This lesson is easy. Did I do all right?” He wanted to get a good mark.
“All right,” replied the old master lightly, “but let’s have lunch.”
Liping had been unbearably nervous all morning and had already had to urinate in the corner of the shed. When he heard the teacher tell him he had done all right, he figured he had passed the test, though not with very good marks.
This lunchtime was not the same as usual. The three old men spoke very little; no one even brought up the question of how Liping had spent the morning. The boy figured they were feigning indifference, so he decided to play along. Gobbling up his food, he waited to see what the next test would be. He did not expect what happened next.
Wang Jiaoming casually said, “Liping, go back to the shed and stay there.” Without even casting a glance at the boy, the old man took him back to the shed and locked him in.
Young Liping had not anticipated this ordeal. He felt he had been tested enough.
Since the old man had given no specific directions as to what he should do, Liping decided to pass the time in sport, shadowboxing in the dark, sitting down to rest when he got tired. Before long, however, the boy realized with growing discomfort that he had not prepared himself properly for this test. The call of nature began to nag him until he thought he would burst. Growing more anxious as the minutes ticked by like hours, eventually Liping wound up pounding and kicking on the door, hollering and screaming for the old men to let him out. Finally he disgraced himself.
As for the three Taoist masters, even while they were occupied with treating the ailments of the local people, nevertheless they focused their inner attention on their young apprentice. By their power of second sight, they were fully aware of his struggle. Lao-tzu said, “Those who conquer themselves are strong.” The old masters were not being cruel; they were doing what was necessary to create a new human being. The I Ching says, “Faithfulness and trustworthiness are means of developing character.”
From that day on, Liping came back every three or four days to practice “repentance” in the shed. Each time, the length of his isolation was increased, from half a day to a day, from a day to a day and a night. After several sessions, he learned to control himself, and his heart and mind became calm and clear. Having achieved this, he began to use his brain to think about questions. His mentors told him that this “structured thought” was an extremely important subject in training the brain.
Lao-tzu said, “Movement overcomes cold, stillness overcomes heat; clear calm is a rectifier of the world.” He also said, “Effect emptiness to the extreme, keep stillness steady; as myriad things act in concert, I thereby observe the return.” The essential point here is in calm stillness; when stillness reaches its climax, it produces motion, whereby you observe the subtle. “Structured thought” means that after body and mind have reached the climax of stillness, the brain conceives a “thing,” be it a scene, a personage, or an event. One must think ahead or in retrospect, causing the thing to develop and evolve until a “result” is obtained. When this result contains a definite meaning, the exercise is said to have taken effect. This operation of a thought process is called “structured thought.”
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
