What does it cost for love to pass through?

There is a man in the wuxia novels named Yang Guo.

His name is Guo — to pass through, to exceed, to err, to be more than. He is named for what passes. His father passed before he arrived. The world he grows up in does not welcome him. He loves a woman the world will not allow him to love, and is separated from her for sixteen years. In the middle of his life, his right arm is cut off.

By the standards of the world he came into, Yang Guo is incomplete. He has lost his father, his society's permission, his arm, and most of the years he might have spent with the only person he loved.

And yet — by the time the story ends — Yang Guo is unmatched. Not the strongest swordsman because he trained the hardest. The strongest because he could no longer use the system the other swordsmen used. With one arm, the old forms did not apply. He had to find what the forms could not see.

There is a saying about the highest swordsman in those stories: no sword is the sword. The blade became unnecessary because the swordsman had become the blade. But that transformation required losing the blade first.

This is what 过 names.

It is the same character used for passing through, for exceeding, for erring, and for being more than. It is the character in errors — 过错 — but it is also the character in exceptional — 超过. To pass through is also to surpass. To make a mistake is also to go past. The same gesture is failure and excellence.

The man who lets nothing pass through him stays whole. He also stays small. The man who lets something pass through him is left with less. He is also left with what passing through gave him — which is something nothing else could give.

A man with a stone bowl tries to hold the sea. The sea cannot pass through the bowl. The bowl remains full and the sea remains the sea, but the man and the sea never meet. Another man breaks his own bowl. The sea floods through him. He is no longer holding anything. He is also, briefly, the sea.

This is the cost of love passing through.

Not the cost of giving love. To give love, you must first have love, and to have love is to hold a bowl. The bowl is what limits the love. The bowl is what makes the love yours before it can be theirs.

What we sometimes mean — when we say we want to love truly — is something else. We want love to come through us, the way rain comes through sky and lands on earth. The sky does not give the rain. The sky lets the rain pass.

For this, the sky has to be open. Which means it cannot also be holding something.

Yang Guo at the end of the story is not a man who has added powers to himself. He is a man from whom things have been taken — and through that emptiness, something else moves with terrifying ease. Residual emptiness. 残缺. Broken form. The bowl is gone. The sea moves.

There is a phrase: 大爱无爱. The greatest love does not look like love. Because love that looks like love is still being held by someone, still being framed by I love you — and the I in I love you is the bowl. The bowl that has to be there before the giving. The bowl that limits what the love can do.

无敌 — without rival — does not mean defeating all rivals. It means having no position from which a rival could be defined. A man who is no longer holding a sword is not in the swordsman's tournament. Yang Guo is unmatched not because he wins the matches — because he is no longer playing the game in which there are matches.

This is what 过 asks of you, if you would let love through.

Lose the arm. Lose the bowl. Lose the position from which you were going to give.
Then let what passes through, pass.