Afterword of Justice Way
Originally, Not a Single Thing. A Great Love Remains in the Human World.
The author is only a passing traveler. Drifting through the universe, passing by this blue star. I saw, with a start, a great disaster coming down upon it. So I stopped, and left a few words. They are the work before your eyes. Whether it can be saved is up to the ones who read it. Apart from leaving a few small words, there is nothing I can do. On the other side of the universe, there may be a greater trouble waiting for me.
The "here" in this book steps out now to speak to you. In the pages of the book you can hardly find me. Where I should have said "I," I mostly wrote "here," or "someone." The credit belongs to the ancestors, so there should be no place for me in the book itself. But on this last page, I would like to meet you as who I am, Lei, Yi Yang.
How does an ordinary person come to write a book? Let me tell you something you may not expect. I am not a gentleman seated in a study. I am a working man. In an industrial accident, I fell from a height. The doctor said, you were already gone. And he said, the person you are now is no longer the person you were. A severe concussion. For a long time, I lost my memory. I was left disabled, a man in a wheelchair. I tell you this plainly, because it is where this book comes from. A person who is whole in body, sound in mind, living a good life, does not sit down to write these words. He has work, he has hope, he has tomorrow, and he is busy living his days. It was that fall that took the old me away. The old me was gone, and only then did this new me sit down and write this work, one word at a time. So this work grew out of a great misfortune. Without that fall, there would be none of these words. It sounds bitter, and yet I have made my peace with it. Originally, not a single thing. The old me, the craft, the hopes, the body, were nearly all gone when I fell. Nothing left. And yet it is exactly when a person has nothing that room opens up in him for something larger. That larger thing is this, the wish to leave something for the human world. The great disaster became the source of that wish.
How was it written? Let me tell you how this work came to be. On the eighteenth of April, 2026, the thought first came to me. On the twenty-ninth of May, my sixty-fourth birthday, the first draft of the first six volumes was finished. By July, the seventh volume, Hope, was separated out from what had been the last chapter and written into a volume of its own, and at last it stood in seven volumes. One man, a few months, more than a million words. These months were lonely. From beginning to end, not a single living person helped me face to face. What kept me company were the artificial intelligence tools, editing and ordering the words for me day and night, lending me their computing. An old man with a damaged brain, who loses his memory, was able to order these words into chapters, and what he relied on was this: perseverance, and faith.
Why the plainest words? For this work I used only a few hundred of the most common words. The words you use every day, buying food, cooking a meal, calming a child. The deep and learned terms, the academic phrasings, I tried my best not to use. Not because I could not, but because I did not want to. Those words only the schooled can read. And I want everyone, ordinary people too, to be able to read this. However deep a truth is, it should be said in the plainest words, said until an ordinary person can understand it. Only then does it count. To use a few hundred common words to speak the deepest truths, this was the hard task I set myself. I did my best.
What I did was only small things, and a small person is fit only to do small things. I was a photographer. In my earlier years I made my living by that craft, and I studied it to its depths. Many years ago, people who wanted to move to America, when they had their papers photographed, were told to turn their face forty-five degrees to the side, and not to face forward. Everyone had it done and thought no more of it. But I was a researcher of photography, and I had also studied forensic criminology under a renowned physician, and I saw at a glance what that angle meant. Facing forward is how you photograph a person. Full profile is how you photograph a prisoner. Forty-five degrees sits exactly between the two. No one said it aloud, but that one angle had quietly placed a green card holder halfway between a person and a prisoner. The heaviest of judgments, hidden inside the lightest of actions.
I told the people around me, plainly. That an immigrant did not even have the right to face the camera, a thing found nowhere in the world but in this land that calls itself a beacon. Later, a young Chinese lady understood, and she only left one quiet sentence: the American government has truly wronged you. Not long after, the rule changed, from forty-five degrees to facing forward. And so that dark piece of history was quietly set right. Immigrants could look straight into the lens, and had the right to stand there and face others head-on, like a person. Whoever changed it left no name, and vanished into the crowd. So many were helped. Not one of them knew there had been someone to thank. One small thing, done, and then you walk away, leaving no name. For an ordinary person, to do one small thing in a lifetime is already enough.
Seeking no name and no gain, only to give. This work is free to read. It sits on justiceway.org, open to anyone, and costs not a cent. I hope only that the great love may truly be passed on, and that the author may quietly be forgotten. I brought nothing here, and I can take nothing away. A passing traveler, able to leave a few words behind, and that is all.
A small oil lamp
The author is no savior. This work is no scripture that will save the world. It is only a small oil lamp. All it does is take the truths the ancestors set down thousands of years ago, and light them up again in the plain speech of today, so that you, where you stand, can see a small circle of light. It cannot light the whole world. A small oil lamp cannot reach that far. The one who does the great work was never this book, and never me. It is you. It is every reader who takes up this small light.
One lamp lights another, and its own light is not one thread the less, yet the human world has one more lamp of brightness. When you understand, and the small thing in your heart is lit, you become a lamp that has been lit. Then you go and light the people beside you. One lamp lights the next, one generation the next, and the light spreads ever wider, and the love grows ever more. And this one lamp is only the beginning. This great love, through all of you, remains in the human world. And that is enough. That is the whole of what I hoped for, in writing this work.
The world is full of love.
The world is full of hope.
In the world, there is you.
And that is enough.
间 满
人 充 爱
人 间 充 满 希 望
人 间 ， 有 你
就 好
❤️
The rest of the road, you will walk yourselves. You will walk it well.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
Lei, Yi Yang / Tiger Lyon