People accumulate a past in two major ways: personal experiences from everyday life, and knowledge from teachers, books and other sources. Experience and intellectual learning encompass a person's world view; and although it seems it should be the other way around, it is the intellectual discriminations fostered by learning which are more difficult to drop than direct experiences of life. Bad habits which accumulate from everyday experience may harm you and a small group of people around you, but intellectual views can affect and influence entire populations. Through the media, your ideas can reach millions of people.

An ancient Chinese proverb says, "He who steals another's belongings is a thief, but he who steals a country is a king. He who kills another is a murderer, but he who kills thousands is a great hero." A person who steals power and takes over a country does not do so because of personal habits. He is driven by a powerful world view.

Intellectual knowledge is powerful; therefore, it is difficult to get rid of. Yung-chia admits that he too amassed enormous amounts of knowledge from sutras and sastras before meeting the Sixth Patriarch. The Buddhist tradition encourages people to study sutras and sastras. For ordinary people, studying is good, and it can be productive. But for a practitioner seeking enlightenment, studying can be a problem. When Yung-chia met Hui-neng, he let go of everything that he had ever studied.

Yung-chia says that pursuing the practice through study is like trying to count every grain of sand on the ocean's floor. Studying Buddhist literature is an endless endeavor. The Buddha taught for forty-nine years, yet he likened his preaching to the amount of sand one can fit under one's fingernail, and he said that the part he did not lecture on encompassed all the dust in the world. Preaching can go on forever. Attempting to study it would be a waste of time.