Glimpsing a Leopard Through a Tube, Seeing Its Spots and Knowing Its Form

Yet the longer they listened, the more questions piled up in their hearts, lingering there and refusing to leave.

These were different from the questions that arose while reading. Questions from reading usually concerned individual words and sentences—either their meanings were unclear, or their circumstances hard to grasp. One often had to ponder them over and over, or seek instruction from others, before enlightenment suddenly came.

What Qiu Yan spoke of, however, were things he had personally experienced. Within each event or experience, he drew upon the classics for his descriptions. Once those canonical words emerged and matched the circumstances, one could grasp their deeper meaning without too much anguish.

Qiu Yan was not simply telling stories. From every story, he extracted many underlying patterns, summarized them with words from the classics, and imparted them to everyone present without reservation.

As the lecture continued, many students came to understand this, and naturally felt delighted. Yet while the meanings of the classics were clear, many of the Grasslands tribes' actions and motives, as well as the Central Plains border army's ways of responding, still puzzled them. Some even differed considerably from the books they had read since childhood.

Thus, countless doubts and questions arose—not about the classics themselves, but about real phenomena that truly existed. It gave them the feeling of stepping out of their books and beholding a new world.

It was vexing, yet novel, like a cat's claws scratching at their hearts. The more unbearable it became, the more they wanted to continue.

However, when the sun reached its zenith, Qiu Yan stopped speaking. Only then did the listeners realize that they were already ravenously hungry. Yet the journey carried along by his words had not ended, and countless questions still weighed on their hearts, impossible to settle. Every