Meeting opportunities in life is a blessing.
When it comes to good fortune, failing to cherish it yourself is called squandering your blessings.
Not everyone gets to seize opportunities, achieve fame, or make a fortune. Absolutely not.
When people encounter opportunities, they often lose their blessings because their limited perspective makes them get ahead of themselves.
It takes three years to learn how to speak, but a lifetime to learn when to stay quiet. Being humble in life is crucial.
Gus and Walter White from *Breaking Bad*.
Walter White had many flaws. For instance, whenever he thought about how much money he had, he’d want to flex—try some clumsy “wolf-pack pose,” buy a luxury car, and live large to show off and make others envious.
What ultimately brought Walter White down? His vanity.
Walter was pretty dumb. There was that book left behind by his former grad-school lab assistant—Gus’s old research partner—who admired Walter and was also under police surveillance. Walter kept that book by the toilet in his bathroom, savoring the feeling of being admired and unwilling to throw it away. Unfortunately, his brother-in-law, an缉毒警 (drug enforcement officer), spotted that book while using the bathroom at Walter’s house. He saw the inscription on the title page—something like “To so-and-so”—and that’s what led him to suspect Walter. That’s how Walter got taken down.
Now look at Gus in contrast. He ran his empire for decades, and you couldn’t find a single thread of evidence even if you planted a tracker under his car. His whole life was just: go home, go to the chicken shack, go home, go to the chicken shack—a strict two-point routine. His life was as mundane as that of a Puritan.
Who would’ve guessed that he was the mastermind all along?
You couldn’t find anything on this guy. He just lived that boring routine his entire life: home, chicken shack, home, chicken shack, and philanthropy.
Only people with low status dare to be arrogant and overbearing, which eventually gets them targeted and taken care of.
Re-reading *Journey to the West*.
Do you really think the Monkey King was all that great? Always calling himself the “Great Sage Equal to Heaven”?
When the Bodhisattva asked him to lift the Alabaster Soap Vase, he couldn’t even pick it up.
That’s because the vase was filled with water from the five lakes and four seas—he didn’t have the cultivation to handle it. Could the Monkey King lift it simply because he was inferior to the Bodhisattva? Not at all. Even the Bodhisattva’s dragon maid could lift it. In other words, a mere handmaiden serving beside the Bodhisattva had deeper cultivation than that self-righteous monkey. Could the Monkey King beat Red Boy? Yes or no?
Red Boy’s Samadhi True Fire wasn’t Laozi’s fire—it was a primordial fire he cultivated and awakened on his own, with no teacher. And he grasped it in his infancy, before he was even born. The Monkey King nearly got roasted to death by him. They were worlds apart in rank. The Monkey King wasn’t nearly as formidable as he thought. All his so-called skills came from Patriarch Bodhi—both the 72 transformations and the somersault cloud were taught by Bodhi.
It wasn’t that the Monkey King was awesome; it was that Patriarch Bodhi wanted him to be.
This point is crucial.
If Bodhi hadn’t chosen him, he’d just be a monkey on a mountain. Bodhi deliberately chose to teach a monkey precisely because monkeys are mischievous—He knew he’d cause trouble, and that was exactly the point.
The whole story was foreshadowing for the journey to retrieve the scriptures. So *Journey to the West* is essentially about the Monkey’s spiritual cultivation. The Monkey’s true growth and real learning happened on the pilgrimage—that was his practice. He finally realized: if not for the mission’s needs, he’d be nothing more than a handmaiden beside the Bodhisattva. The Bodhisattva might not even want him as a subordinate. He was far inferior to Red Boy’s natural talent. Red Boy taught himself; he practiced as an infant. Whereas the Monkey was specifically crafted by Patriarch Bodhi.