Quiet

Of course, I too am ill at ease with this society in all sorts of ways, yet I am calm, and I accept it.

I have realised that many things happen in connection with a person’s values at a particular period. Values are of course not something stable and unchanging; things change and develop, people are swept along by things, and values get split down the middle.

Here and now. What you believe and what you do not believe; what you accept and what you do not accept; what you show and what you do not show…

These answers, interwoven, are your values here and now. Values are the driving cause, the tide, directly propelling how things develop and flow, forming your encounters.

More than a year ago I read Wang Yangming on the unity of knowledge and action (Chien Mu, An Outline of Yangming’s Teaching): “Knowledge is the guiding idea of action, action is the exercise of knowledge. Knowledge is the beginning of action, action is the completion of knowledge. If you truly grasp this, then speaking only of knowledge, action is already within it; speaking only of action, knowledge is already within it.” This is exactly the principle.