, dismayed by the realization that this task would take him days on end to complete. Such drudgery!
Liping decided to change the subject. Now he began to think of his schoolmates, now in class. It is second period, and the math teacher is lecturing. He is talking about the basics of accounting, bookkeeping, double entry, receivables and payables, balancing accounts, and so on. Also incredibly boring. Everyone is there in class except Liping himself. No one is listening very intently, especially Liping’s friends, who are looking at his empty seat and thinking how convenient for him not to have come to this torturous class. They are aching to get outside and play!
But none of this was very interesting either, Liping reflected, and here this thought stopped.
Now Liping began to go through books inside his brain. Here is a textbook, he began, and he started to look through it mentally from the first lesson. There is a picture of the Great Wall, very grand and impressive. Gazing at the Great Wall from a distant mountain ridge, Liping mentally saw it like an enormous dragon whose head and tail could not be seen, snaking through the fastnesses of the high mountains. He began describing it to himself. The wall is several meters in height, made of boulders and blocks, built along the spines of the mountains. Truly a breathtaking sight. The Great Wall is a crystallization of the blood, sweat, and skill of countless workers; it is a symbol of the Chinese people.
This was better. Liping concluded his exercise with the thought that he would climb the Great Wall one day, gaze upon the magnificent rivers and mountains of his native land, and take in the pride of being Chinese.
Wang Liping’s exercises in structured thought developed his intellectual power and enhanced both his physical and his mental well-being. The little dark room was no longer a confining prison, but an integral part of the whole universe of space and time. In this infinite expanse of space and time, thought can soar at will. Everything Liping “saw”—the people, the events, the things—was very concrete, very realistic, very lifelike. This was a universe full of life, a universe in which he no longer felt alone. And he no longer felt time as a burden, for there were far too many things to do for him to be bored.
Liping was often hungry, however, during his work in the shed, because the old masters didn’t bring him out for meals anymore. Instead they would show up suddenly at odd times and toss him something. Sometimes it would be nothing but a rock, as if the ancients were playing a joke on him. Sometimes it would be food, which the youth would wolf down in a few gulps.
It was also cold in the shed. The autumns in north China are cold, especially at night, when the chill gets into your bones. Based on the temperature changes and his bodily sensations, Liping had gradually worked out, through structured thought, first the ability to distinguish day and night, and then the ability to distinguish morning, noon, evening, and midnight.
There is a proverb that says, “It takes a hundred refinings to make solid steel.” So it is with human beings; they do not attain great capacity unless they are refined. In Taoist terms, if you want to become a realized human being, while the primal basis is of course important, temporal refinement is even more important, because there is no other way to attain realization.
In the course of two months’ isolation in the darkness, Wang Liping had his first understanding of the Way. The three ancients saw that his heart was sincere and his will was unshakable. Based on these qualities, they decided to take him on formally as a disciple.
They chose an auspicious date for the ceremony. That night the sky was clear, the full moon hanging in the eastern quarter, shining on the human world below. A gentle breeze was blowing, and a few flecks of cloud drifted by through the sky. The toil of the day ended, the people were now sleeping. The mountains in the distance were barely visible in the moonlight; they looked like a herd of sheep huddled together unmoving. The grains and pulses stood silently in the fields; occasionally the faint rustle of their leaves came whispering in the breeze, but their colors could no longer be distinguished.
The whole earth was plunged into a profound quiet; only the three elders and their young apprentice remained awake, carrying out the ceremony marking the formal initiation of Wang Liping as the eighteenth-generation Transmitter of the Dragon Gate branch of Taoism. He was given the Taoist name Yongsheng, which means Eternal Life, and the religious name Linglingzi, which means the Spiritually Effective One.
When the ritual was completed, the grand master gave the boy a brief summary of Taoist principles:
“The primal Way is formless and imageless, beginningless and endless, unnameable and indescribable. The word for the Way, which we use as a convenience, is pregnant with hidden meaning.
“First two dots are written. The left one symbolizes light, the right one symbolizes darkness, as in the symbol of the absolute wherein yin and yang embrace each other. These two dots represent the sun and moon in the sky, water and fire on earth, and the two eyes in human beings, which seem to reverse their light and gaze inwardly in the course of refinement exercises.
“Under these two dots is written a single stroke, meaning ‘one,’ which represents the totality of all things. Below this, the graph for ‘self’ is written, referring to oneself, meaning that everything in the universe is in one’s own body, and the Way is not apart from oneself. When the above pieces are assembled, they form the word ‘head,’ which signifies that practice of the Way is the best and most essential thing one can do in the world. Finally the sign for ‘walk’ is written, meaning to travel or operate, signifying the natural working of the teaching throughout one’s whole body, the Way being carried out in one’s own body, the Way being carried out in the whole world. These are the meanings contained in the structure of the character for the Way.”
The grand master paused for a moment, then went on: “Chinese Taoism was founded by Lao-tzu. The essences of its doctrines are all in this word ‘Tao,’ the Way. The methods of attaining the Way are based on stillness.
“The wonders of stillness are inexhaustible. It is possible thereby to participate in evolution and to embrace all things; heaven, earth, and humanity are all included within it.
“People of the world only know how to talk about stillness; they cannot enter into stillness truly, because they have not found out the source of stillness. The source of stillness is in emptiness. All things and the changes they go through are but temporary conditions, which finally return to nothingness, then revert to emptiness. As long as the human mind is not still and quiet, there will be thoughts of desire remaining, which create tremendous obstacles to the cultivation of refinement.
Once selfish desires arise, the primal spirit is disturbed, the primal energy is blocked, and training has no effect. Get rid of selfish desire, enter physically and mentally into quiet stillness, and the primal energy will be buoyant, while the primal spirit will be lively.
The way to get into quiet stillness is to gradually eliminate random thoughts of personal desires, sweeping away the obstacles to the growth of primal spirit and energy, making the pathway even. This principle of extinguishing one to enliven the other is the great achievement of stillness. When it comes to resting in the highest good, nothing surpasses stillness.