Chapter One: The Book in the Bag
禮Chapter One · The Story, Plainly Told
I was twenty-three years old on the Saturday evening I first read those words. My first lesson, eighteen months earlier, had been on a Saturday afternoon at a small club in Witham, in Essex. The instructor was Master Chris Cook, and within a few weeks of meeting him, almost without any conscious decision on my part, he had become my teacher in a way that words like 'teacher' do not quite reach for.
I read those two paragraphs more than once. I do not now remember whether they were read aloud, but I remember the feeling of reading them, which was a feeling that does not happen often. The feeling was: someone has put into clean plain words a thing I did not know I had been looking for. The meaning in their fullest sense was not yet available to me. I did not know that they were two of the oldest words in one of the oldest moral conversations human beings have ever had. I did not know, sitting on the edge of that bed, that I had just been introduced, by a martial arts syllabus written in Britain by a grandmaster from Malaysia, to a man who had lived two and a half thousand years before either of us in a small kingdom in China. That would not be clear for some years yet.
But the book was in the bag. And the bag was by the door. And the next training session was on Thursday.
He came to me by accident, through a martial arts syllabus, on the edge of a bed, at twenty-three. Grandmaster M K Loke, who put the syllabus into my hands, did not lecture me on him. He simply named the school after two of his words, and let the words do their work, and trusted that, in time, a few of his students would look up from their training long enough to ask where the words had come from. This book is what happened when one of his students looked up.
Come and sit down. There is rice on the table. We will say the word together, and then we will eat, and then I will tell you about the old man who has been quietly teaching me for thirty years.
From the closing letter: A Letter to the Reader Who Has Come This Far
A teacher in a small kingdom, twenty-five centuries ago, sat down with a student and talked about how to live. The teacher did not know that the talk would last twenty-five centuries. The teacher did not know that the talk would reach you. The teacher believed his work had failed. The teacher did the work anyway.
The work has reached you. The work is now yours.
Take it. Carry it. Do with it what your particular life will let you do with it. Be patient. Be quiet. Be willing to be formed slowly, by the small daily work, in ways you will not be able to see. Be one of the small good people the long teaching has always been trying to produce. Do not measure your progress. Do not advertise your work. Do not, above all, be in a hurry. The work has been carried across twenty-five centuries by people who were not in a hurry. The work will be carried by you, if you are willing to carry it, in the only way the work has ever been carried, which is one small careful day at a time.
