I stole half a day's leisure, and when the warm winter sun spread over every corner of the balcony, I looked at the large pink and purple roses on the orange refrigerator in the house, quietly, in the cement gray In the vase, it blooms brilliantly. Several light and flexible petals are spread on the top of the refrigerator. I was sipping the green tea that my husband had just brewed, and looking through the beautiful pictures on my phone. I longed for a long time in my heart about how to carefully decorate the corridors of the house so that the corridors of the house would exude a strong scent of books.

Suddenly, a piece of news popped up, "According to Taiwanese media, the famous Taiwanese writer Lin Qingxuan passed away at the age of 65." My heart suddenly twitched. Mr. Lin Qingxuan passed away? Why did he just live to be sixty-five and then leave? Didn’t he participate in Zen and realize the true meaning of life? No matter what, you have to live to be a hundred years old!

I looked at the thin layer of fallen flowers on the top of the refrigerator. The sunshine on the balcony was still hot and warm, but it immediately made me, who had no sense of fate, feel a lot of inexplicable thoughts about it in my heart. The laments and laments of the code of life.

When I was young, I was immersed in "The Legend of the Condor Heroes". I imagined meeting the hero Jin Yong countless times, but I never imagined that when I first moved to Yuanhua, only a few dozen kilometers away from his hometown place, he slowly left this world; and at this moment, when I just took a breath of the familiar literary air in the secular world, the news of Lin Qingxuan's passing unexpectedly came.

Is this a potential cause and effect?

It’s not that I want to force him. Although Mr. Lin will never know that a loyal fan like me exists in the world, for me, my life does have some kind of relationship with him. Generally speaking, people in the world are accustomed to attribute this kind of connection to "fate" - this should also be a method that Mr. Lin, a Zen practitioner, likes.

Reading Mr. Lin’s words is a kind of fate.

It was not too early for Lin Qingxuan’s prose to come to me, but I am fortunate to be one of the earliest readers. I bought several collections of his essays by chance, such as "Open the Window to the Soul", "Yuanyang Incense Burner", "Warming a Pot of Wine under the Moonlight", "Clock and Flute of the Cold Moon"... His writing is fresh and elegant, but it is a kind of condensation. Life thinking.

What is still firmly rooted in my heart is his text about food "Pine Nut Tea":

Pine Nut Tea

Lin Qingxuan

< p> A friend came from South Korea and gave me a big bag of raw pine nuts. This was the first time I saw raw pine nuts. They were crystal clear and white, and it reminded me of the sentiment of "pine nuts falling on an empty mountain, a lonely person should not be asleep".

Pine nuts naturally associate people with a lofty realm, but pine nuts that have been artificially picked and manufactured are for eating. How to eat these pine nuts? I remembered that there is a dish of fried pine nuts in the restaurant. , I asked my friends for advice and decided to put the bag of pine nuts in the frying pan.

When my friend heard this, he was shocked: "How can pine nuts be fried in oil?"

"In Taiwan, we all eat pine nuts like this." I said.

"Sin, sin, although this bag of pine nuts doesn't look like much, how many pine trees do you think it can grow after being tempered by winter snow? When fried in oil, not only will the flavor of the pine nuts be lost, And it also undermines our original intention of eating this essence of heaven and earth. What’s more, although pine nuts are elegant, they are still oily, and they must be eaten in an elegant way to taste their true taste.” “So, how should we eat pine nuts?” I asked doubtfully. "Even in Korea, where pine nuts are produced, pine nuts are still regarded as precious foods. The best way to eat pine nuts is to make tea."

"Make tea?" "When you make tea, add a few pine nuts. Inside, the pine nuts will release a hint of oil and rosin, giving the tea a smooth and smooth aroma, like mountain water."

That night, we drank pine nut tea in the house under the moonlight. , as my friend said, a very ordinary tea becomes extraordinary by adding some pine nuts. It felt like an elegant little flower suddenly bloomed in the green grass everywhere, and I smelled the fragrance of the flower. I felt that making tea with pine nuts was the best way to live up to these pine nuts that grew in the mountains and experienced ice and snow.

"Pine nuts are extremely small things, but sometimes, very small things can also be the masters of emotions. When the poet heard the indiscernible sound of pine nuts falling on the empty mountain on a moonlit night, he would Thinking of our sleepless friends far away, drinking pine nut tea in the moonlight can be said to be a unique taste, freeing us from the worldly world. We always feel that the days are too short when we are happy, and feel that the days are too long when we are sad. It’s because we can’t grasp the small things that exist around us like pine nuts,” said the friend.

My friend’s words are very reasonable and remind me that people claim to be the masters of the world, but they are not the only masters of this world. Take the sun and the moon, which always shine, as an example. The sun gives vitality and strength to all things, not just to people. In the gentle embrace of the moonlight, insects and birds sing, so that no one can enjoy it alone under the moonlight. Even a small pine nut is born by absorbing the essence of the sun and the moon. Although we can make tea and cook it, it does not mean that we are nobler than pine nuts.

Buddha Eye Monk left two famous sayings in his Zen koan:

The water flowing out from the edge of the bamboo is cold, and the wind coming from the flowers is fragrant.

Water and bamboo have nothing to do with each other, but because the water flows out from the side of the bamboo, it looks particularly cold; flowers are fragrant, but the fragrance of flowers will never be known to the human body if there is no wind passing through it. . It can be seen that even simple things have different meanings through coordination, let alone people and pine nuts?

I think that all human mental activities are abstract, and this kind of abstraction is suitable for association; If a rich man who has obtained all the material things in the world cannot associate, he will still feel inadequate; if a poor person has abstract associations, he can also live a happy life. This is completely a difference in realm. The Fifth Patriarch of Zen once asked: "When the wind blows and the flags move, is it the wind? Or the flags?" The answer of the Sixth Patriarch Huineng can be used as an example: "It's not the wind that moves, it's not the flags that move, it's the benevolent ones. Heartbeat. ”

A benevolent person is a human being. At the moment when the human heart is moved, everything is moving. If a person is dull, he will turn a blind eye to the movement of the wind and flags. No wonder some people will think of the tragedy of life when walking in the wilderness and sigh: "I only thought that the depth of love is boundless, but I didn't expect that the pain of separation is higher than the sky." But people who have mountains, rivers and earth in their hearts can say it. "The long pavilion is mostly comfortable for guests on a cool night with the moon", which evokes the thought-provoking realm of "using the bright glow as a quilt when sleeping, and lighting the lamp with the moon when waking up".

Some small pine nuts soaked in tea, a faint sound of insects in the summer night, a bit of starlight slanting in the distant sky... They are all speechless, but with the thought As it circulates, it has a dazzling brilliance. I remember Shen Congwen said this: "Everything beautiful has no home. Shooting stars, falling flowers, fireflies, and the most singing queen bird with a blue head, red beak and green wings, also have no home. Who has ever seen anyone raising a phoenix? Who has ever seen someone raising a phoenix? Can it bind the moonlight? A shooting star has its own direction of coming and going, and I have my own destination.

The soul is a flag fluttering in the wind. People should never ignore the things around them, because they may be just right. You can flutter the flag in your heart, even if it is as small as a pine nut.

There is also an article "The Scent of Sunshine" that was included in the Shanghai S version of the textbook:

Sunshine. Fragrance Lin Qingxuan

I met a young farmer in a sunny town in the south.

It was late spring, the first rice crop had just been harvested, and the spring sunshine was bright. The golden threads are pouring like rain on the warm land, the morning glories are blooming on the fence, the birds are chasing each other on the neem tree, and the bamboo shoots in the bamboo forest are breaking through the earth, thinking carefully about the plants breaking through the earth. The sound of growing in the sun is really a very happy feeling in the world.

The farmer and I were sitting next to the rice field. The rice fields were spread out and shining golden due to the sunlight. The farmer's skin was dyed with a strong copper color. I was a guest at the farmer's house. We just poured out the rice from the bag and pushed it with a rake. It was not flattened, but pushed into small pieces. Like a mountain range, one ridge follows another, so that the rice on both sides of the mountain can be exposed to the sun at the same time. It seems that the millet has been dried like this for thousands of years, because when the sun has passed, the eight-claw rake pushes the ridges into the original valley bottom. Then the rice is turned over, and all the grains originally buried inside are turned over to the sunny side---this way the drying of the rice is more effective and balanced than the flat surface, which is simply a yin and yang philosophy.

The farmer fanned his face with a bamboo hat. With beads of sweat on his face, he turned to me and said, "Take a deep breath and take a look. "

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

He said: "Did you breathe anything? "

"What I inhale is the smell of rice, which is a little fragrant. "I said

He smiled brightly and said: "This is not the smell of rice, but the fragrance of sunshine. "

The fragrance of sunshine? I looked at him puzzled.

The young farmer led me to the middle of the rice field, reached out and grabbed a handful of millet facing the sun. He asked me to smell hard, and the aroma of ripe rice rushed into my chest. Then, he grabbed a handful of millet buried inside and let me smell it, but there was no fragrance anymore. This experiment made me deeply moved. I was surprised and felt the magic of sunlight. Why did only the millet exposed to the sun have fragrance? The young farmer said that he didn’t know. He discovered it accidentally when he was turning over rice to bask in the sun. Helping in the farming, imagining the colorful life in the city, he discovered the fragrance of sunshine while drying grain, which made him determined to stay in his hometown. We sat by the rice paddy and talked endlessly about the fragrance of sunshine, and then. I can almost smell the smell of the clothes that were just dried when I was a child, the newly dried quilts, the newly dried paintings and calligraphy. The fragrance of the sun has been so faint that it has been flowing out from childhood since I had a dryer. It just disappeared into my memory, and I never thought that it was related to the sunshine.

The farmer has his own philosophy. He said: "You city people should not underestimate the sunshine. When there is sunshine, the air is beautiful." The flavors are all different. Just say that the flowers smell great. Have you ever differentiated between flowers in the sun and flowers in the house? What about the different aromas? "

I said: "What do you mean by the fragrance of tuberose and epiphyllum? "

He smiled even more proudly: "That is a kind of Yin fragrance, not arousing.

"

I sat by the rice field like that, taking deep breaths again and again, hoping to savor the fragrance of the sun. Seeing how serious and serious I was, the farmer said: "Actually, you don't need to take a deep breath to smell it, but you can smell it. My sense of smell has deteriorated in the city. ”

I was completely conquered by these words. To be more precise, I felt that something in my soul was opened. Through the words, I began to examine my own survival and suffering, and think about the ultimate meaning of life. This feeling of standing at a certain height and looking down at the world after being enlightened gave a heart that had been riddled with thorns and wounds all the way, received some magical healing and comfort from Liang Shiqiu and Lin Yutang. Prose, but after reading Mr. Lin Qingxuan’s words, I seem to feel that it is more consistent with something in my soul, as if it is a sleeping part of my heart. “The heart is connected” and “the heartstrings are plucked” should refer to this feeling.

So, I began to indulge in the self-healing process of writing words. After all, I am a writer, not a female reader fan of Mr. Lin. Respect, but not piety. The significance of his enlightenment is that my words become ethereal, my artistic conception begins to transcend, and I am immersed in the beautiful capture of the true flavor of life.

Ever since I became obsessed with Lin Qingxuan. After reading the book, I often recommend reading to students in class. Fortunately, there is an article about his "Lily Blossoms" in the Chinese textbook of the Shanghai Education Press, which can be used as an entry point to guide students to have a deeper understanding of his life.

Lily Blossoms

Lin Qingxuan

In a remote and remote valley, there is a cliff thousands of feet high. I don’t know when a cliff grew on the edge. A little lily appeared.

When the lily was born, it looked exactly like a weed. However, it knew in its heart that it was not a weed.

Deep inside, there is an inner pure thought: “I am a lily, not a weed. The only way to prove that I am a lily is to bloom beautiful flowers. "With this idea, the lily worked hard to absorb water and sunlight, took root deeply, and straightened its chest.

Finally, one spring morning, the first flower was born on the top of the lily.

Lily was very happy, but the nearby weeds were disdainful. They laughed at Lily privately: "This guy is obviously a grass, but he still says he is a flower. It's true. He thought he was a flower, but I saw that instead of buds, he had a tumor on his head. "

In public, they laughed at Lily: "Don't dream, even if you can really bloom, in this wilderness, your value is still the same as us? ”

Occasionally there are bees, butterflies and birds flying by, and they will also persuade the lilies not to work so hard to bloom: “On the edge of this cliff, even if the most beautiful flowers in the world bloom, no one will come to appreciate them.” ah! "?

Lily said: "I want to bloom because I know I have beautiful flowers; I want to bloom because I want to complete my solemn life as a flower; I want to bloom because I like it. Use flowers to prove your existence. No matter whether anyone appreciates it or not, no matter what you think of me, I will bloom! ”

Under the contempt of weeds and bees and butterflies, wild lilies worked hard to release their inner energy. One day, it finally bloomed, and its spiritual whiteness and graceful grace became the most beautiful thing on the cliff. Beautiful color.

At this time, the weeds and bees and butterflies no longer dare to laugh at it.

The lilies are in full bloom, and there are crystals on them every day. The weeds think they are last night's dew, but only the lilies know that they are tears of deep joy.

Every spring, wild lilies bloom and set seeds hard. Its seeds followed the wind and fell on the valleys, grasslands and cliffs, and white wild lilies bloomed everywhere.

Decades later, people thousands of miles away came from cities and towns. Many children came from the countryside to appreciate the lilies, and they knelt down and smelled the fragrance of the lilies; many couples hugged each other and made a vow of "a happy marriage forever"; countless people saw this unprecedented experience. It is so beautiful that it touches the pure and tender corner of my heart.

It is known as the "Lily Valley".

No matter how others appreciate it, the mountains are full of lilies. Keep in mind the teachings of the first lily: “We must bloom silently and wholeheartedly, using flowers to prove our existence. ”

In the passage practice, there is also an article from his "The Makeup of Life", which is the one I am most devoted to explaining among the many passages for reading and analysis:

Life Makeup

Lin Qingxuan

Makeup of Life

I know a makeup artist who really knows how to apply makeup and is famous for it. >

I am a little more curious about this person who lives in a completely different field from me, because in my impression, no matter how knowledgeable you are about makeup, you only work on the skin, which is really not what a wise person should do. pursued.

Therefore, I couldn’t help but ask her: "You have been studying makeup for so many years. What kind of person is good at makeup? What is the highest level of makeup?"

For this question, the aging makeup artist smiled deeply. She said: "The highest state of makeup can be described in two words, which is 'natural'. The most advanced makeup technique is to match the identity of the owner through very sophisticated makeup, and can naturally express that person's personality and temperament. Secondary The best makeup is to highlight a person and attract everyone's attention. The worst makeup is to cover up her shortcomings or age. The worst kind of makeup is that it distorts your personality and loses the harmony of your facial features. For example, people with small eyes have thick eyebrows, and people with big faces have red lips..."

I didn’t expect that the highest state of makeup is no makeup, it’s natural. This really surprised me.

Seeing that I was fascinated by what I heard, the makeup artist continued: "Isn't this just like when you write articles? Poor articles are often just a pile of words and sentences, distorting the author's personality. Better articles are radiant. It attracts people's attention, but others know that you are writing an article. The best articles are the natural expressions of the writer, without being piled up. When you read it, you don't feel like you are reading an article, but you are reading a life. ”

What a wise man! But, "After all, people who do makeup only work on the skin," I sighed.

"That's not right," the makeup artist said: "Makeup is just the last technique. It can change her lifestyle, get enough sleep, and pay attention to exercise and nutrition. In this way, her skin will be improved and she will be energetic. It is much more effective than makeup. The next level of makeup is to change your temperament, read more, appreciate art more, think more, be optimistic about life, have confidence in life, be kind-hearted, caring for others, love yourself and have dignity. This is the kind of person you are. How can you be ugly without makeup? The makeup on your face is just the last little thing about makeup. Let me explain in three simple sentences: third-rate makeup is makeup on the face, second-rate makeup is makeup on the mind, and first-rate makeup is makeup on the face. The make-up of life.”

The make-up artist then concluded: “Aren’t you article writers also make-up artists? Third-rate articles are make-up of words, second-rate articles are make-up of spirit, and first-rate articles are make-up of words. The article is the makeup of life. Do you understand makeup? ”

I stood up to pay tribute to this female makeup artist, and I was deeply ashamed of my initial views on makeup artists.

After bidding farewell to the makeup artist and heading home, I walked on the dark surface of the night and came to a profound realization: All appearances in this world do not exist independently and must have their own profound meaning. Inner abundance means, then, the best way to change the appearance is not to work on the appearance, but to reform from the inside.

Unfortunately, people who work hard on appearance often don’t understand this truth.

When preparing materials for the public welfare lecture on Chinese language in junior high schools two days ago, I also wanted to use this article as a narrative reading paragraph to share with the audience. However, considering that the lecture time was tight, the language If the connotation of the paragraph is too rich, it will not be conducive to students' understanding if it cannot be fully developed, so they have no choice but to give up.

I have paid attention to many literary masters. Although some died like Mr. Jin Yong, several of them had shorter lives. The reason may be that they used their brains too much. Most of them lost their brains. Terminal diseases such as tumors. Robert Sheckley, the master of contemporary science fiction novels, passed away due to multiple complications caused by the spread of a brain tumor. A few months ago, Taiwanese writer Li Ao also died of a brain tumor. Today we are shocked to hear that he has been ranked among the top ten writers in Taiwan for ten consecutive years. The death of Mr. Lin Qingxuan, a best-selling author and known as one of the eight masters of contemporary prose, forced me to "face life head-on" and examine the meaning of life again.

Life originally has no meaning. All the meaning of life is given to it by people. Mr. Lin Qingxuan passed away prematurely. Some people may think that his life was worthwhile because he became a well-known writer and gained both fame and fortune. Some people think that his life was not worth it. There is no point in being famous anymore because he will not live long. But in fact, this is all about looking at the social significance of life and death from the outside world. I think that if we must find an explanation for the meaning of life, it is best to look at whether it has meaning and meaning internally (mind, soul). Significance.

I think that for Mr. Lin, he used his own life exploration process to live out himself, live out his confidence, and live out his dignity. For him, his life is Makes sense. And his life process that is very meaningful to him has indirectly inspired others to explore and think about the meaning of life. Naturally, it has social significance, but it should be additional and should not be regarded as the meaning of life itself. The essayist's last Weibo post before his death also expressed this sentiment: Don't lose your desire to fly. This inspired me even more. No matter how long your life is, as long as you have a desire to fly during your life, and you have been working hard to prepare for it. With active attempts, this life itself is already full of meaning!

At the end of this article, the sun is still rarely bright, and the broken gold pours down, shining on the bouquet in the vase.

The few petals of fallen flowers beneath it are so peaceful, and their brilliance remains the same against the solemn cement gray bottle.