The drop of thick ink hanging at the tip of the brush finally could no longer bear its own weight, snapping free from the bristles and falling downward.
On the pure white rice paper, an irregular black blot instantly bloomed.
Xu Zijin’s brush remained suspended in midair, unmoving.
He sank his wrist, slapping the wolf-hair brush down beside the red sandalwood brush washer, splashing up a few drops of murky water.
In a fit of temper, he snatched up the sheet of Huizhou raw paper stained with the ink blot and yanked it hard.
Rip!
The paper tore, and he casually crumpled it into a ball, tossing it into the shadow beneath the desk.
The night was deep, the hour past midnight; candlelight flickered in the study.
The flame of the coarse red candle on the desk sputtered, dim and bright, elongated by the night breeze stretching Xu Zijin’s shadow across the green brick wall.
He swiftly drew out a fresh sheet of paper, smoothing its surface with both hands, pressing down the curling corners with two slabs of bluestone paperweights.
His fingertip reached out to the brush rack, selecting another purple-hair brush.
The brush tip dipped into the inkstone, soaking up the thick ink.
Horizontal and vertical strokes, sweeping and spreading with ease.
“On Rectifying the Mind Through Investigating Things” — On Rectifying the Mind Through Investigating Things.
Five bold characters, their force penetrating the paper, the ink glistening with a cold, wet sheen in the candlelight.
Xu Zijin did not pause; the brush edge moved downward without hesitation.
He continued to write, setting down the lines that broke open the thesis.
“A century of classical studies has focused on outward forms while neglecting inner substance, shredding principles to escape difficulties, and the rectification of the mind grows ever more distant.”
Sixteen characters, each one reeking of deadly intent.
Once these sixteen words were unleashed, they would cut off the retreat of the old Confucian scholars at the Imperial Academy.
And also cut off his own path.
For a hundred years, the scholars of the Great Qian Dynasty had wasted their efforts agonizing over the minutiae of the Four Books and Five Classics, while understanding nothing of basic agriculture or water conservancy.
Xu Zijin’s brush did not stop, tearing apart the hypocritical academic culture of the past century.
Xie Yunwan stood by the long couch at the side, her body involuntarily leaning forward.
“A century of classical studies … focused on outward forms while neglecting inner substance …”
Xie Yunwan whispered the half-sentence aloud, the end of her words trembling uncontrollably.
These sixteen characters were like thunder rising from flat ground.
She staggered backward half a step.
Crashed the sound of clamor!
It was the teacup she had knocked over on the square table.
Xie Yunwan paid no attention to the mess on the floor, her face full of shock.
“You’ve lost your mind!” Xie Yunwan couldn’t help but warn. “If these sixteen words spread, the three thousand students at the Imperial Academy will tear you apart!”
Xu Zijin was declaring war on all the scholars of Great Qian!
This was an extreme act of moral attack, more radical than raising troops in rebellion. Once it got out, both people in this study would be drowned by the spittle of civil officials.
Xu Zijin didn’t even lift his head, utterly ignoring the commotion behind him.
“Miss Xie, if you’re afraid, there’s still time to leave through the back door.” Xu Zijin rotated his wrist, letting the brush tip dip and lick the inkstone pool.
He raced the brush across the page like flying.
“The mind is the dwelling of principle; things are the manifestation of principle.”
After finishing this line, he paused his wrist slightly, forcibly embedding Xu Qinghuan’s reasoning into this elegant, classical shell.
“To investigate a thing is not to exhaust its form, but to rectify one’s mind in order to respond to its principle.”
The brush moved like a dancing dragon and a striking serpent, ink splattering.
He used the most traditional Neo-Confucian vocabulary to overturn the crude interpretation of investigating things and extending knowledge.
It was no longer about sitting in quiet meditation or empty talk about mind and nature, but about going out into the field to explore the iron laws governing all things.
Xie Yunwan stumbled a few steps, barely steadying herself.
She did not leave.
Trembling, she reached out, picked up the sheet of rice paper with the written words, and brought it close to the corner of the desk where the coarse red candle burned.
By the jumping flame, she read word by word, line by line.
As her eyes moved across the paper, the color drained from her face, leaving it pale.
“To grasp principle through tangible objects, to verify truth by numbers …”
Xie Yunwan’s lips moved, but no sound came out.
She stood frozen, even her breathing ceased.
She became a statue of clay, holding the paper aloft for a long time, her mind’s murky classical doctrines shattered by these few lines.
Xu Qinghuan’s theory, which overturned worldly conventions, had finally been clad in its most impenetrable armor, standing dignified before the world.
Xu Zijin continued writing.
He took a second sheet of paper, dipped the brush tip well in ink, and converted the physical empirical logic into classical phrasing.
“Water flows downward, fire rises upward, the alternation of sun and moon, the procession of the four seasons—all are inevitable manifestations of principle.”
He wrote extremely fast, strokes connecting one after another, the wild, unbridled spirit of cursive script gradually emerging.
“Nature is principle, but the common people use it daily without knowing it.”
When he reached this line, Xu Zijin bore down with his wrist, dragging the final stroke of the character for “know” until it carved a deep trail of ink.
With these eight characters, he embedded Xu Qinghuan’s claim that water flows downward because of principle, firmly under the most rigid hierarchical system of the Great Qian Dynasty.
This was a thunderbolt strong enough to blast apart the entire imperial court.
Xu Zijin reversed his wrist and wrote the closing line.
“Focusing the mind without distraction is the essence of investigating things.”
The final stroke ended.
Xu Zijin laid the purple-hair brush heavily onto the brush rest.
“Hah.”
He let out a long sigh, his chest heaving violently. He raised a hand to wipe the fine sweat beading on his forehead.
The first draft was complete.
This essay, “On Rectifying the Mind Through Investigating Things,” was enough to smash the Imperial Academy’s plaque into pieces.
Xu Zijin stood straight, lifting the manuscript before his eyes.
He read through the freshly written essay from start to finish.
When he read the opening, he lifted his chin slightly.
When he reached the middle, he gave a slight nod.
When his gaze fell on the line, “Nature is principle, but the common people use it daily without knowing it,”
A buzzing sound exploded in Xu Zijin’s head.
Cold sweat seeped from his back, his under robe clinging to his spine, damp and icy.
“The people use it daily without knowing…”
Xu Zijin murmured to himself, his teeth biting into his lower lip until a faint taste of blood seeped through.
The heavenly principle of the Great Qian Dynasty was the divine right of emperors, the orthodox doctrine jointly interpreted by the emperor and the chief minister within the imperial court.
If the heavenly principle lay in the people's daily acts — in eating, drinking, defecating and urinating — in the rules of blacksmiths forging iron and of farmers plowing fields…
Then what need was there for an emperor?
What need was there for all the civil and military officials?
This was no longer just a debate with the Imperial Academy over scholarship.
This was digging up the ancestral graves of the Great Qian royal family!
Usurping imperial power — punishable by death by a thousand cuts, with nine generations of his family exterminated.
Xu Zijin’s hand trembled, and the manuscript slipped onto the desk.
He yanked a purple-tipped brush from the rack, stabbed the tip viciously into the inkstone, and soaked it in thick ink.
He suspended the brush over the line “Nature is principle,” his hand shaking so much he could barely hold the shaft.
Rip!
Xu Zijin slashed the brush down hard, the thick ink smearing the eight characters completely black, even tearing a gash through the paper itself.
He threw down the brush, grabbed the paper with both hands, crumpled it fiercely into a ball, and hurled it to the ground.
“What did you cross out?” Xie Yunwan was roused by his movements, rushing to the desk in two steps.
“Something that could get us killed,” Xu Zijin panted heavily.
Xie Yunwan looked down at the crushed paper ball on the floor, then back at Xu Zijin’s ashen face.
“Imperial power,” she uttered two words.
Xu Zijin did not reply. He just stared at the remaining fragments on the desk, his mind churning.
Night wind slipped through the window lattice, making the candle flames waver.
Xu Zijin sat back down in his chair and drew out a fresh sheet of paper.
He had to change those words that touched the emperor’s raw nerves.
He had to bury the new doctrine deeper, hide it more safely, make it utterly foolproof!
He picked up his brush and wrote a few lines, his strokes sluggish.
After two quarters of an hour, Xu Zijin grabbed the paper and tore it in half.
Unnoticed, the coarse red candle on the desk had burned out.
The window paper gradually paled to the color of fish bellies, letting in a sliver of cold, pale light.
A whole night.
Xu Zijin agonized at the desk, weighing every word and phrase.
Xie Yunwan stood nearby, holding a fresh ink stick, grinding it in circles in the inkstone.
Her wrist ached, her fingers stained black, but she never uttered a single complaint.
When Xu Zijin finished his second draft and read it through, he found that to avoid offending imperial power, the essay had become clumsy and incoherent, completely losing the sharp edge of its empirical logic.
“Waste paper!”
Xu Zijin roared, tearing the second draft into shreds.
Xie Yunwan silently handed him a new sheet.
“Write again.”
Xu Zijin took the paper, laid it flat on the desk, and started a third version.
Halfway through, he realized he had fallen back into the old rut of traditional Neo-Confucianism, unconsciously using yin-yang and the Five Elements to explain all things.
“Wrong! All wrong!”
Xu Zijin grabbed his hair with both hands, crushed the third draft into a ball, and hurled it at the corner of the room.
The floor beneath his feet was littered with crumpled paper scraps.
He could not compromise.
The truth Xu Qinghuan had left behind — once compromised, it would become nothing but useless, sour pedantic writing.
He had to find a balance point where he could keep his life and still hammer the truth into people’s minds.
Morning light crept in faintly. The study shifted from dimness to grayish white.
Xu Zijin’s eyes were bloodshot, his sockets burning red.
He flipped the fourth draft he had just written face-down on the desk.
Bracing his hands on the desk’s edge, Xu Zijin stood up wearily.
His legs were numb, and he staggered, barely catching his balance.
He skirted the desk and paced back and forth in the study, now covered with discarded paper.
The floor was blanketed with paper balls large and small.
Take one step back: broad seas, open skies. Go back to writing his splendid, ornate bureaucratic script and ace his way to the provincial first-place scholar.
Take one step forward: a bottomless abyss. Post this rebellious “Treatise on Investigating Things and Rectifying the Mind” all over the capital, and face the axes and blades of all the court officials.
Xu Zijin walked to the window and grasped the lattice with both hands.
The morning air carried a faint smell of soil.
He gasped deeply, the fire in his chest burning so fiercely that his internal organs ached.
“Xu Zijin.” Xie Yunwan stood by the desk.
That single call somehow stirred Xu Zijin’s thoughts to their deepest depths.
He strode back to the desk in wide steps and grabbed the face-down fourth draft.
He flipped the draft over and spread it flat on the desk.
“Principle is one but its manifestations are many — even common men and common women can understand it and can practice it.”
This was the astonishingly bold statement he had finally settled on after enduring a long, dark night.
He had not retreated.
Since heavenly principle lies in all things, in the blacksmith’s forging of iron and the farmer’s plowing of fields, then naturally common men and women can all understand it and practice it.
This was not only a rebuttal to the Imperial Academy; it was a reclamation of honor for every common person trampled into the mud under heaven.
Xu Zijin stared blankly at those fifteen characters. The foul air in his chest was fully expelled.
A closed loop of theory.
He had gambled the foundations of the Great Qian imperial power and the great aristocratic families on these fifteen characters.
Just then, the morning sky suddenly darkened.
Massive clusters of black clouds pressed down from the north, blotting out the newly risen sunlight.
In an instant, the study fell into shadow.
Xu Zijin did not shift his gaze an inch.
Boom!
A deafening thunderclap split the air outside the window.
A pale flash of lightning tore through the dark clouds, and the fierce light pierced the window lattice, instantly illuminating Xu Zijin’s bloodshot eyes, as well as the fifteen bold, ink-heavy characters on the paper.
