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We find ourselves in Beijing China in the year 1422 AD.
The Yongle Emperor (aka Chengzu or Yung Lo, r. 1403-1424 AD) was the third ruler of the Chinese Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 AD).
When Chengzu’s son Hongxi (Hongxi means “heart” in Mandarin) was born, he built a palatial school just for him. Starting at age 5 Hongxi attended school and was taught by Ma Shi who was a Chinese landscape painter, court astronomer, mathematician and poet.
Hongxi grew to love Ma Shi like a father. He cherished his daily walk through the woods and hillside to get to his secluded school, built solely for him.
On his sixteenth birthday, as he crested a hill that would finally bring his school into view, he saw billows of smoke and then ashes where his school used to be.
He found a note from Ma Shi.
心 (Hongxi)
This is the last lesson I will teach you.
It has been my greatest honor to be your teacher.
But now, my work is done. You no longer need me. It is a hard day for me, but one that I knew would come. So go, leave this place, never to return. This was a place for a child, which you are no longer. A man would shed no tears.
Go, as all of my students before, but know I will walk with you everyday for the rest of your life.
Sometimes you will believe that you can see me out of the corner of your eye, and you will quickly turn your head only to see a willow swaying in the breeze, a quiet stream racing at your feet, or a hawk hovering a mile in the sky.
Sometimes you will think you can hear me, but when you close your eyes and listen, you will hear the far off rumblings of an earthquake, an eagle hatching from its egg, or an archer’s arrow finding its mark.
They are all me and me them, watching you, warning you, still teaching you.
And when I have breathed my last and my lifeless body is burned in my funeral pyre, my ashes will float on the eastern breeze and they will find my students as they sleep and enter their lungs. The same way the ashes of my teachers entered me. And so when you awake the next day, so will I, as will all those who came before me, and you will then walk as countless generations of masters and no longer as one solitary man until the day you die.
Go. The world awaits you. I am old and my journeys are long since done. The world is for the young, with their untainted eyes. Think of me as I will think of you.
尊重 Respect
爱 Love
荣誉 Honor
马氏 (Ma Shi)
