Editor's Note: Mid-Autumn Festival greetings! Hope you can celebrate the day with loved ones. Here's an ancient Chinese poem about the moon brought by Bill Porter, an American writer & translator. He told Liu Xin he loves Chinese poetry because you can say so much with so little.

Liu Xin: For instance, what would you say you learned from Lao Tzu or from Confucius that you can think of at this moment?

Bill Porter: When you study Confucius or Lao Tzu, there are many, many books about it, but when all I wanted to do was just read the text, I didn't want to read books about Confucius. I want to read what the Lun Yu said or the Dao De Jing.

It was in the course of reading the Dao De Jing, I discovered that the Dao De Jing was about the moon. It was not just the moon that we think of. It was about the dark moon. Dao De Jing was about being the dark side of the moon, not the bright side of the moon. I later sort of realized that the Yi Jing is about being the full moon, being successful.

Liu Xin: The Book of Change.

Bill Porter: Yes, not just change. Things change, of course. But then you read the Yi Jing, it's all about using change to be successful. Lao Tzu's Dao De Jing is about being a failure, how to fail, how to be the dark side of the moon, how to be the weak rather than the strong. Because if you're the dark of the moon, then you're going to become bright. If you're the bright moon, then you're going to fade.

And so, this is the great lesson I've learned from Lao Tzu's Dao De Jing. It's the cultivation of being simple and weak and the feminine, being on the dark side and also not knowing so much because we discover that our knowledge is not really knowledge after all. It's just delusion posing as the truth. I got that from the Buddha, that what we think of that we know is just what everybody says something is so.

So, I discover all of these. It's sort of like these are all doors, the Buddha door, they're all about harmony, whether it's the harmony of the mind is Buddhism, a harmony of the body is Taoism. The harmony of society is Confucianism.

And if we're all searching for something, we find ourselves in like a burning house, in a world gone crazy and we want to go through one of these doors. We have to choose which door. We all have different personalities and inclinations, so we're going to choose a different door, but we have to go through one door. We can't go through three doors, but once we go through that door, we're outside. There are no doors. There is no Lao Tzu. There's no Taoism and Buddhism and Confucianism. It's no more divisions about what's real.

Liu Xin: Finally, we are approaching the mid-autumn festival where people eat mooncakes. And this is often the time when people would write poems or recite poems. And I know that you have a particular penchant for singing or chanting poems.

Actually, according to some people, that's basically the way how ancient poems were supposed to be recited, right? Not really as we're doing, but a in a musical way.

Bill Porter: When I was first in Taiwan, I studied calligraphy, Shufa. I could've studied calligraphy with a most famous calligrapher in Taiwan, his name was Zhuang Yan.

One of the most famous poems I remember from studying with him and writing it out with my calligraphy brush was the poem Zhongqiu Yue by Su Shi, where he goes: As evening clouds withdraw a clear cool air floods in, the jade wheel passes silently across the Silver River. This life this night has rarely been kind, where will we see this moon next year?

This is a poem he wrote to his brother Su Zhe, Su Ziyou. Because they only met maybe every 4 or 5 years, they would have a chance to get together. So, I always just love this simple little poem he wrote about just watching the moon and wondering, will we see this again? Will we see this again together? (Liu Xin: They were very close.) Very touching poem. So that's what I love about Chinese poetry, you can say so much with so little.