Day 466 of German (October 26, 2025)
Thanks to my father, I gained an early appreciation for Buddhist concepts like emptiness and impermanence, even before I was a teenager. Although these ideas lacked the backing of real-life experience at the time, they planted enduring seeds that help me process adversity today.
I have always shied away from reading Buddhist scriptures. The only one I seriously studied was the Heart Sutra, and that was only because I was instructed to repeatedly write it out. Even then, the complex transliterations required annotation, and I was too young to genuinely bother finding the meaning.
For years, I felt intimidated by the Diamond Sutra, despite the beauty of its excerpts, assuming it would be too difficult to grasp. I spent a couple of hours recently trying to prepare myself by searching for critical commentaries, only to find that these interpretive works—often written in older, dense Chinese (文言文)—are actually much harder to read than the original Sutra itself.
The Wisdom of Direct Experience
This struggle taught me a vital lesson: what is widely perceived as difficult may not be so in the source material itself.
This parallels the German language. It is widely perceived as harsh and difficult, but others’ opinions on its complexity do not impact my personal appreciation. The perceived difficulty that truly discouraged me from the Diamond Sutra was not the scripture, but the dense, longer body of interpretive work surrounding it.
I realized I have been letting external perceptions influence my own appreciation of things I’m deeply interested in. The Diamond Sutra is not something one can skim, but when I sit patiently and read it word by word, the core text is quite readable with minor annotation.
Similarly, while German is not an easy language, it is still possible to acquire it one word at a time. The necessary difficulty should stem from the practice itself, not from the discouraging “reviews” of others.