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natural mountain spring: No matter what mud is thrown in, it is simply and naturally bubbled away into clarity. From E’Mei temple, with this fresh, clear-running mind, Nan began a quest to sharpen his spirit even further. The journey took him, for nearly a decade, from master to master in China, from monastery to university to rural huts. These were the places where the last bits of some of China’s most ancient traditions had been carried, places where classical wisdom had survived a hundred years of national chaos. Nan’s wandering education resembled the way in which, in millennia past, monks would make spiritual marathons around China, seeking an ever-sharper edge to their insights. Solitary monks would stride into packed monasteries and engage in tests of insight, contests to see who could feel the underlying nature of the world with greater fidelity. The aim was, always, to touch the energy flows moving, just unseen, below our lives. “Ten thousand kinds of clever talk—how can they be as good as reality?” So the famous Ch’an master Yun Men, who himself trained four great masters, faced down a King with pure silence in one such a battle.! Nan was trying to cultivate in himself deep ways of feeling and sensing the world. During his wandering study, he followed a path that would lead him to enlightenment in more than a dozen different schools of Buddhism. He mastered everything from medicine to calligraphy. His youthful success and energy at sword fighting, it emerged, was a sign of a prodigal genius. He became, in the 20 century, recognized as one of those crucial human vessels by which really ancient tradition is preserved and carried forward for new generations. After a few years of study, Nan saw the descending madness of Mao’s China and slipped out of the mainland for Taiwan. He lived for decades between Taipei and Hong Kong and America. During this time his fame as a teacher grew. In the mid- 1990s as China opened, Nan returned to the mainland. He had been invited by some of China’s most powerful families, the children of communist revolutionaries who were groping for a sense of history and identity. They wanted to absorb the lessons of Chinese culture that Nan had internalized, they hoped to bend them into tools they could use to shape a Chinese future. Might the old habits of the country, with their ancient roots, have something to offer a nation nearly splitting with the energies of modernity? Nan agreed to set up a private school. He selected a site on the shores of Lake Tai in Zhejiang Province, not far from Shanghai. He chose the location carefully: The still lake water near his campus was like a giant bath of calming yin energy that balanced the urgent, uncertainly aggressive yang energy of 1990s China into a kind of harmony. Ash trees shaded the study rooms in the summer. Wild peonies erupted in pink and white each spring. 1 So the famous Ch’an master: “Yun Men’s Every Day is a Good Day” in Thomas Cleary, Secrets of the Blue Cliff Record: Zen Comments by Hakuin and Tenkei. (Boston, Mass.: Shambhala, 2002) 39. Fir an excellent introduction to the thinking of Master Nan, see Diamond Sutra Explained (Primodia Media 2007) and To Realize Enlightenment: Practice of the Cultivation Path (York Beach, ME: S. Weiser, 1994) HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018238