Yang Ning's *Water Flows, Flowers Bloom*: Cultivation Will First Turn Your Life Upside Down.
A 23-year-old housewife,
physically weak, lived a
life as bland as plain water. One day, on her way
to her mother's house, she
stepped on a tattered book,
without a cover or back
cover.
Inexplicably, she bent down to pick it up and
casually flipped through it.
Four lines jumped into her eyes: "I was originally from this land, to
transmit the Dharma and save those lost in delusion.
One flower blooms with five petals, and the
result is natural." The instant
she saw these four lines,
a thunderclap boomed in the clear sky. Startled,
her hand trembled, and the
book fell to the ground. Looking
up at the cloudless sky,
she froze for a few seconds, then
picked up the book again,
repeatedly reading the four sentences,
completely bewildered.
She then threw the dirty, tattered book into the trash.
But those four sentences,
like a knife, were
etched into her brain,
never to be erased.
From that day on,
her life trajectory was completely rewritten.
This woman was named Yang Ning.
She later wrote an autobiography,
recording her more than twenty years of cultivation experience,
titled *Water Flows, Flowers Bloom*. This was the
first time I read her story. What
touched me most wasn't the miraculous meditation experiences,
but the middle section – as she practiced, her
temper grew increasingly worse, her
home became chaotic, her
husband thought she had gone astray, and
she herself felt she was regressing.
That passage made me pause for a long time
because it completely contradicted everyone's intuition about "spiritual practice." Hello
everyone,
I'm Wang Lijie.
Today is the second installment of the series. In the last episode,
we used the story of a cup of coffee to dissect a fundamental mechanism: what's
in your cup is what
spills out when it's bumped.
Today, I'll use the same cognitive framework – predictive coding, Yogacara philosophy, and
seed theory – to analyze what happened to Yang Ning.
But before we begin,
I want to ask you a question:
If someone tells you
they've started spiritual practice,
what would you expect from them? Would you
think they should become more peaceful,
more patient, more gentle, and more "cultivated"?
If someone around you starts meditating and studying Buddhism, and then their
temper worsens, they argue more fiercely with their family, and they're easily
irritable – what would you think?
Most people's first reaction would be: this person has gone astray in their practice, gone
astray.
Stop right now!
This reaction seems perfectly reasonable.
Spiritual practice is supposed to make you better, right? If you get
worse the more you practice, then you're going in the
wrong direction, aren't you? If
someone trying to lose weight gets fatter,
you'd say their method is wrong. If
someone learning piano sounds worse the more they practice,
you'd think they should change teachers. The
principle is the same.
But what if I told you that there's a flawed premise in
this whole chain of logic? The
flawed premise is here:
you've compared spiritual practice to losing weight and practicing piano. Losing weight and
practicing piano are additions – adding a new skill,
adding a new habit.
Each step should show measurable progress.
But spiritual practice isn't addition; it
's subtraction.
It's not about adding "good qualities" to you;
it's about clearing away things that have always existed within you but have never been seen.
And the process of clearing away
inevitably involves bringing those things to the surface.
When they're brought to the surface,
you're more confused, more painful,
and more out of control than before – this isn't going astray;
it's precisely the sign that spiritual practice has truly begun.
Today, I'm going to use Yang Ning's story to
completely dismantle this mechanism.
Shortly after Yang Ning stepped on that tattered book, one
day her child was asleep.
She suddenly became curious and wanted to meditate,
purely out of playfulness. But
after closing her eyes for a few seconds…
Suddenly, her mind and body felt completely clear.
Beautiful landscapes appeared before her eyes, peacocks
displayed their plumage, and the sound of ocean waves filled her ears. The
second time was even more exaggerated – she found herself sitting on a cloud, on a
lotus throne, with
a thousand hands and a thousand
eyes, and hearing the chanting of Buddhist scriptures. She
sat for over two hours, but
felt as if only a dozen minutes had passed. Leaving aside whether
these images are "real" or "illusory,"
let me use a predictive coding framework to conduct a precise analysis.
Your brain is not a passively receiving information camera;
it is a predictive machine, constantly
generating predictions about the world from top to bottom.
In your daily waking state,
your prior beliefs have a very high precision weight – simply put,
your brain has a very powerful "story template."
It uses this template to constantly filter and cover up raw sensory data.
You think you see the truth of the world,
but what you actually see is a story fabricated by your brain.
During meditation,
three things happen simultaneously: closing your eyes to cut off visual input, keeping your body
still to reduce somatosensory input, and
not following thoughts to reduce default mode network activity.
These three things combined
cause that powerful "story template" to begin to loosen, and its
precision weight to decrease. At
this time, the
deep signals that have been suppressed before surface.
Like background music playing in a room, you can't
hear it when you're talking, but once it's
quiet,
the melodies become clear.
Yang Ning saw such rich images during her first meditation session.
What does this mean? It does
n't mean she's exceptionally gifted.
She herself mentioned a key detail—she was just having fun at the time,
without any goals like "I want to cultivate myself" or "I want to achieve enlightenment."
This means her prior knowledge was very low;
she didn't pre-install a
model of "what meditation should be like" in her brain.
This unguarded, relaxed state is
precisely when the gates of consciousness are most easily opened.
But there's a trap here.
Yang Ning quickly fell in love with these wonderful states.
She said meditation became a habit like washing her face and brushing her teeth; she felt
uncomfortable if she didn't meditate for a day. She
stopped doing housework and
even forgot to cook. Her husband,
seeing her sitting there with her eyes closed every day,
not knowing what she was doing,
started to feel uncomfortable.
But Yang Ning was immersed in those wonderful experiences and didn't
care at all. From a
Yogacara perspective,
this is the Manas consciousness at work.
What is the Manas consciousness?
It's a "claimant" deep within your consciousness that never goes off duty.
Its only job is to label every experience as "mine,"
regardless of whether the experience is good or bad. The
manas consciousness (or subconsciousness) immediately rushes to claim, "This is mine!"
Yang Ning experienced a wonderful state in meditation, and her manas
consciousness immediately asserted: "This is my state!
This is my progress!
This is the result of my practice!"
Thus, a craving for the wonderful experience of meditation was formed. In
Buddhism, there's a specific term for this: "craving for meditative pleasure." Simply put, it's an
upgrade from craving milk tea to craving meditation. The addictive
substance has changed, but the
mechanism of addiction remains exactly the same.
This is crucial
because most beginners,
once they experience that wonderful feeling,
think they've found the right path.
But if you start chasing that feeling,
you've already gone astray.
You think you're practicing,
but you're actually pursuing another form of "pleasure."
Later, Yang Ning encountered
a master who called himself "Old Man of India" in meditation, who
taught her techniques. She
also encountered Li Shizhen in meditation,
learning about traditional Chinese medicine.
Her brother later consulted the *Compendium of Materia Medica* and
found that the uncommon herbs she described did indeed exist, and the
illustrations matched.
This type of experience is most likely to spark debate—either complete belief
or complete disbelief.
My attitude is: don't make a simple choice between "true" and "false."
From the perspective of Yogacara philosophy...
Alaya-vijnana – that “seed warehouse” –
stores not only experiences from this life.
When deep meditation significantly reduces the weight of precision at each level, the
deepest seeds may begin to manifest,
appearing as various contents of consciousness.
Whether the knowledge she acquired were seeds deep within Alaya-vijnana is open to
interpretation,
but that's not the focus today. The
focus is on what happens next,
because that's the most valuable part of the entire book.
The master told Yang Ning two things
: First, don't look at any state that appears in meditation,
no matter how beautiful or awe-inspiring,
don't cling to it.
Second, even more precisely: "Don't manage thoughts.
Thoughts are like states of mind; let them
flow past you like water.
Quietly observe them,
don't distinguish between good and evil, beauty and ugliness,
just observe them.
" Did you hear that?
"Let thoughts flow past like water" – this is cessation,
not chasing,
not grasping,
letting consciousness lose its raw materials.
"Quietly observe them" – this is contemplation,
maintaining awareness but not interfering.
"Not distinguishing between good and evil, beauty and ugliness" –
this is reducing the weight of precision in conceptualization,
not labeling the raw data.
The title itself, "Water Flows, Flowers Bloom," contains the whole secret.
Water Flows – Let everything flow like water, let
flowers bloom - when you let go of attachments,
your inherent light will naturally blossom.
If the story had unfolded as we expected in spiritual practice,
Yang Ning should have become increasingly peaceful
and wise,
eventually achieving enlightenment, right?
But Yang Ning's story doesn't follow the script.
As her practice deepened,
her temper not only didn't improve, but worsened. She became
more impatient, more
easily irritated, and
more easily angered. Her
husband's eyes clearly said: "How did practicing Taoism and Buddhism turn you into this? You
must have gone astray!" Even
more heartbreaking was the changing gaze of
those around Yang Ning – neighbors, relatives.
A housewife,
confined at home every day, meditating with her eyes closed, not doing
housework, her
temper worsening, becoming
increasingly impatient with her children and husband –
in any normal social environment,
this person would be considered "problematic."
No one would say, "She's going through a necessary stage of spiritual practice."
Everyone would say, "She should stop and return to normal life."
Yang Ning herself was confused.
She said, "I feel like the more I practice, the more I regress.
" Now I want to ask you a question:
Suppose you are Yang Ning's friend, and
she calls you
saying that her spiritual practice is making her temper worse. If
family relationships are deteriorating,
what advice would you give her?
I guess most people would say: Stop,
adjust, and
continue when your mindset is better.
This advice sounds reasonable,
but it's precisely the most dangerous
because it's based on a flawed judgment. It
assumes that a worsening temper is a sign of "deviating from the right path," when in
reality, a worsening temper is a sign of "reaching the destination."
However, this destination isn't the final stop,
but a necessary transit point.
Let me use seed theory to provide a precise breakdown. The Yogacara school
likens the deepest part of human consciousness to a "seed warehouse," the
Alaya-vijnana.
Every action, thought, and emotion you have
leaves a seed in this warehouse.
Under suitable conditions, these seeds will sprout again,
growing into corresponding actions, thoughts, and emotions.
When you're not practicing,
those seeds of greed, anger, and ignorance quietly lie at the bottom of the warehouse.
Occasionally, they are triggered by external factors, and
one or two surface.
You might have a small outburst of temper, and it's over.
You might think your personality is alright,
but this isn't because those seeds don't exist,
but because they haven't been activated on a large scale. For example,
you have a pond. The
surface looks clear,
but the bottom is covered with decades of silt—
childhood trauma, unresolved anger...
Suppressed grievances, yearning for love, fear of abandonment—
normally, the surface of the pond is calm;
you only see clear water.
You think the pond is clean.
But what does spiritual practice do? It
stirs up the bottom, causing the
silt to rise, making the
entire pond more turbid than before.
Yang Ning's temper worsens,
not because spiritual practice creates new anger,
but because it unearths old anger that has been buried deep within.
In predictive coding terms, the
brain normally maintains
a self-model of "I am a gentle and rational person" through high-precision weighted a priori beliefs. Spiritual practice
lowers these weights, the
self-model begins to loosen,
and suppressed true emotions surge forth.
You haven't become worse;
you've seen your true self for the first time.
And the true self is far more chaotic
than you thought.
Yang Ning's husband's reaction in this process
represents the typical reaction of most people "around spiritual practitioners."
He doesn't understand what happened;
he only sees the result—my wife has changed,
become more difficult to get along with.
His world lacks concepts like "seed surging" and "decreased a priori weights."
He only has a simplistic judgment:
"What you did made you worse,
so you should stop.
" This judgment is wrong.
But you can't really blame him,
because from the outside,
Yang Ning was indeed getting worse.
That's the paradox of spiritual practice:
you're undergoing an earthquake-level cleansing internally,
but outsiders only see the ruins.
They don't know what's being rebuilt beneath those ruins. What
if Yang Ning had listened to her husband and stopped at that moment? The turbulent silt would have sank back to
the bottom, the
surface would have returned to calm, and
she would have become a "gentle, good wife" again.
But the seeds would still be there,
intact,
waiting to be triggered again.
Nothing would have changed.
So Yang Ning didn't stop,
but she experienced something even more cruel.
Her master told her to uphold the precept of forbearance—not to argue with her husband,
no matter what he said,
not to talk back,
not to be angry.
Yang Ning did as she was told.
She endured it, stopped
arguing with her husband,
but she said her
heart was still turbulent.
Resentment, anger, and hatred tore at her heart.
She endured,
and then, to a certain extent, it
completely exploded.
She said she went crazy,
throwing all of her master's teachings to the back of her mind,
swearing,
smashing things in the house. At
that moment,
all the grievances accumulated in over twenty years of marriage,
all the anger suppressed in her spiritual practice... The experience of
everything gushing out was so
real it was heartbreaking,
but it revealed a crucial principle in spiritual practice:
"endurance" and "observation."
While they may seem similar on the surface, they
are fundamentally different things.
What is endurance?
Endurance is like putting a lid on boiling water. The
water is still boiling,
the steam is still accumulating;
you're just preventing it from escaping.
Each time you press down, the
pressure increases.
In Yogacara philosophy,
this is called "suppressing without ceasing"—the expression of the seed is temporarily suppressed,
but the seed itself remains intact.
Moreover, each suppression plants a new seed of resentment: "I am enduring." The
pressure escalates,
like a balloon being constantly inflated. The
harder you press it down, the
more powerfully it bursts.
Yang Ning endured for three years, and the
balloon exploded.
What is "observation"?
Observation is a completely different operation.
You don't suppress the water,
nor do you boil it.
You stand beside it,
watching—watching where the anger rises,
what sensation arises in which part of the body,
how it gradually swells from a small discomfort into an emotional storm, and
then how it slowly dissipates without a response.
You're not "holding back" your temper;
you're "seeing clearly" what the temper is all about.
When you can see this process clearly...
Although the seed manifested and expressed itself,
you didn't add new energy to it,
nor did you feed it with new thoughts like "Why me?" or "This is so unfair." The
seed completed its manifestation process, and its potential
energy dissipated.
More importantly,
because you didn't generate new resentment following it,
you didn't plant new seeds of the same kind.
In Yogacara philosophy,
this is true "permanent severance." The
seed completed its mission through manifestation and awareness;
this causal chain ends here and
no longer continues. In the last
episode, we said: what you spill
is what you usually put in,
not what you "decided" to spill at that moment.
Today, Yang Ning's story adds a deeper meaning to this statement.
If you want to change what's in the cup,
you must first let the old things out.
And the process of letting them out
looks like "spilling everything."
Patience is
covering the cup with your hand when the old things are about to come out.
Observation
is letting it flow out,
but watching it flow
without panic or confusion.
Yang Ning's teacher taught her the method of "observation" from the beginning,
letting everything flow like water.
But facing real marital conflicts, her
husband's lack of understanding, and the doubts of everyone around her, her
ability to "observe" was not yet stable enough.
She retreated to "endurance,"
and the consequence of that endurance,
she demonstrated to everyone through her own experience, was an
explosion.
Speaking of which,
I can't help but digress with an observation highly relevant to investing.
Have you noticed that there's
also a very common form of "endurance" in investing?
Many people buy a stock, it
falls, but they do
n't cut their losses.
They tell themselves, "I'm bullish on the long term,"
they tell their friends, "I'm not panicking,"
they even post on social media, "Value investing is about patience."
But look at their phones—they check the market
every ten minutes. They
say they're not panicking, but
every cell in their body is panicking.
This is "endurance"—they're suppressing fear,
not recognizing it. And
then what? When it
falls to a certain point, they
can't hold back anymore,
panic-selling.
All the "endurance" accumulated before
explodes in the worst possible way in an instant.
Usually, the price at which they sell is
right near the lowest point.
What do truly excellent investors do when faced with the same decline?
They don't "endure without selling."
They "recognize"—they see where their fear comes from, whether it
corresponds to a real change in fundamentals
or the contagion of market sentiment, and
what's spilling from their cup.
They can do this
not because they made the right decision at the moment of the decline.
It's not because they
practiced "seeing clearly" repeatedly over the years before the downturn.
So you see,
Yang Ning's story isn't just about spiritual practitioners.
Anyone who needs to make decisions under pressure—
investors, entrepreneurs, managers,
even ordinary people facing marital crises—
faces the same fundamental question: When a cup is knocked over, do
you try to stop it from spilling,
or do you try to see clearly what it's spilling? Okay,
back to Yang Ning.
After the outburst,
she experienced an extremely painful period.
Looking back on those days, she said she felt she had no wisdom,
not even her usual intelligence,
becoming confused and
unsure of what she was doing.
If you use conventional judgment,
this is a decline in ability, a side
effect of spiritual practice.
But if you use the framework of Yogacara philosophy,
you'll see a completely different picture. What is the
"intelligence" Yang Ning spoke of? It's the
sixth consciousness—the consciousness mind.
It's the "editor-in-chief" of your brain,
adept at analysis, judgment, classification, and labeling.
Your effective operation in society
relies on it.
But it's also the commander-in-chief of conceptualization,
constantly adding "good" and "bad" to your experiences. The
narratives of "right," "wrong," "should," and "shouldn't"—you
think those narratives are facts, but
they're actually stories fabricated by the "editor-in-chief."
When Yang Ning felt her intelligence had vanished,
what did it
mean? It meant the "editor-in-chief's" precision was significantly reduced;
the person who had been helping her fabricate stories was laid off. With the
"editor-in-chief" laid off,
of course you'd feel confused, like
someone who's always worn tinted glasses
suddenly taking them off—their first reaction isn't "Ah,
I finally see the world clearly!"
but rather "Oh my god,
everything is so unfamiliar,
I can't understand anything!"
That confusion isn't regression; it
's a normal transition period after the old filters are removed. Last
time, we used the old monk's story to establish a concept: what's
in the cup is what
spills out when it's bumped.
Today, Yang Ning's story shows us a deeper layer of this concept.
If you want to change what's in the cup,
you'll go through three stages.
The first stage: stirring. Cultivation
brings up the old seeds that have sunk to the bottom of the cup.
You're more confused than before.
Many people give up at this stage
because they think they've gone astray. The
second stage: differentiation.
You begin to learn to distinguish between "endurance" and "observation."
Endurance is like pressing down the lid to prevent it from coming out;
observation is watching it come out without adding energy.
This distinction may seem small,
but it determines whether you are accumulating or releasing pressure. The
third stage: Clarity.
When enough old seeds have been observed,
released, and no new seeds of the same kind are planted, the
contents of the cup truly begin to undergo a qualitative change.
This doesn't happen overnight;
it's a process that takes time.
Yang Ning spent over twenty years completing these three stages.
I also want to share my thoughts on those miraculous meditation experiences.
Yang Ning encountered her master, saw Li Shizhen, and learned about traditional Chinese medicine in meditation.
What is the essence of these experiences?
With current scientific tools,
we cannot give a definitive answer.
My attitude aligns with the consistent stance of this channel:
maintain reverence for ancient wisdom,
respect for personal experiences, and
at the same time, remain rationally open-minded,
neither easily believing
nor readily denying.
But the most valuable part of Yang Ning's story, in
my opinion, is not those "beyond conventional understanding" meditative states,
but rather the very human things she experienced during her practice: a
worsening temper,
family relationships strained to the point of near collapse,
her husband's lack of understanding,
self-doubt, failure to endure humiliation, and
feeling like she was regressing with each practice.
Because these are the realities of everyone who seriously confronts themselves.
Everyone encounters these things.
You don't need to meditate or see any visions.
You only need to carefully observe your own thoughts and emotions, and
you're already doing the same thing—stirring up the silt in the seed bank,
reducing the weight of prior beliefs, and
beginning to see your true self.
Yang Ning wrote a sentence at the beginning of the book:
she wrote this book for only one purpose, out of
a need for love.
She said this love doesn't arise from a certain moment or place, nor
does it disappear; it's simply
an existence.
In this love, the
ego has no place to stand.
You see, the
place she finally reached
wasn't some supernatural power, superpower,
or even "inner peace,"
but a love that emerged after the ego dissolved.
That Manas consciousness,
that claimant who spent her whole life saying "This is mine," "That
is mine,"
finally quieted down.
When "I" left the stage, what
remained wasn't emptiness,
but love.
But before reaching that place,
you have to experience a collapse of the ego.
And most people
run away when the collapse begins.
Yang Ning didn't run away.
She sat on those ruins for over twenty years,
and then the water flowed and the flowers bloomed.
Perhaps you haven't started any form of spiritual practice yet, or
perhaps you're experiencing a phase where "the harder you try, the worse it gets."
Whether at work, in relationships, or in self-discovery,
perhaps someone around you is telling you: "Are you going in the wrong direction?"
Before you make a decision,
think about Yang Ning's pond.
The water has become murky, but that does
n't necessarily mean you polluted it;
perhaps it just means you've finally started cleaning it. What are your thoughts
on this episode of Yang Ning's story? Have
you ever experienced that phase where "the harder you try, the more you regress"? Do
you feel you spend more time "enduring"
or "observing"?
Feel free to tell me your thoughts in the comments section. In the
next episode,
I'll tell an even older and more legendary story:
a young man from 2,200 years ago who
transformed from an impulsive assassin into one of the most outstanding strategists in Chinese history.
And what changed him wasn't a military treatise,
but a pair of shoes.
I'm Wang Lijie.
See you next time.