Peng Zhiyong: Return to Age Three, Empty Yourself to Receive the World

For the fourth episode of our podcast Signal and Noise, we invited Peng Zhiyong.

Peng was among China's first cohort of university physics majors. Drawn to meditation and stillness, he walked away from the iron rice bowl of a teaching position after he'd already secured it. For thirty years, with a copy of Zhuangzi as his companion, he wandered — using breath as his method and sitting practice as a way to see his original mind. He resists labels, and he's never in a hurry to teach anyone anything. Because, as he puts it, we already knew what mattered when we were three years old. Empty yourself to receive all things. Stay curious. Let go of discriminating judgment.

This episode, we talked for a full ten hours.

Now, we invite you to quiet down with us and listen in on a conversation about freedom, meaning, change, and vitality — and to feel that breathing, Daoist heart.

If anything resonates, we welcome your thoughts in the comments.

What follows are excerpts from our conversation that we found especially illuminating, shared here in article form.

Enjoy

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Peng: In traditional culture, there's a phrase: "the return of the first yang." When we look at a child around three years old, we generally don't fixate on their appearance. Even if they're not good-looking — even if they're a bit homely — you still find them adorable. Because they understand everything now. You say, go get me the ball, and they bring it. You say, bounce it, and they bounce it. You say, give it to me, and they hand it over.

They're always happy, without so much discrimination.

Like a joyful little bird, hopping about. When tired, they rest. No one would think to make a two- or three-year-old do chores or work. Just coaxing them delights you. But it's not that you're driving them — they're driving you. Yet they have no concept of being driven or of driving others. Their sense of self has emerged, yet they're still relatively easygoing.

In Zhuangzi, there's a term for this: "accepting the times and dwelling in harmony." They don't nitpick, don't excessively criticize their environment, don't fuss over food and drink. Not so many demands.

Oasis: Right. At that age, no one thinks, my family is poor so I'm unhappy, or my family is rich so I'm happy.

Peng: Many of us aren't happy as adults, and really, we're still longing for that time. Even those who grew up poor — later, with money, they may not be truly happy, because they've moved away from that three-year-old state. One day while sitting in meditation, it came to me: this is what Zhuangzi may have been expressing. It's not that someone like Aitai Tuo actually existed in the world — it's that we were all originally such people.

Aitai Tuo: https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E5%93%80%E9%AA%80%E5%AE%83/10317749

Peng: There are many ways to know oneself.

One is trial and error — but how time-consuming, how full of detours. By the time you recognize yourself, years have slipped away and you're old. Another is letting others see for you, letting those with clearer vision look — "the child at three, the elder at eighty." Some teachers can tell at a glance: this student has this material, that student has that material. The story of the伯乐 and the千里马. But what kind of horse are you? You still have to meet your伯乐.

The last way is what Zhuangzi calls "seeing the singular" or "seeing the unique."

Because Zhuangzi has several concepts. One is what we mentioned earlier, "empty yourself to receive all things," "gather emptiness for the Dao." Another, related to "emptiness," is: "gaze into that emptiness, and the empty room gives birth to brightness." You glance over the whole, and a great door opens; you enter a realm. "Brightness" means light, and light connects with the light of dawn. The popular term now is "awakening." But when do you wake from sleep? When dawn breaks. So Zhuangzi describes another state, a true realm: "the clarity of dawn" — the long night, suddenly broken by morning light. You see how this connects with "the empty room gives birth to brightness"; sometimes they interpenetrate. All of this is intimately tied to the actual bodily sensations and experiences in sitting meditation.

When your energy level rises, you recognize for yourself that there was such a realm in the past. Another expression for this is "recovering the old master of previous lives." When I first read this, my imagination ran wild — I kept connecting it with past and present lives. Then one day, sitting there, it hit me: people often say we're born with certain things. That's our innate talent — what's contained in the seed.

Oasis: Like DNA.

Peng: Right. "Recovering the old master of previous lives" — isn't that simply seeing our own天赋? What kind of person can I grow into? Then I seek out the environment that belongs to me, and give myself time to let this seed grow naturally. This is a method that exists beyond trial and error, beyond asking others to see us for what we are — whether we call it cultivation, practice, or something else.

None of these is necessarily better than the others. I'm not saying that if I just sit with eyes closed I'll see myself clearly. But it's a method, a way. Through it, we can also see what we possess.

"Gaze into that emptiness, and the empty room gives birth to brightness": https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E8%99%9A%E5%AE%A4%E7%94%9F%E7%99%BD

Peng: If you immerse yourself in something long enough, sitting practice is really about giving yourself a different environment to step back — sometimes that's when clarity comes. Many people, when told to relax, become attached to relaxing, and then they're caught by that very relaxation. But really, you're just staying there awhile, removed from your usual setting — that's "empty yourself to receive all things."

Whether it's calligraphy, playing an instrument, whatever — when you step back from what you're doing, or switch to something else, there's that brief empty moment when you stop. In the transition between two activities, that in-between space is empty. Maintain that empty state. You hear people describe their life experiences: they had a turning point, not learned from anyone, suddenly a kind of sudden insight, awakening — and they understood. Their suffering, their constriction, suddenly opened up.

So some choose to travel, to exercise, to do other things, to listen to music. I think this too is a process where the bounded and the boundless interpenetrate. Because they too feel uncomfortable in their state, they want to get out, to find a way — but it doesn't have to be sitting in meditation.

Oasis: What you just said is really illuminating. We used to say "let me come back to my senses." In Chinese expressions, so much philosophy is already embedded, right? "I feel like I've lost my spirit in this matter" or "I need to come back to my senses" — it means that some emotional or mental state has been dwelling in the body or mind for too long, and you've drifted far from that spirit.

Only after you return to your senses can you return to emptiness, and only then can you connect with that "boundless." Otherwise, you're trapped.

Peng: Yes, exactly as you say. When people say "let me come back to my senses," they're really emptying themselves, emptying out and doing nothing — that's already somewhat the meaning of "empty yourself to receive all things," a kind of transition. What makes sitting meditation distinctive is that when you sit, you don't move, you do nothing — so it's easier to empty out.

Oasis: People always want to compare, but what they compare against isn't themselves, nor the path they should be walking. They're clearly on the national highway, yet they keep comparing themselves to the provincial road, then to the expressway — and they find all these differences. But those differences are noise. What's the same is the signal. Yet they stare at the noise, at what's different, day after day, and lose the signal.

So whether in life or in sitting practice, in the cultivation of mind and heart — how do we gradually let go of this noise? How do we return to that signal?

Peng: That's the work. Actually, I don't think it's about discarding the noise — it's always there. Its disturbance just grows lighter. In Zhuangzi, there's another formulation; interpretations vary, but here's mine. Ultimately, one "returns to扰宁" (rao ning). Literally: a baby, a small child, tickling you with their little hand. Does it itch? If you can remain in a state of tranquility despite that constant tickling — that's the skill.

Oasis: Right. In that way, you've removed the noise and returned to the signal.

Peng: The noise still exists simultaneously.

Oasis: Noise and signal exist together, but you can abide in tranquility with your signal. Hearing you explain it this way, I realize Zhuangzi's descriptions of human psychological states are remarkably precise. When people talk about Zhuangzi, the first impression is often Free and Easy Wandering — everyone hopes to be free and easy, what we'd today call "free." We also talked about going with the flow, emptying yourself to receive all things, finding tranquility without seeking it. In your view, what does it mean for a person to truly be free and easy?

Peng: My view is quite simple. When our endocrine system is in a certain state, we are very free and easy. For instance, when certain hormones reach certain levels — when endorphins hit a particular value — our bodily sensation is very comfortable. So Zhuangzi opens with the transformation of the giant kun fish into the peng bird: when energy is stirring within the body, it stimulates our glands, they secrete certain substances, and it feels good. It's a direct bodily sensation — floating, ethereal, free and easy.