(a)

Next, let's talk about the perspective of the book.

I didn't hesitate to write in the first person, which is very uncomfortable with the reader, and in the second person that is incomprehensible.

Although I later found out that writing like this would lose a lot of potential readers.

I was really surprised to find that readers of online literature are so obsessively rejecting the first person, and so almost completely indifferent to the second person.

Their definition is so narrow.

They obviously can't accept the work of Kazuo Ishiguro, the winner of this year's Nobel Prize in Literature, because his words have no plot or chronological order, just a few flashes of life that flash at random, like flowing water.

And Zweig's "Letter from a Strange Woman" is certainly a completely unreadable book, because he dares to use the "wrong" and "dizzying" second person.

A work like Faulkner, which is mixed with multiple names and angles, and a work like Malthus's "One Hundred Years of Solitude", which is chaotic in time and space, overlapping and splitting the identities of the characters, and even a puddle of blood can be used as the protagonist to narrate, is even more of a "failed work" that no one cares about.

The view of appreciation here is so non-mainstream.

However, it is a pity that although from a cultural point of view, they are the non-mainstream of literature, in terms of absolute numbers, they are the mainstream of today's Chinese society.

They are strong turbidity currents! Possess the terrifying power of turbidity wave emptying!

This discovery really shocked me for a long, long time.

The second thing that struck me was that here, there were no typos, it turned out to be abnormal, not normal. Incoherent Chinese sentences, wrong words and overwhelming typos fill every corner. Such a broken, self-defeating scene really made me feel very ashamed as a writer. It's like walking into a slum neighborhood littered with graffiti and broken window panes, gunshots and sirens blaring at any moment.

Can this also be called literature?

Is this the most fashionable and dynamic part of contemporary Chinese literature?

These things exist in the world, how do we face the ancients? And how can we face posterity?

As a cultural person, I feel deeply ashamed.

Many times, I feel like I can't talk about it, and I tell people that I put the most important book in my life in this filthy and dilapidated environment.

Sometimes, I feel very sorry for you, how can I put and bury such a bright life and such a noble soul of yours in this gloomy garbage dump?

I'm so sorry for you.

Whenever this thought comes to me, I am reminded of what you taught me back then.

You say that the darker the place, the more light is needed.

As a candle, as a torch, its mission is to enter into the deepest darkness of the night, to illuminate those who are blind and confused in the darkness.

Perhaps, the choice made by chance is exactly what your bodhisattva wishes.

Perhaps, the world I inadvertently broke into is the same world that you want to lead me to observe.

If you have not seen the deepest darkness, you will not truly desire the most complete light, and you will not have a firm desire to incarnate into the all-encompassing light of wisdom in the ten worlds!

I now believe in this more and more.

You once told me that we must bravely climb to the highest peak, and only when we have the ability to climb the peak can we go down to the deepest abyss and rescue those who have fallen into the trough and cannot struggle to get out.

(b)

Let's talk about the heroes and heroines in again.

Actually, they weren't my imagination. They exist in the sun and on the earth just like us, and they have breathed, laughed, shed tears, and experienced all kinds of joys and sorrows in life.

They were real.

It is so easy to bring them back to life in the story, because they are so vivid and vivid in the first place, that they do not need to be painstakingly conceived, they are alive and present at all.

I just had to write them down like I did.

But resurrecting them in the story is so hard.

Because they have all passed away in my life, through the bleak moments of life and death in all sorts of sad ways. Only the shadows in the memories are left, which still appear in my heart from time to time.

When I think back to my past relationship, my heart hurts as if it had been punctured repeatedly by hundreds of millions of sharp needles.

In the comment area, a reader once asked, I don't know if you will feel sad and shed tears when you write these episodes.

Here I can answer: yes. I feel sad. I shed countless tears. I was choked with grief countless times and couldn't continue writing.

The me, to a large extent, is the source and upstream of me at this moment.

The first male protagonist "You" is my great teacher, who enlightened me with the most important insights in my life, taught me basic methods of study, and left an indelible mark on my life.

He was truly a rare hero.

I wrote a couplet for him to comment on the course of his life.

The couplet says:

Strange men from heaven and earth,

Maverick husband.

Horizontal batch: true hero.

I promised never to mention your name if I wrote a book in the future.

Indeed, I have never mentioned your name in this life.

However, in order to accommodate readers in the early stage of reading ability, I still reluctantly mentioned your previous life name "Jinglong".

(c)

The second male protagonist in Kaohsiung (his name in his previous life was Liu Shen), he is also a real person, and he has only been away from us for a few years.

Everything about him, I was truthful.

In order not to hurt those who are still alive and related to him, I did not write his real name, and also hid some episodes that should not be elaborated.

The third actor in the is supposed to be my former partner, Mr. Liang Yichen.

Mr. Liang Yichen has been away from us for a shorter time, Yichen is his Chinese pen name. I love the name.

He watched me finish the first 80 percent of the book, and he also made changes to the text.

The postscript of this book, "Notes on the Winter Lake", is written about the past of the time when we pondered this book together. I wrote it specifically to commemorate Yichen.

All of the characters who appear in the Quest for the Tao volume are real people in real life, although I don't necessarily use their real names.

They are all important partners or spiritual friends in my life.

This volume is dedicated to them.

(iv)

It can also be said that this book is my autobiography.

Although I'm not a big person, even ordinary people can have his autobiography.

It is a more complete reflection of the process of my life in which I established my faith and became determined to seek the truth.

This book is also a common biography of all lives.

It records the journey of all lives through life and death again and again, through countless episodes, from cognitive pain to liberation from all the pain in life.

It is a biography of a drop of water that illuminates the sea.

It is a biography from a flower shining into spring.

It is the mirror of all life.

Let all life see the trajectory of their own life from the story in the mirror, and understand the direction of their own life.

This is the biography of all the worlds of all people.

The "I" here is all unenlightened or enlightened beings.

The "you" here is all the beings that have been enlightened or will soon be fully enlightened.

You should look at the story this way so that it doesn't feel like it's a story.

It's not someone else's story, it's about all of us.