Liu Xiang of the Western Han Dynasty said that books are like medicine, and good reading can cure foolishness. I think that "books are like medicine", because the temperament of books is similar to the temperament of Chinese medicine.
Traditional Chinese medicine is slow in temperament, and is good at tepidly tepid from the root to trace the source of disease, so the course of treatment is long. Drinking a dose of Chinese medicine will have an immediate effect, and the medicine will only appear in legends or literary works. It's the same with reading. The influence of books on people's thoughts and temperaments is an invisible fine-tuning process that requires a slow process. Needless to say, even reading ten or eight books of "Dream of Red Mansions" and other tome classics in one go may not necessarily change a person's thinking and temperament all at once. Haste makes waste. Chinese medicine is not in a hurry to cure diseases, and it is not urgent to study. Only when a person continues to read and read for a long time will he have poetry and books in his belly.
Photographed at the Qi Jiguang Memorial Hall
Before boiling the traditional Chinese medicine, it needs to be soaked, and the soaked Chinese medicine can be boiled slowly on a slight heat in order to fully boil out the active ingredients of the medicine. Reading also requires "bubbles". Read the book a hundred times, and its meaning will be revealed. Only by "soaking" into the book and tasting it repeatedly can you understand the essence of the book. Relying on gobbling up to engage in assault, and wanting to eat a fat scholar in one bite, the possibility is very small.
There are many people who know the truth of "soaking" books. When Du Fu was a child, he always read books repeatedly, and he read the books very well, so he was very good at writing poems. Zhang Guanghou, a mathematician, once saw a paper on deficit and felt that it was useful for his research work, so he read it over and over again, which was more than 20 pages long, and he read it upside down for more than half a year, and only then took it to guide his work after fully understanding its meaning.
[Song] Liu Songnian's "Reading Map in the Mountain Pavilion" (detail)
The efficacy of traditional Chinese medicine that is boiling fiercely cannot be optimistic; Swallowing the books that you read is easy to cause "indigestion", and both need to be fully "soaked" and slowly "boiled".
Some people say that reading is like drinking honey, and it is a happy thing. I don't think that's entirely true. Some professional books are still very bitter to chew. "There is a diligent path in the book mountain, and there is no end to the hard work of learning the sea", which is also the truth. If we are just blindly satisfying the pleasures of the senses, we can use our mobile phones, watch movies or other visual ways to get it, and it seems that we don't have to read books. Traditional Chinese medicine has five flavors: pungent, sweet, sour, bitter and salty, and the addition of sugar to traditional Chinese medicine will change its medicinal properties and then affect the curative effect. Reading, if you only covet comfort and blindly pursue "sweetness", just like traditional Chinese medicine, you can't read a famous book without "bitter" effort.
[Song] Liu Songnian, "Reading in the Autumn Window" (detail)
Traditional Chinese medicine is a "hodgepodge", and "the use of medicine must be in harmony with the monarch and the ministers", and the four complement each other - as stated in the "Shennong Materia Medica". It's the same with reading. For a person to be well-rounded, one must read different types of books. Books on the profession are like the medicine in Chinese medicine, books on improving one's self-cultivation are like medicines, books on philosophy, politics and literature are like adjuvant medicines, and books on social knowledge are like medicines. Avoid "partial eating" in reading. When Mr. Lu Xun talked about reading, he said: "You must pick many flowers like a bee to make honey." The "Chinese Tibetan Sutra" wrote: "The truth is poured out, and the false is supplemented; The cold is hot, and the hot is cold". It is talking about healing, and it can also be said to refer to reading. If you understand what you lack knowledge, you should consciously read this area. The book is like Chinese medicine. How many books we have read, we don't remember anymore; Just like what Chinese medicine we drank when we were sick, we can't remember it. But what is certain is that whether it is Chinese medicine or the books we have read, they have quietly changed our physique and temperament, and have been integrated into our blood and soul. (This article was originally published in Monthly Reading, Issue 4, 2024)
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