Fuzzy Life: Reading "The Ninth Taste"

Uncertainty in life always disturbs us. Sometimes we are afraid, peeping at the intersection, wandering, but never dare to move forward. stay put. Sometimes we bury our fears and live as if nothing had happened. As if nothing ever happened. Fear gradually expands in the bottom of my heart. However, most of the time, we just live and don't want or want to think about it.

The only thing we can be sure of is this: Memories cannot save the present. Now, there is a future. Memories cannot save the past either: because the past is irretrievable, there is no redemption, and there is nothing left. We have lost it once and for all.

Is there anything else we can leave behind? What else can you expect? No matter how we go, we still have to accept the helplessness of fate and accept that it has stabbed one wound after another on me until I die.

And fate is like a heavy and dirty fog, mixed with many hustle and bustle in the world, tightly wrapping and covering everything, and it can neither escape nor change. Let every body and soul endure the joys and sorrows of things and the helplessness of separation and reunion. We can't make any other choices except to nakedly endure the sharp cold and pain that go deep into life.

Like a fog of fate, we walked dazedly inside, unable to identify the direction. When we are gradually familiar with it, we are slowly getting used to how to explore, how to search, and guess what is hidden behind the blurry scenery in our eyes. Fate swept through us with an arrow; in the fog a few gunshots rang out. When I woke up, you were already down. I run to you; we are covered in fog.

We live and we suffer together. You are still alive with me.

Xu Guoneng's "Landscape in the Fog" brings us back to our own encounters. He knocked softly on our outside door so that we could unwittingly open it and talk to him. Fog has many layers of duality, and we all experience fog as a small, insignificant part of our lives. But it's our life: sometimes it's cloudy, congealed, filthy, forcing our mouths and noses with force, and eventually falling; sometimes it's just a faint presence, interfering with our vision, but we can't help but look forward to what lies ahead What exactly is it. Sometimes, even if we don't notice it, it always exists; the world behind the fog, the world we live in, is always out of control and out of sight.

Xu Guoneng's book "The Ninth Taste" contains many symbols and vague meanings, some of which can be interpreted and expanded in multiple ways, making people unconsciously accept the shared impression of life. The "Landscape in the Fog" mentioned above is the same, and the "flavor" of "Spiritual Food" is also the same.

And that time, I really realized a kind of indisputable dilution. Maybe after Master Zhou in his middle and old age, he didn't care whether he could make a peerless taste that overwhelms all living beings, but hoped to be able to taste the most recent food in the ordinary food. of simplicity. That day, he brought out the Uwa cauldron and filled me with a bowl of gruel. He said that it was boiled with the dew that he had picked every day since the beginning of autumn and the bitter chrysanthemum. Then I realized that the pots and urns everywhere in his garden were for the purpose of serving food. Dew on the tips of the leaves. Generally, clear porridge always has a slight sweetness, but this porridge is just melted by the slight bitterness of yellow chrysanthemum, so it only tastes the fragrance of chrysanthemum without any taste. From this beginning, and from this to the end, the joys and pains in life should be attributed to a kind of insipidity, just like violent or passionate music, and finally return to the sound of tranquility. After drinking the clear porridge, the empty mountain in front of me fell with twilight rain, and the clouds and mists scattered. At that moment, it was almost still to the point of being too wild.

A bland taste is not just a difference in the concentration of the taste; blandness is the base of all materials and all tastes, allowing any seasoning and any variation to function. When we taste the sharp salty, sweet, spicy and bitter taste, we always taste it, plain. Plainness gives us an opportunity to escape from all kinds of tastes and emotions.

How can we live in this invisible world? We yearn for plain, light life, but always quiet and self-sufficient. But bland is not just bland. Insipidity becomes any taste, any thought, any experience, any understanding.