What to Do When Facing Difficulties? See How Fusheng Gained Insights into Academic Progress from the Second Yang Line of the Qian Hexagram

In the early years of the Western Han Dynasty, Fu Sheng huddled in the adobe house of his hometown in Jinan, staring at the dog-eared scroll of *the Book of Documents* on his desk, so worried that his beard was twisted into a tangled mess.
It was truly a stroke of bad luck. He had been a court academician during the Qin Dynasty, with the entire *Book of Documents* stored in his memory. But then came the chaos of war at the end of the Qin Dynasty. He fled into the deep mountains with the book and hid there for years. When the world was at peace and he reached for the bamboo slips again, good gracious—several of the binding ropes had rotted and snapped, and the characters were so worn that they were barely legible. He had filled in most of the text from memory, but there were a few spots where he got stuck. No matter how hard he thought, something felt off—either the context didn’t fit, or the tone didn’t sound like something a virtuous minister of ancient times would say.
If this had happened to someone else, they might have just fudged through it. After all, there weren’t many people in the world who could even make sense of the *Book of Documents*. But Fu Sheng was stubborn. He always felt he was letting the ancient sages down. He couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, and his mind was filled with the question, “What do you do when you hit a wall?” He wore himself out so much that his eye sockets turned dark with fatigue.
One day, he was squatting on a ridge of the field catching his breath, when he looked up and saw an old farmer from the neighboring village squatting by the field pulling weeds, muttering to himself: “For a dragon to soar to the sky, it must first spend enough time in the fields. Only when its roots are firmly planted can it ride the east wind.”
Fu Sheng’s heart skipped a beat. He suddenly remembered the Nine Two line of the Qian Hexagram from the *Book of Changes*, which he had read in his early years: “Seeing the dragon in the field, it is favorable to meet the great man.” He had always thought this meant a great figure was about to emerge into the world. But now, standing on the field ridge with the wind blowing on his face, he suddenly understood: the dragon in the field isn’t idling—it’s grounding itself, building up its strength. And the so-called “great man” doesn’t have to be someone with high office and generous salary; it’s someone who can wake you up, the “right reference point” you’ve been looking for.
Before, he had been stubbornly mulling things over by himself—wasn’t he just trapping himself in his study? How do you adjust when things aren’t going well? You have to step outside, ask people who know better, and find living proof in the fields.
He acted on this thought right away. The next day, he packed dry rations and set off, specifically seeking out elderly people who still remembered the old stories of the previous dynasties to chat with. He listened to their legends of flood control from ancient times and the folk ballads passed down from antiquity. When he reached Qi Commandery, he met an old musician in his eighties. The old man had poor eyesight, but his memory was exceptionally sharp. He hummed a tune from an ancient sacrificial ceremony, and the lyrics actually matched most of the *Canon of Yao*, the chapter where Fu Sheng had been stuck.
Fu Sheng slapped his thigh and laughed out loud on the spot. The stuffy frustration that had been weighing on his heart for months vanished in an instant. It turned out that making the right decision never comes from sitting in a room and guessing randomly. You first have to sink down into the “field,” plant your roots firmly, then look up for someone who can show you the way—and the path will naturally open up.
When he returned to Jinan and reorganized the *Book of Documents*, the words flowed smoothly from his brush at once. Later, when scholars in Shandong heard that Fu Sheng could teach the *Book of Documents*, they came one after another carrying their book chests to become his disciples. He sat under the apricot altar lecturing on the classics, and sunlight filtered through the leaves onto the bamboo slips, shining so brightly that it looked like a little dragon swimming between the lines of text.
When someone asked him the secret of learning, he would point to the fields outside the courtyard and say: “Don’t be in a hurry to fly up to the clouds. First settle yourself firmly in the fields. The people you’re meant to meet, the truths you’re meant to understand—they will come naturally.”