I apologized to my son.
A program was shut down.
Have you ever thought about this?
The most stubborn label on you
is not put there by others,
but welded on by yourself.
Hello,
everyone.
I am Wang Lijie.
In this episode, I won't talk about koans
or sutras.
I want to share a small thing that happened to me recently.
A very small thing.
So small you might think it's not worth mentioning.
But precisely such a small thing
allowed me to see a program that's been running in me for decades.
My son is studying in the U.S.
A while ago,
his forgetful and careless habits
caused a significant financial loss.
About 20,000 dollars.
Of course,
the loss was from my wallet.
After it happened,
it felt like a thorn in my side.
Not because of the $20,000,
but what really made me uncomfortable was
that he seemed to have no apology for it at all.
It didn't have to be a long letter;
at least a sentence,
or even a WeChat message.
But he said nothing.
During a midday nap one day,
I had a dream.
In the dream, my son was apologizing to me.
I was quite happy when I woke up.
I told my wife:
"Look,
he still feels guilty in his subconscious,
he's just too embarrassed to say it."
Chinese people
are always like this—
some things are just hard to say.
Later, when my wife was video chatting with our son,
she mentioned it casually.
His reaction was: "Why apologize?"
He felt nothing needed an apology lately.
Okay.
Right then,
another seed was planted in my heart.
What seed?
A judgment.
This kid caused a loss for the family due to his unreliability,
and yet he hasn't even thought about apologizing.
I didn't say it aloud,
but the thought was buried there.
About a month later,
we were chatting in the family WeChat group.
Because of another tiny matter,
my tone of voice became a bit impatient.
In text,
tone can't be hidden.
My wife privately reminded me: "Why are you so harsh with him?"
I didn't really admit it at the time,
but lying in bed that night,
I began to seriously trace back the whole thing.
Then I noticed something I had never noticed before.
I had been waiting for my son to apologize.
I felt he owed me one.
This thought had been circling in my head for a month.
But that night, I realized something: apologizing
is a learned behavior.
It's not written in the genes.
How do children learn to apologize?
Not because you tell them to, but by watching you.
They learn by observation.
In this family,
from childhood to now,
has he ever seen his father apologize to anyone in the family?
Think about it carefully.
It seems not.
My wife does very well.
If she gets emotional and loses her temper with the child,
she takes the initiative to apologize afterward.
But what about me?
I don't think I've ever made that gesture at home.
So, in the environment he grew up in,
what signal was he receiving?
Men don't apologize.
Or more accurately,
fathers don't apologize.
This is what he observed himself.
It's a seed in his Alaya consciousness,
planted over and over by his environment as he grew up.
And as for me,
looking back,
I never once saw my father at home
apologize to anyone while I was growing up.
So this seed in me
has been running for at least two generations.
Maybe longer.
Maybe three or four generations,
tracing all the way back
to origins we cannot even identify.
This is what Yogacara calls "perfuming."
Seeds don't require intentional planting;
they seep in like smoke.
Whatever you do every day
is what the people around you are being "perfumed" by.
You think you aren't teaching him anything,
but every one of your behavioral patterns
leaves a trace in the ocean of his consciousness.
In a previous episode, we discussed parent-child relationships—
specifically, "how to avoid repeating
the trauma of the previous generation in our own children."
I promised then to do a dedicated episode on this topic.
Today, I'm fulfilling that promise.
The answer is actually quite simple.
You don't need parenting communication classes
or educational methodologies.
You only need to change yourself.
When you change,
he will naturally change too.
Because you are his environment.
You are the source of his "perfuming."
But changing yourself
has a prerequisite: you must first see what program you're running.
If you can't see it,
how can you change it?
After I realized this that night,
I made a decision.
The next day,
I addressed my previous impatience in our WeChat group
and formally apologized to my son.
Then something interesting happened.
Right after I apologized,
he immediately apologized to me
for the unreliable incident that caused a financial loss.
The whole process was completely natural.
No one forced him;
no one demanded it;
there was no prior buildup.
It was like a lock suddenly clicking open.
Do you notice?
I waited for over a month,
using hints, expectations, and silent pressure,
and nothing happened.
But I did just one thing—
I apologized first—and everything cleared up.
You see,
this is how seeds work.
When you plant a new seed,
the corresponding seed in the other person's consciousness
will also be activated.
This isn't just "chicken soup" logic.
It's not a simple moral exchange of
"be nice to others and they'll be nice to you."
This is the precise manifestation of Dependent Origination in relationships.
When you change a cause,
the entire web of conditions recalculates.
You don't need to teach him to apologize.
You just need to be authentic in front of him once.
His subconscious mind will respond on its own.
But I want to say something deeper here.
Why haven't I apologized at home for decades?
Is it because I've never done anything that required an apology?
Obviously not.
What was stopping me?
A label.
The label of "father."
When you identify with being a "father,"
that identity comes with its own set of rules.
Fathers are authorities.
Fathers are right.
Fathers don't need to bow to their children.
No one dictated this.
It's your Manas-vijnana seizing that label
and building a defense system around it.
This is the most hidden form of ego-grasping.
When we talk about ego-clinging,
we think of something intense—
selfishness, greed, or a need for control.
But in reality, the deepest ego-grasping
is often the quietest.
It doesn't make a scene.
It masks itself as "common sense."
"A father doesn't bow to his child."
That's not ego;
that's just common sense, right?
"A boss doesn't admit mistakes to subordinates."
That's not arrogance;
those are just the rules.
You don't even perceive a problem.
But what if you remove the label "father"?
What if there's just a person in front of you,
an independent life?
If you spoke impatiently to them because of your mood,
should you apologize?
Of course you should.
It's that label that makes you hesitate.
It makes you feel that apologizing will damage your authority.
It turns something that should be simple
into something impossible.
And it's not just the father-son relationship.
Think about it.
How many of your actions are locked by labels?
You're the boss,
so you don't apologize to staff.
You're the teacher,
so you don't admit fault to students.
You're the senior,
so you can't show weakness to the youth.
You're a man,
so you can't cry.
You're a practitioner,
so you can't admit you still feel jealous.
Every label
draws a line in the space of your behavior.
That line says: if you cross it,
you lose that identity.
So you don't dare cross it.
You'd rather let the relationship break,
let the misunderstanding deepen,
or let people around you be hurt,
than step over that line.
Because the moment you cross it,
your ego experiences a small death.
But that death
is exactly what practice is.
What has the Dharma been saying all along?
It tells us that the identity
was never who you are anyway.
This reminds me of a story in the Vinaya.
The Buddha was once inspecting the Sangha
and found a monk who was very ill.
He had dysentery,
was covered in filth,
and was lying in his own excrement.
No one was looking after him
because his body was too dirty.
Everyone stayed away.
The Buddha walked over,
and together with Ananda,
personally washed the monk's body.
He changed his soiled clothes and moved him to a clean bed.
After doing this,
the Buddha gathered all the monks and said,
"You have no parents here to care for you.
If you do not care for one another,
who will?"
"To care for the sick,
is to care for me."
What moves me about this story?
The Buddha was the teacher of the entire Sangha,
the World-Honored One in everyone's eyes.
By any worldly labeling system,
he was the last person who should be doing this.
Scrubbing a sick man's body,
cleaning up his excrement—in Indian caste society at the time,
this was work for the lowest of the low.
But the Buddha did it.
Not to perform compassion,
not to teach his disciples a lesson;
he simply saw a person in need
and went to help.
No labels created a barrier between him and the action.
This is what a person who has completely uninstalled identity labels looks like.
He didn't "disregard his status" to do it;
within him, the concept of "status" didn't even exist.
In his operating system,
the program called "I am the World-Honored One, so I shouldn't do this"
was never installed.
Or rather,
it might have been installed once,
but was completely uninstalled that night under the Bodhi tree.
We certainly cannot reach the Buddha's level,
but the direction is the same.
As we mentioned in the Bodhidharma episode,
the deepest trap in practice isn't greed, anger, or ignorance—
it's that final "garment" that has grown into the skin.
"I am a good person," "I am a practitioner,"
"I am a father"—these labels are the hardest to remove
because you don't even realize they are labels.
You think they are you.
My realization that night
wasn't some earth-shattering enlightenment.
It was just a very tiny loosening.
I saw that the "fathers don't apologize" program had been running in me
for decades,
and I had never once questioned it.
Practice isn't about gaining universal truths on a cushion;
it is found in the gaps of daily life,
noticing the automated programs that have been running for a long, long time.
Then you ask yourself: This program—
did I choose to run it,
or is it running itself?
If you find it's running itself
and you've never audited it,
that is the working of avidya, or ignorance.
It doesn't have to be massive ignorance,
just a tiny blind spot,
a corner where the light has never reached.
This brings up an interesting point:
Why did I figure this out right before sleep?
Why not during the day?
Because during the day, you're too busy.
Your attention is entirely external,
handling tasks, responding to messages, playing roles.
Only when you lie down at night
do those roles exit the stage one by one.
The "investor" exits, the "husband" exits, the "content creator" exits.
Whatever remains at the end,
it finally has the space to speak up.
This is why almost all traditions emphasize meditation,
solitude, or reflection before sleep.
It's not because dark has some mystic power,
but because only when roles go offline
does label-free awareness have a chance to see reality.
But once you shine a light on it,
it begins to loosen.
Once it loosens,
change will happen,
and it might happen much faster than you think.
After I apologized to my son,
a chain reaction occurred:
he apologized to me too.
This wasn't some educational trick
or a communication technique;
it was the manifestation of a seed.
When you plant a new seed in your field of consciousness,
it activates other seeds within the web of causality.
By changing the behavioral pattern of your own node,
the entire relational field fine-tunes itself.
So, the one thing I want to share today is this:
examine those behavioral patterns you take for granted,
especially those you've never questioned.
They might not even be your own choices;
they are inherited,
seeds from your parents,
cultural seeds,
and the default settings of your identity labels.
You are not your labels.
You are the awareness that can examine those labels,
choosing whether to keep or uninstall them.
If you find a label stopping you from doing what you should,
whether it's apologizing, showing vulnerability, or speaking kindly,
then try to let it go.
Letting it go won't cost you anything,
but holding onto it is exactly what causes you
to lose the chance for true connection.
I used to think of "spiritual practice" as something heavy,
reserved for grand experiences—the light of deep meditation,
the realization of emptiness, or moments of oneness.
But now I feel more and more
that the most valuable part of practice
is these tiny moments of "seeing" in daily life.
Seeing a program running,
and then choosing to turn it off,
or even choosing not to turn it off,
but at least knowing that it's running.
That's enough.
I read about a Buddhist concept called "Anusaya"—latent tendencies.
These are extremely subtle, dormant habits.
They aren't as easily noticed as heavy afflictions;
they are like background noise.
After listening to it for decades,
you don't even notice it's there anymore,
until one day the environment suddenly goes quiet,
and you say, "Oh,
that sound has been playing all along."
"Fathers don't apologize"
was a latent tendency for me.
It was too quiet,
too "normal"—
so normal that I never thought to examine it.
Alright,
that was my recent small experience with practice.
It's trivial,
not spectacular,
but it truly changed how I interact with my family.
From now on,
I will apologize immediately for things I do wrong—
to my family,
to my friends,
to my subordinates,
to anyone involved,
without any identity labels or ego.
I believe everyone has corners in their life
waiting to be seen—
those "givens" you've never questioned,
things you thought were common sense but are actually shackles.
Do you have a similar experience?
Is there a label
that has stuck you for a long time,
until one day you realized it existed?
Feel free to share with me in the comments.
I am Wang Lijie.
See you next time.