溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
Why Does Flowing Water Fill Every Hollow Before Advancing?
Does true attainment have an order none can skip — filling each hollow before it flows on?
Flowing water, as a thing, does not advance until it has filled each hollow.
Mencius's "it fills each hollow before advancing" opened the question of whether attainment has an order. Confucianism took it up, holding that learning and cultivation are built step by step, and wary of radical leaps. Yet later Chan (Zen) Buddhism forged the opposite path — sudden awakening (dunwu), that enlightenment comes not by stages but all at once in a single moment. Mencian gradualism and Zen suddenness long stood opposed as two roads of learning and awakening. Is true attainment a gradual filling of hollows, or a sudden leap beyond? The question still divides the mind that builds bit by bit from the mind that leaps in one bound.
In an age that seeks a fast shortcut to everything, Mencius's question — that water advances only after filling each hollow — recalls the worth of a process that cannot be skipped.
Mencius likens the order of learning and attainment to flowing water: where a hollow lies ahead, water fills it and only then, brimming over, flows on.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
Mencius likens the order of learning and attainment to flowing water: where a hollow lies ahead, water fills it and only then, brimming over, flows on. There is no shortcut that skips a stage; true achievement comes from filling, one by one, the small hollows right before us. I feel this water-image touches the method of what we leave. We wish to attain and leave something great in a single stroke, but water does not hurry; it fills the empty place before it first. What can I leave by skipping today's small hollow? I look at where the hollow I must now fill lies.
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