He became a monk in his early years, then came to Shanlian Town, Xing Wu County, Zhejiang Province, and lived in Yongxin Temple for 30 years. Here, Zhiyong lives a simple life. Every day the rooster gets up at dawn, grinds a big plate of ink, and then constantly copies Wang Xizhi's copybook.
Zhiyong also prepared several large bamboo slips with a capacity of more than one stone in the room. When he was practicing calligraphy, he took them off and threw them into bamboo slips. After a long time, the broken pen has accumulated ten big scorpions. Later, Zhiyong dug a deep pit in the open space in front of Yongxin Temple window, buried all the broken pens in the soil, and built a grave house, called the "returning pen tomb". This is how the story of "returning a pen to the grave" came about.
After long-term unremitting hard practice, Zhiyong's calligraphy finally reached its peak and formed its own style, becoming a famous calligrapher in China. At that time, the people who asked him to inscribe were packed, and the wooden thresholds in the temple were trampled through and had to be wrapped in iron sheets. Later, this story became an allusion, called-Iron Gate Limit.
In his later years, he wrote more than 1000 books with the truth as the content, and selected the most satisfactory 800 books and distributed them to temples in eastern Zhejiang. Up to now, the ink block and woodcut of Zhi Yong's Thousand-Character Works are still regarded as a model for learning calligraphy.