The Vow to Become a Sage

Before this, my ambition for my life was probably just to become an ordinary person.

Something I was good at, in some professional field, that could earn enough to live on. Maybe a little more than that. Enough to live comfortably, to buy the things I wanted without having to think twice. I've always had some appetite for material things. Not an unreasonable one. Just an ordinary person, working toward ordinary goals.

For thirty years I followed the script that comes with that. School. Then more school. Then a PhD. I had no particular gift for it. My grades were average. Publishing was hard. Finishing was hard. I worked anyway, the kind of working that runs right up to the edge of breaking.

I was anxious the whole time, because I knew what was waiting on the other side if I didn't finish: no real footing in the job market, no way to support myself. So I looked for ways around the problem. Most of them failed, because I'd spent too many years inside an institution and understood almost nothing about how the world outside it actually worked. What I tried mostly came to nothing.

I lost a great deal in those attempts. I gave up a great deal. I got close to having nothing left at all. And there, strangely, I felt something like emptiness. Nothing left to lose meant nothing left to fear. But it was the wrong kind of empty. I didn't know where to go, what to trust, or what my life would look like from there. It was a kind of emptiness that sits in the chest, not just in the bank account.

That was when I met my first teacher, a man I call Master Panzi.

I'd known him for a few years by then, in the loosest sense. We'd met once, briefly, and hadn't spoken much since. I'd seen the course he advertised, on Wang Yangming's philosophy of mind. I didn't think much of it. It was expensive. I didn't know what Yangming philosophy even was. It seemed to have nothing to do with whatever I needed to fix, so I let it pass.

Then, in an unplanned conversation, something in him got through to me. Not an argument. The certainty with which he held what he believed. I asked him a question. He taught Confucian philosophy, so I asked: where is love, in all of that? The Confucian texts, as far as I knew, barely mention it.

He said no. Confucianism is full of love. Come take my course. I'll show you what love is in five days.

On July 14, 02023, I started his course on Wang Yangming's philosophy.

It got to me in a way I hadn't expected. He built it step by step, in a deliberate order, and somewhere in that order a person with no background in Chinese philosophy, which was me, started to understand what zhi, intention or aspiration, meant in that tradition. Who Wang Yangming was. Who Confucius and Laozi were, in their own inner lives. What a sage actually is. And the claim underneath all of it: that anyone can become one.

The course opened and closed on the same point. You had to vow to become a sage. A sage is someone whose mind has become clean, free of private, self-serving thought. The work of a lifetime is removing that. Walking, for as long as you live, toward that cleanliness.

I had no direction at the time. No real aim for my life. The course found me exactly there. It started on July 14 and ended on July 18, and by the end I had made the vow.

I didn't understand, then, what that vow would mean for the rest of my life. I knew the course mattered. I knew the vow mattered. I didn't know it would matter this much. Looking back, that may be where the road actually started, the one I'm still on.

The course itself was only a reading of Confucian and Daoist texts. It hadn't yet put me on any actual practice. What it gave me was the direction, and a picture of what a sage's mind looks like. But the vow was enough to set the rest of it in motion.

What follows are the notes I kept at the time, unchanged.

02023.07.14

Set the vow, then walk it.
Hold the center, keep to the one.
The work takes as long as it takes.
The heart in step with heaven.

02023.07.15

Standing alone, unchanging.
Circling, without end.
Who would have known:
one's own nature is already whole.

02023.07.16

Standing alone, unchanging, circling without end: this is called the Way.
A person's innate clarity is called the heart-mind.
Where the heart-mind stirs is called intention.
Where intention fastens onto something is called a thing.
What cannot be resisted is called nature.
What aligns with the Way is principle.
What flows as energy is called qi.
It comes down to one clear, unclouded heart-mind.
Rectify the heart, be sincere in intention, examine things, fulfill nature,
exhaust principle, cultivate qi, walk the Way. All of it is here.

02023.07.17

I vow to become someone whose mind is clean.

02023.07.18

How does the channel stay this clear?
Because a live spring feeds it.

02023.07.20

The Mean is not "close enough." It is the utmost.
An endless reaching for the utmost purity, the utmost balance, the utmost harmony.