6 ideas
A learner first pursues evenness and correct structure. Once that is secured, they push toward the precipitous and daring. Having mastered daring, they return to evenness, but it is now a balance that holds risk inside it rather than a beginner's timidity, which is why mature simplicity looks like the first stage while being its opposite.
Five conditions favor good work: a calm mind with no pressing business, a sense of obligation to a recipient who deserves the effort, mild weather, good paper and ink, and a sudden impulse to write. Five opposing conditions spoil it: a hurried mind, coercion, harsh weather, poor materials, and a weary hand. With the harmonies the hand flows freely, with the discords it stalls, so output quality depends on the whole situation and not only on skill.
Style shifts from plain substance toward ornament over time, and it is wrong to despise either the rough ancients or the polished moderns. The right course is to follow ancient models without clashing with one's own era, and to be current without taking on its excesses. Refinement is not decadence, and simplicity is not superiority in itself.
A writer's character leaks into the trace, and each temperament tends toward its own partial excess. The upright become stiff, the stubborn become rigid and awkward, the gentle become soft and weak, the impetuous become rash, and the timid become cramped. Reading a style this way shows most artists mastering only the facet their nature favors, while completeness requires consciously correcting one's native bias.
Wang Xianzhi believed he surpassed his father, Wang Xizhi. Once, he secretly rewrote a wall inscription his father had left, thinking his version better. Xizhi returned, looked at it, and sighed that he must have been very drunk when he wrote it, and Xianzhi was privately ashamed, showing that self-assessed superiority can dissolve before a master's unforced judgment.
In standard script, the individual dots and strokes carry the form, while the turning and continuous movements carry the emotional character. In cursive, this reverses: dots and strokes become the carriers of feeling, and the turning movements become the structural form. The same elements serve opposite functions depending on the mode, so mastery of one mode does not transfer automatically to the other.