1. Birds startle snakes.
Shiyalou was a monk in the Tang Dynasty. He lived in the temple for a long time, burning incense and chanting sutras. Other monks secretly played chess and slept when they were free, but Shiyalou bought ink stones and ink brush paper to practice calligraphy. Sometimes in the middle of the night, he still practices hard.
As the years passed, he became more and more proficient in writing. Many people who burn incense and worship Buddha also come to ask him to write. He agreed one by one. His cursive writing is particularly elegant and unrestrained. Someone asked him, "How about cursive script?" Shiyalou wrote eight words: "Birds fly into the forest, and snakes frighten the grass!"
"Flying birds startle snakes" describes that the font is elegant like birds flying, and the strokes are powerful, even snakes are frightened.
2. Learn from the pool.
Wang Xizhi, the great calligrapher of the Jin Dynasty, asked his son Wang Xianzhi to learn calligraphy from childhood. After a period of practice, Wang Xianzhi wrote the word "big" for his father to check. His father added a little bit to the word to become "too". He ran to ask his mother, who told him that only a little is real kung fu. So Wang Xianzhi practiced writing beside 18 large water tanks at home.
3. The score is three points.
Wang Xizhi, a great calligrapher in the Jin Dynasty, was the son of Wang Kuang, a calligrapher in the Eastern Jin Dynasty. He was good at calligraphy at the age of seven. At the age of twelve, when he saw the previous generation's "Bi Shuo" under his father's pillow, he stole it. The father said, "Why do you want to steal the things I secretly collected?" Wang Xizhi smiled and did not answer. His mother asked, "Do you see the use of calligraphy?"
Seeing that he was still young, the father worried that he could not keep the secret and told Wang Xizhi, "I will teach you calligraphy when you grow up." Wang Xizhi knelt down and said, "Let the child read this book. If you grow up and look at it again, it will delay the child's fine talent and development.
Father was very happy, so he gave the book to him immediately. In less than a month, calligraphy (by Wang Xizhi) has made great progress. When Mrs. Wei learned about it, she told Taichang Wang Ce, "This child must have seen the knack of using a pen. When she saw his calligraphy recently, she was very old." With tears, she said, "This child will be more famous than me in the future."
The Ming Emperor of the Eastern Jin Dynasty once went to the north suburb of Jiankang, Kyoto, to offer sacrifices to the Land God. He asked Wang Xizhi to write the sacrifice on a wooden board and then sent someone to carve it.
The engraver removed the wood layer by layer, and found that Wang Xizhi's ink had penetrated into the deep part of the board, and the white bottom could not be seen until he removed a third of the thickness! The engraver exclaimed at his forceful brushwork: "How impressive!" Later, "How impressive!" became an idiom, which means good calligraphy skills or thorough analysis of problems.
4. The pen moves slowly.
During the Tang Dynasty, the secretary, Jianhe Zhizhang, entertained guests at his house, and Li Bai wrote a poem "Cursive Script and Song" at the banquet. Huai Su, a disciple of Master Xuanzang, was good at cursive writing. He was asked to do calligraphy in public. Huai Su helped to dip his pen in ink, and he was absorbed in his luck. He wrote it quickly. He Zhizhang exclaimed, "The master writes in a left-handed and right-handed way. It's really a long stroke."