Whatever comes to mind. Sometimes a story I read, sometimes something that came to me while holding my mala beads.
The desert looks bone-dry on the surface, yet water lies hidden beneath. We are the same — anxious and busy above, quiet and clear below. You don't need to travel far to find it. Just stop, and dig down. For one second.
On a lost path behind Mount Qingcheng, I met a Daoist who had not eaten lunch in seven years. Bigu is not dieting, nor fasting — it is another kind of relationship between a person and food.
An 80-year-old TCM doctor taught me zhan zhuang — Chinese standing meditation. I didn't believe it at first. How can standing still heal anything? After 100 days, my insomnia is gone, my hands are warm, my temper softened. This is my honest record of those hundred days.
In the Lotus Sutra, there was a monk with no special powers who bowed to everyone he met, saying "I would never look down on you. You will all become Buddhas." Mocked and beaten, he never stopped. This story made me sit with something uncomfortable — how often I look down on people without even noticing.
I was reading the Lotus Sutra recently and came across the Parable of the Phantom City. I put the book down and sat by the window for a long time. Not because the story was so dramatic, but because I suddenly felt it was about me.
I read a story from the Lotus Sutra today, and after I finished, I sat there for a long while.
The Parable of the Prodigal Son in the Lotus Sutra tells of a lost child who wandered for fifty years, not knowing his father had been waiting all along. Reading this story, I realized that poor son was me.
The most famous parable from the Lotus Sutra—a burning mansion, children oblivious to danger, and a father who uses skillful means to save them. This 2,500-year-old story reveals the nature of our delusion in the Three Realms and the path toward liberation.