Living the Simple Life

Posted: November 29, 2010 | Author: Doug 陀愚 | Filed under: Buddhism, Confucius, Religion, Taoism | Leave a comment »

As faithful readers will no doubt have noticed, I read a lot. I read on the bus, read on my lunch break at work, I used to read in the car when Baby was one-year old and would take extended naps in her little carseat and I had nothing to do but to watch over her for a while. I read in bed, at my desk, on the “throne” and so on. I read a lot.

Yet in spite of that I don’t own an e-reader and have absolutely no intention of buying one. I prefer good old fashioned paper books because:

• Paper books require no batteries.
• Paper books are safe to drop.
• Paper books are too plain to be worth stealing.
• You don’t have to worry about digital rights; you can share with a friend.¹

You get the idea. It’s the same with nice electronics, fancy cars and other valuable goods. They’re nice to have but introduce other burdens you didn’t have before. Oftentimes it’s not worth the extra burden.

It reminds me of a sagely quote from the Dao De Jing (Prof. Charles Muller translation):

[12] The five colors blind our eyes.
The five tones deafen our ears.
The five flavors confuse our taste.
Racing and hunting madden our minds.
Possessing rare treasures brings about harmful behavior.
Therefore the sage regards his center, and not his eyes.

He lets go of that and chooses this.

The point being that the more we try to enrich our lives, the more we can make ourselves miserable and agitated.

Confucius also felt similarly:

[7:16] Confucius said: “I can live with coarse rice to eat, water for drink and my arm as a pillow and still be happy. Wealth and honors that one possesses in the midst of injustice are like floating clouds.”
(trans. Prof. Muller, Analects of Confucius)

If I could apply the same logic I do with books to the rest of my life, perhaps I would be happier with having less, and more simple, ordinary goods, than what I have now…

P.S. A great Japanese Buddhist poem on the subject can be found here.

P.P.S. Title of this post got messed up and replaced with another one due to a certain bug in the iPhone app that creeps up at inconvenient times.

¹ Thanks to “Cherryblossom” for thinking of this one via Twitter.

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