Inner Practice: Time to Hit Petty People
One year ago, I have written a post about Spirituality and Science on Da Siu Yan (打小人). In direct translation, it means hit the petty people or villain hitting.
Today, we transit into the solar term Jingzhe (惊蛰) again, exactly one year from that older post. Time flies, isn’t it?
In tradition during this period of time, you will see the old grandmas hitting the cut papers shaped like humans with their slippers under the overhead bridges or flyovers. People actually engage such services from the grannies to ward off bad luck and hit away the so called ‘bad’ people or ‘petty’ people from their lives.
Who exactly are the Petty People?
The word Petty means Small. So petty people mean small people. Petty or small here definitely does not refer to the body sizes. But the hearts of such people. The characteristics displayed by such small hearted people are often undesirable and unwelcoming by others and the world. Examples of such characteristics are calculative, stingy, resentful, grudge bearing, selfish, narcissistic, evil and the list goes on. Through small hearts, the worlds of such people are small as well. The hearts of Petty People can only have the space to hold for one person, and usually that happen to be themselves.
Where are the Petty People?
Surprisingly, they are in all of us. We may think that the Petty People are the bosses we face every day, or the nasty colleagues we have to work with, or even that fateful partners we tied ourselves down to. Yet they are seen as Small People through the lens of our Small Hearts. It is because we are small hearted that we see everything and everyone as petty. The pettiness is not inherent in the objects and people on the outside, it is from inside, from ourselves.
So who are we hitting again?
The smallness and pettiness within us. The undesirable, despisable traits we embodied. The small hearts that blind us to a world much bigger than we know because we have chosen to close ourselves up and see everything as evil.
Take out that slipper and hit it hard. And realize how much we have missed out all this while in our pettiness.
This is then the true meaning of Da Siu Yan.
