PHILOSOPHY IN 40 IDEAS

Lessons for Life

Philosophy is a practical discipline committed to helping us live
wiser and less sorrowful lives. This book draws together forty of
the greatest ideas found in both Eastern and Western
philosophy, spanning the history of thought from Socrates to
the Buddha, Jean-Paul Sartre to Lao Tzu. We are reminded of
the wit, humanity and relevance of the great thinkers – who
have hugely helpful things to say to us about falling in love,
making friends, finding serenity, discovering our purpose and
enjoying what remains of our lives.
The word ‘philosophy’ hints to us why the subject matters. In
Ancient Greek, ‘philo’ (love) and ‘sophia’ (wisdom) indicate that
philosophy is quite literally a discipline for those who ‘love
wisdom’. Here are its most essential ideas rescued, highlighted
and inspiringly presented so that they can work their helpful
effects where it is most needed: in our daily lives.
Selected Chapters Include:
 Know yourself
 Philo-sophia
 Democracy
 Eros and philia
 Sub specie aeternitatis
 Machiavellianism
 The Vinegar-Tasters
 The life of Confucius
 Mettā/Benevolence
 Water as wisdom
Read an Extract of the Book
Hardback book with colour images | 85 pages | 178 x 126 mm
Guanyin
Guanyin is a saintly female figure in East Asian Buddhism
strongly associated with mercy, compassion and kindness. She
occupies a similar role within Buddhism as the Virgin Mary
within Catholicism. There are shrines and temples to her all
over China; one, in the province of Hainan, has a 108 metre
statue of her (it’s the fourth largest statue anywhere in the
world). Guanyin’s popularity speaks of the extent to which the
needs of childhood endure within us. She is, in the noblest
sense, ‘mummy’. Across China, adults allow themselves to be
weak in her presence. Her gaze has a habit of making people
cry – for the moment one breaks down isn’t so much when
things are hard as when one finally encounters kindness and a
chance to admit to sorrows one has been harbouring in silence
for too long. Guanyin doesn’t judge. She understands that you
are tired, that you have been betrayed, that things aren’t easy,
that you are fed up: she has a measure of the difficulties
involved in trying to lead a remotely adequate adult life.
Six Ideas from Eastern Philosophy
Eastern Philosophy has always had a very similar goal to
Western philosophy: that of making us wiser, less agitated,
more thoughtful and readier to appreciate our lives. However,
the way it has gone about this has been intriguingly different.
In the East, Philosophy has taught its lessons via tea drinking
ceremonies, walks in bamboo forests, contemplations of rivers
and ritualised flower arranging sessions. Here are a few ideas
to offer us the distinctive wisdom of a continent and enrich our
notions of what philosophy might really be.

ONE: Life is suffering

The first and central ‘noble truth’ of the Buddha is that life is
unavoidably about suffering. The Buddha continually seeks to
adjust our expectations so we will know what to expect: sex
will disappoint us, youth will disappear, money won’t spare us
pain. For the Buddha, the wise person should take care to grow
completely at home with the ordinary shambles of existence.
They should understand that they are living on a dunghill.
When baseness and malice rear their heads, as they will, it
should be against a backdrop of fully vanquished hope, so there
will be no sense of having been unfairly let down and one’s
credulity betrayed. That said, the Buddha was often surprisingly
cheerful and generally sported an inviting, warm smile. This
was because anything nice, sweet or amusing that came his
way was immediately experienced as a bonus; a deeply
gratifying addition to his original bleak premises.  By keeping
the dark backdrop of life always in mind, he sharpened his
appreciation of whatever stood out against it. He teaches us the
art of cheerful despair.
TWO: Mettā (pali): Benevolence
Mettā is a word which, in the Indian language of Pali, means
benevolence, kindness or tenderness. It is one of the most
important ideas in Buddhism. Buddhism recommends a
daily ritual meditation to foster this attitude (what is known
as mettā bhāvanā). The meditation begins with a call to think
very carefully every morning of a particular individual with
whom one tends to get irritated or to whom one feels
aggressive or cold and – in place of one’s normal hostile
impulses – to rehearse kindly messages like ‘I hope you will
find peace’ or ‘I wish you to be free from suffering’. This
practice can be extended outwards ultimately to include pretty
much everyone on earth. The background assumption is that
our feelings towards people are not fixed and unalterable, but
are open to deliberate change and improvement, with the right
goad. Compassion is  a learnable skill – and we need to direct it
as much towards those we love as those we are tempted to
dismiss and detest.
THREE: Guanyin
Guanyin is a saintly female figure in East Asian Buddhism
strongly associated with mercy, compassion and kindness. She
occupies a similar role within Buddhism as the Virgin Mary
within Catholicism. There are shrines and temples to her all
over China; one, in the province of Hainan, has a 108 metre
statue of her (it’s the fourth largest statue anywhere in the
world). Guanyin’s popularity speaks of the extent to which the
needs of childhood endure within us. She is, in the noblest
sense, ‘mummy’. Across China, adults allow themselves to be
weak in her presence. Her gaze has a habit of making people
cry – for the moment one breaks down isn’t so much when
things are hard as when one finally encounters kindness and a
chance to admit to sorrows one has been harbouring in silence
for too long. Guanyin doesn’t judge. She understands that you
are tired, that you have been betrayed, that things aren’t easy,
that you are fed up: she has a measure of the difficulties
involved in trying to lead a remotely adequate adult life. 
FOUR: Wu Wei (Chinese): Not making an Effort
Wu Wei is a (Chinese) term at the heart of the philosophy of
Daoism. It is first described in the Tao Te Ching, written by the
sage Lao Tzu in the 6th century BC. Wu Wei means ‘not making
an effort’, going with the flow, but it doesn’t in any way imply
laziness or sloth. It suggests rather an intentional surrender of
the will based on a wise recognition of the need, at points, to
accede to, rather than protest against, the demands of reality.
As Lao Tzu puts it, to be wise is to have learnt how one must
sometimes ‘surrender to the whole universe’. Reason allows us
to calculate when our wishes are in irrevocable conflict with
reality, and then bids us to submit ourselves willingly, rather
than angrily or bitterly, to necessities. We may be powerless to
alter certain events but, for Lao Tzu, we remain free to choose
our attitude towards them, and it is in an unprotesting
acceptance of what is truly necessary that we find the
distinctive serenity and freedom characteristic of a Daoist. 
FIVE: Bamboo as Wisdom
East Asia has been called the Bamboo Civilization, not merely
because bamboo has been widely used in daily life, but also
because its symbolic qualities have been described and
celebrated for hundreds of years in the philosophy of Daoism.
Bamboo is, surprisingly, classified as a grass rather than a tree,
yet it is tall and strong enough to create groves and forests.
Unlike a tree trunk, the stems of bamboo are hollow, but its
inner emptiness is a source of its vigour. It bends in storms,
sometimes almost to the ground, but then springs back
resiliently. We should, says Lao Tzu, ‘become as bamboo is.’
The greatest painter of bamboo was the Daoist poet, artist and
philosopher Zheng Xie of the Qing Dynasty. Zheng Xie is said to
have painted eight hundred pictures of bamboo forests and saw
in them a perfect model of how a wise person might behave.
Beside one pen and ink drawing of bamboo, he wrote in elegant
script: ‘Hold fast to the mountain, take root in a broken-up
bluff, grow stronger after tribulations, and withstand the
buffeting wind from all directions’. It was a message addressed
to bamboo but meant, of course, for all of us.
SIX: Kintsugi
Since the 16th century, Zen Buddhist philosophy in Japan has
been alive to the particular beauty and wisdom of things which
have been repaired. Kintsugi is a compound of two ideas: ‘Kin’
meaning, in Japanese, ‘golden’ and ‘tsugi’ meaning ‘joinery’. In
Zen aesthetics, the broken pieces of an accidentally-smashed
pot should never just be tossed away, they should be carefully
picked up, reassembled and then glued together with lacquer
inflected with a luxuriant gold powder. There should be no
attempt to disguise the damage, the point is to render the
fault-lines beautiful and strong. The precious veins of gold are
there to emphasise that breaks have a rich merit all of their
own. It’s a profoundly poignant idea because we are all in some
way broken creatures. It’s not shameful to need repair; a
mended bowl is a symbol of hope that we too can be put
together again and still be loved despite our evident flaws.

Gongshi
In the West, we expect philosophy to come from books. In the
East, more wisely, there’s an awareness that it may
legitimately come from rocks as well. In China, in the middle
period of the Tang dynasty, at some point in the first half of the
9th century CE, an enthusiasm for rocks developed in Chinese
culture which gradually spread to Japan and Korea – and has
continued to the modern age. Rocks mounted on wooden
stands have become well-known and prestigious objects of
contemplation.

In East Asia, rocks are venerated with all the respect that we
would accord to a work of art; except that what is really being
honoured is the power of nature rather than the human hand.
The more eroded and irregularly contorted the rock, the better.

Collectors seek out rocks with passion. Scholarly essays and

whole treatises are dedicated to the subtleties and nuances of
rocks. Rocks from different locations are catalogued, and their
particular aesthetic qualities inventoried and graded. Smaller
rocks are placed on desks; gardens are built around the larger
ones.
What follows is a brief history of petrophilia (love of rocks):
826 CE, Tang Dynasty
Lake Tai, Jiangsu Province, China
A middle-aged gentleman is taking a stroll around a large lake
on the Yangtze Delta Plain in eastern China, when something
on its shore catches his eye. It is an apparently trivial yet
momentous discovery: a pair of oddly shaped rocks.
This is perhaps no less than the founding moment in Chinese
petrophilia. This cultivated pedestrian is someone special. After
numerous ups and downs in his career as a state official,
including periods of imperial disfavour and exile, Bai Juyi has
finally made it: he has been appointed Prefect of the nearby
city of Suzhou. He also happens to be one of China’s major
poets.
It is not a chance combination of talents. Examinations to enter
the state administration test the candidate’s knowledge of
poetry as well as the classics of Chinese philosophy. Culture is
believed to inculcate moral virtues of sensitivity, rectitude and
wisdom that are essential to judicious decision-making. The
ideal administrator doesn’t just know maths and time-keeping,
he is meant to be a man of learning and the arts. Many of
China’s leading poets and painters have careers in public
service.
So struck is Bai Juyi by these rocks, with their twisted angles
and perforations, that he has them taken back home to
Suzhou. Soon after his return, he sits down and writes a poem
about them.
Poetry for Bai Juyi is often a kind of a diary writing, in which he
recounts interesting experiences and powerful feelings that
affect him during the day. The title for this particular poem is ‘A
Pair of Rocks’. Bai Juyi admits that the rocks are somewhat
unconventional in their aesthetic appeal:
        Dark sallow, two slates of rocks,
        Their appearance is grotesque and ugly.
They are also covered in dirt and begrimed with smoke, their
cavities thick with green moss. He describes himself washing
and scrubbing them:
        Of vulgar use they are incapable;
        People of the time detest and abandon them.
So just what is the value of these unprepossessing specimens?
Daoism, which began as a philosophy in ancient China before
turning into a popular religion, cherishes nature – and it is
evidence of its force that Bai Juyi welcomes in the rocks. The
holes, perforations and indentations signal the patient, mighty
forces of the universe – which we should respect and attempt
to find harmony with.
The ancient rocks offer a consolation for an ageing Bai, who
feels excluded from ‘the world of youngsters’:
Turning my head around, I ask the pair of rocks:
‘Can you keep company with an old man like myself?’
Although the rocks cannot speak,
They promise that we will be three friends.
Through rocks we can learn to respect the dignity of what has
been marked by ageing and time. Thanks to Bai Juyi’s
enthusiasm, the unusual limestone rocks at Lake Taihu soon
become sought after by sensitive, creative people in the Tang
dynasty.
12th century CE, Northern Song dynasty
Wuwei district, Anhui Province, China
It is early in the first decade of the twelfth century. Mi Fu, the
most legendarily eccentric of scholar-officials in China, has just
been appointed as a magistrate in Wuwei County. On arrival,
he has to pay an important social visit. He has been invited to
meet-and-greet all the other important administrators with
whom he will be working. They stand waiting for him in the
front garden of the official residence. But as he walks towards
them, they are shocked at his sudden breach of protocol.
For he has been stopped in his tracks by an unusually large
rock in the garden. Instead of offering his respects to his hosts,
Mi Fu turns and bows ceremoniously to the extraordinary
looking rock. He calls out and addresses it as ‘Elder Brother
Rock’, making an elaborate speech. He performs all the rites
and obeisances that were prescribed for an older brother
according to the principles of ‘filial piety’ in Confucianism –
which believed that harmony in the family was the nucleus of
social order in the state at large.
Only after fully expressing his devotion to this amazing rock
does Mi finally turn to his flabbergasted hosts. It was this story
that earned Mi Fu his soubriquet, ‘Crazy Mi’ – and captured the
imagination of East Asia’s painters, for whom ‘Mi Fu and Elder
Brother Rock’ remained a favourite image for centuries to
come.  
In Confucianism, natural objects were perceived to have moral
qualities analogous to human virtues – the uprightness of the
bamboo or pine tree, for example, withstanding the buffeting
wind, was a model for the rectitude and probity an official
should display in government. Mi Fu takes this to an extreme –
the natural is not just a paradigm of official virtue, but is of
equal, even superior, importance to social responsibilities.
Mi Fu writes a treatise on rocks that enumerates their four main
aesthetic qualities: shou, an elegant and upright stature; zhou,
a wrinkled and furrowed texture; lou or cracks that are like
channels or paths through the rock; and tou, the holes in the
rock that allow air and light to pass through.
In the 11th and 12th century, during the Chinese Northern
Song dynasty, the passion for collecting rocks among scholar-
officials like Mi Fu takes off in earnest. Stones are mounted on
wooden bases and placed on desks as constant sources of
inspiration.
These decorative stones become known as gongshi – spirit
stones (popularly mistranslated as ‘scholars’ rocks’ in English).
Their peculiarly twisted shapes are admired as evidence of
the qienergy that is believed to animate nature and the human
body alike.
Any cultivated person is expected to have an appreciation of
rocks. They are valued as highly as any painting or calligraphic
scroll. The well-known Song dynasty scholar-statesman, Su
Shi, for example, is said to have offered a set of stones as a fair
and equal exchange for a set of great paintings.
During the Song dynasty, the most favoured rocks are quarried
from the limestone of Lingbi, in the northern Anhui province.
Lingbi rocks are dark black and glossy in texture. They are
esteemed as much for the bell-like sound they produce when
tapped as for their striking appearance.
Lingbi Rock

January, 1127 CE, end of the Northern Song dynasty

Kaifeng, Northern China
The imperial capital of China, Kaifeng, is under siege and about
to fall to the Jurchens, a nomadic people from Manchuria. Soon
the Song emperor, Huizong, will be taken captive and forced to
abdicate, while his son, Qinzong, will flee to the south to
establish a new court and the Southern Song dynasty. China
will be split in two. In these desperate final days of the
Northern Song, the order is given for the trees in Huizong’s
spectacular imperial garden at Kaifeng, the ‘Northeast
Marchmount’, to be cut down for firewood, and for its incredible
array of fabulous rocks to be pulled out of the ground and used
in catapults against the invading Jurchens. It is a sad end to
what must have been one of the most remarkable gardens in
world history.
The royal park is said to have been teeming with striking rocks.
The most prominent have been given names by Huizong, and
commemorated in verses by him, incised into the rocks in
golden ink. There is one rock called ‘Divine Conveyance Rock’,
another ‘Auspicious Dragon Rock’.
Emperor Huizong’s passion for rocks has clearly rather got out
of hand – and explains his neglect of security issues. Huizong
had in previous years appointed a royal official to explore the
whole of China in search of precious rocks for his garden.
Apocryphal tales abound of this official’s abuses – such as
robbing homes for the sake of rocks, and dismantling important
bridges to let boats with huge rocks pass by on canals and
rivers. A love of rocks appears to have hastened the collapse of
the Northern Song empire.
1450-1550, Muromachi Period, Japan
Ryoanji Temple, northwest Kyoto
In fifteenth-century Japan, a new type of rock garden develops.
As with so much of Chinese culture, the obsession with rocks
has crossed over to Japan in the latter part of the first
millennium – while also being adapted in special ways. In
Japan, the spirit rocks are called suiseki, and the Japanese
favour much more subdued, smooth rocks than the Chinese. In
Japan, rocks are treasured for their yoseki, a weathered and
‘ancient’ appearance that is similar to the ‘aged’ simplicity of
the aesthetic of wabi sabi. The rocks are not so much placed on
wooden stands, as positioned in trays surrounded by sand or
water – evoking mountains and lakes.
At several Zen Buddhist temples, and most remarkably at
Ryoanji in Kyoto, the stones start to be set in very more
minimal settings, so as to bring out their qualities all the more.

Here landscape is reduced to its barest essence – scattered

rocks that recall mountains surrounded by the stone fragments
of raked gravel in symmetrical wave-like patterns that suggest
flowing water. The only greenery is the bed of moss in which
each rock is set.
The raking of the gravel around the rocks by temple monks is a
careful and precise art. There are various patterns including the
‘water pattern’ of concentric rings or ripples, like those
produced when a stone is dropped in a lake; the ‘stormy water
pattern’ of haphazardly overlapping semi-circles, and the
continuous wave-effect of parallel or gently undulating lines.

Marked off by a wall, the garden of Ryoanji is to be viewed

while seated from outside rather than physically explored.
Conclusion
The originator of the East Asian reverence for rocks, Bai Juyi,
was well aware of how powerful a love of rocks can become. In
his essay, ‘Account of the Lake Tai Rock’, he speaks of an
‘addiction’ that some rocks can bring about. Truly wise people
should restrict their rock worship to a few hours a day, he
counsels.
At a time, when few of us spend more than a few minutes a
year looking at a rock, the advice seems less than urgent.
Indeed, the tradition of rock reverence has a lot to teach us:
that wisdom can hang off bits of the natural world just as well
as issuing from books; that we need to surround ourselves with
objects that embody certain values we’re in danger of losing
sight of day-to-day – and that some of our most precious
moments can be spent in the presence of nothing more chatty,
prestigious or costly than a rock.

Kintsugi 金継ぎ
Though we may keep a little quiet about this, especially when
we’re young, we tend deep down to be rather hopeful that we
will – eventually – manage to find perfection in a number of
areas. We dream of one day securing an ideally harmonious
relationship, deeply fulfilling work, a happy family life and the
respect of others. But life has a habit of dealing us a range of
blows – and leaving nothing much of this array of fine dreams
save some shattered and worthless fragments.
It’s at moments of disillusion that we might turn our minds to a
concept drawn from Japanese philosophy, and in particular,
from the Zen Buddhist approach to ceramics. Over the
centuries, Zen masters developed an argument that pots, cups
and bowls that had become damaged shouldn’t simply be
neglected or thrown away. They should continue to attract our
respect and attention and be repaired with enormous care –
this process symbolising a reconciliation with the flaws and
accidents of time, reinforcing some big underlying themes of
Zen. The word given to this tradition of ceramic repair
is kintsugi:
Kin = golden
tsugi = joinery
It means, literally, ‘to join with gold’. In Zen aesthetics, the
broken pieces of an accidentally-smashed pot should be
carefully picked up, reassembled and then glued together with
lacquer inflected with a very luxuriant gold powder. There
should be no attempt to disguise the damage, the point is to
render the fault-lines beautiful and strong. The precious veins
of gold are there to emphasise that breaks have a
philosophically-rich merit all of their own.

The origins of Kintsugi are said to date to the Muromachi

period, when the Shogon of Japan, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358-
1408) broke his favourite tea bowl and, distraught, sent it to be
repaired in China. But on its return, he was horrified by the
ugly metal staples that had been used to join the broken
pieces, and charged his craftsmen with devising a more
appropriate solution. What they came up with was a method
that didn’t disguise the damage, but made something properly
artful out of it.
Kintsugi belongs to the Zen ideals of wabi sabi, which cherishes
what is simple, unpretentious and aged – especially if it has a
rustic or weathered quality. A story is told of one of the great
proponents of wabi sabi, Sen no Rikyu (1522-99). On a journey
through southern Japan, he was once invited to a dinner by
a host who thought he would be impressed by an elaborate and
expensive antique tea jar that he had bought from China. But
Rikyu didn’t even seem to notice this item and instead spent his
time chatting and admiring a branch swaying in the breeze
outside. In despair at this lack of interest, once Rikyu had left,
the devastated host smashed the jar to pieces and retired to
his room. But the other guests more wisely gathered the
fragments and stuck them together through kintsugi. When
Rikyu next came to visit, the philosopher turned to the repaired
jar and, with a knowing smile, exclaimed: ‘Now it is
magnificent’.  

In an age that worships youth, perfection and the new, the art
of kintsugi retains a particular wisdom – as applicable to our
own lives as it is to a broken tea cup. The care and love
expended on the shattered pots should lend us the confidence
to respect what is damaged and scarred, vulnerable and
imperfect – starting with ourselves and those around us.

Zen Buddhism and Fireflies

One of nature’s odder creatures is the firefly, a soft bodied
beetle that emits a warm yellow glow from its lower abdomen,
typically at twilight, in order to attract mates or prey. Though
relatively rare in Europe and North America, the firefly is a
common sight in Japan, where it is known as the hotaru.
Hotarus are at their most plentiful in June and July, and can be
seen in groups around rivers and lakes. The glittering light of
the hotaru is deemed to be so enchanting, the Japanese hold
firefly festivals – or hotaru matsuri – to watch their dance.
Fireflies at Ochanomizu. Kobayashi Kiyochika (1847-1915)
Something even odder has happened to the firefly in Japan: it
has become philosophical. Zen Buddhist poets and philosophers
(the two terms are largely interchangeable in Japan) have over
the centuries noted the affinity between the firefly and a central
concept in Zen: the brevity of life. Zen does not think of our
transience as tragic, rather it is by accommodating ourselves
gracefully to our own evanescence that we can reach
enlightenment and harmony with nature’s necessities.
For Zen, the firefly is the perfect symbol of transience positively
interpreted: its season is very brief, it lights up only in high
summer, and its light appears always to flicker. Fireflies are
both fragile – and astonishingly beautiful when seen in large
numbers in a pine forest or a meadow at night. They are a
metaphor for our own poignant lives.
The move of locating important philosophical themes in the
natural world is one that Zen makes again and again, for
example, in relation to bamboo (evocative of resilience), water
(a symbol of patient strength, capable of wearing down stone)
and cherry blossom (an emblem of modest rapture). Zen
repeatedly hangs its ideology onto things that could seem at
first very minor, because it wants to make use of what is most
ordinarily in our sight to keep us tethered to its grand bathetic
truths.
The great seventeenth century poet Matsuo Basho, pushes
aside our day to day vanity and egoistic ambitions in the hope
that we might become, via his focus on a small short-lived
creature, appropriately attentive to our own finitude.
Falling from 
A blade of grass, to fly off –
A firefly.
For Zen Buddhism, the firefly is the ideal carrier – on its slender
wings – of reminders of the need for dignified resignation in the
face of the mightiness and mystery of the natural order.
Koyabashi Issa, an 18th century Buddhist priest as well as
haiku master, wrote 230 poems on fireflies. In one of the most
celebrated of these, he captures a moment where time is
momentarily stilled, so that its passage can more viscerally be
felt:
The fireflies are sparkling 
And even the mouth of a frog
Hangs wide open
It’s a tiny moment of satori or enlightenment; the frog is as
wonderstruck as the poet at the piercing light of the brave
doomed fireflies – much as we should fairly be amazed,
frightened, grateful and ultimately joyous to have been
allocated a few brief moments in which to behold and try to
make sense of our own existence in an always largely
unfathomable 13.8 billion year old universe.

Sen no Rikyū
In the West, philosophers write long non-fiction books, often
using incomprehensible words and limit their involvement with
the world to lectures and committee meetings. In the East, and
especially in the Zen tradition, philosophers write poems, rake
gravel, go on pilgrimages, practice archery, write aphorisms on
scrolls, chant and, in the case of one of the very greatest Zen
thinkers, Sen no Rikyū, involve themselves in teaching people
how to drink tea in consoling and therapeutic ways.
Sen no Rikyū was born in 1522 in the wealthy seaport of Sakai,
near present day Osaka. His father, Tanaka Yohyoue, was a
warehouse owner who worked in the fish trade and wished his
son to join him in business. But Rikyū turned away from
commercial life and went in search of wisdom and self-
understanding instead. He became fascinated by Zen
Buddhism, apprenticed himself to a few Masters and took to a
life of wandering the countryside, with few possessions. We
remember him today because of the contributions he made to
the reform and appreciation of the chanoyu, the Japanese tea
ceremony.

The Japanese had been drinking tea since the 9th century, the
practice having been imported from China by merchants and
monks. The drink was considered healthy as well as calming
and spiritual. But it was Rikyū’s achievement to put the tea
ceremony on a more rigorous and profound philosophical
footing. Thanks to his efforts, which were both practical and
intellectual, drinking tea in highly ritualised and thoughtful
ways, in particular buildings which he helped to design, became
an integral part of Zen Buddhist practice; as central to this
spiritual philosophy as poetry or meditation.
The Japan of his era had grown image-conscious and money-
focused. Rikyū promoted an alternative set of values which he
termed wabi-sabi — a compound word combining wabi, or
simplicity, with sabi, an appreciation of the imperfect. Across
fields ranging from architecture to interior design, philosophy to
literature, Rikyū awakened in the Japanese a taste for the
pared down and the authentic, for the undecorated and the
humble.
His particular focus was the tea ceremony, which Rikyū
believed to hold a superlative potential to promote  wabi-sabi.
He made a number of changes to the rituals and aesthetics of
the ceremony. He began by revolutionising the space in which
the tea ceremony was held. It had grown common for wealthy
people to build extremely elaborate teahouses in prominent
public places, where they served as venues for worldly
gatherings and displays of status. Rikyū now argued that the
teahouse should be shrunk to a mere two metres square, that it
should be tucked away in secluded gardens and that its door
should be made deliberately a little too small, so that all who
came into it, even the mightiest, would have to bow and feel
equal to others. The idea was to create a barrier between the
teahouse and the world outside. The very path to the teahouse
was to pass around trees and stones, to create a meander that
would help break ties with the ordinary realm. 
Properly performed, a tea ceremony was meant to promote
what Rikyū termed “wa” or harmony, which would emerge as
participants rediscovered their connections to nature: in their
garden hut, smelling of unvarnished wood, moss and tea
leaves, they would be able to feel the wind and hear birds
outside – and feel at one with the non-human sphere. Then
might come an emotion known as “kei” or ‘sympathy’, the fruit
of sitting in a confined space with others, and being able to
converse with them free of the pressures and artifice of the
social world. A successful ceremony was to leave its
participants with a feeling of “jaku” or ‘tranquillity’, one of the
most central concepts in Rikyū’s gentle, calming philosophy.

The Tai-an tearoom in Kyoto, designed by Rikyū

Rikyū’s prescriptions for the ceremony extended to the
instruments employed. He argued that tea ceremonies
shouldn’t henceforth rely on expensive or conventionally
beautiful cups or teapots. He liked worn bamboo tea scoops
that made a virtue of their age. Because in Zen philosophy,
everything is impermanent, imperfect and incomplete, objects
which are themselves marked by time and haphazard marks
can, suggested Rikyū, embody a distinct wisdom and promote it
in their users. 
Bamboo glass made by Rikyū himself
A wabi-sabi style tea bowl, 16th century
It was one of Rikyū’s achievements to take an act which in the
West is one of the most routine and unremarkable activities
and imbue it with a solemnity and depth of meaning akin to a
Catholic Mass. Every aspect of the tea ceremony, from the
patient boiling of the water to the measuring out of green tea
powder, was coherently related to Zen’s philosophical tenets
about the importance of humility, the need to sympathise with
and respect nature and the sense of the importance of the
transient nature of existence.
It’s open ended where this approach to everyday life might go.
It leaves open the possibility that many actions and daily habits
might, with sufficient creative imagination, become similarly
elevated, important and rewarding in our lives. The point isn’t
so much that we should take part in tea ceremonies, rather
that we should make aspects of our everyday spiritual lives
more tangible by allying certain materials and sensuous rituals.
Rikyū reminds us that there is a latent sympathy between big
ideas about life and the little everyday things, such as certain
drinks, cups, implements and smells. These are not cut off from
the big themes; they can make those themes more alive for us.
It is the task of philosophy not just to formulate ideas, but also
to work out mechanisms by which they may stick more firmly
and viscerally in our minds.

Wu Wei
Wu wei  means – in Chinese – non-doing or ‘doing nothing’. It
sounds like a pleasant invitation to relax or worse, fall into
laziness or apathy. Yet this concept is key to the noblest kind of
action according to the philosophy of Daoism – and is at the
heart of what it means to follow Dao or The Way. According to
the central text of Daoism, the Dao De Jing: ‘The Way never
acts yet nothing is left undone’. This is the paradox of wu wei.
It doesn’t meant not acting, it means ‘effortless action’ or
‘actionless action’. It means being at peace while engaged in
the most frenetic tasks so that one can carry these out with
maximum skill and efficiency. Something of the meaning of wu
wei is captured when we talk of being ‘in the zone’ – at one
with what we are doing, in a state of profound concentration
and flow.
Wu Wei
Wu wei is closely connected to the Daoist reverence for the
natural world, for it means striving to make our behaviour as
spontaneous and inevitable as certain natural processes, and to
ensure that we are swimming with rather than against currents.
We are to be like the bamboo that bends in the wind or the
plant that adjusts itself to the shape of a tree. Wu wei involves
letting go of ideals that we may otherwise try to force too
violently onto things; it invites us instead to respond to the true
demands of situations, which tend only to be noticed when we
put our own ego-driven plans aside. What can follow is a loss of
self-consciousness, a new unity between the self and its
environment, which releases an energy that is normally held
back by an overly aggressive, wilful style of thinking.
But none of this means we won’t be able to change or affect
things if we strive for wu wei. The Dao De Jing points out that
we should be like water, which is ‘submissive and weak’ and
‘yet which can’t be surpassed for attacking what is hard and
strong’. Through gentle persistence and a compliance with the
specific shape of a problem, an obstacle can be worked round
and gradually eroded.  
The idea of achieving the greatest effects by a wise strategic
passivity has been central to Chinese notions of politics,
diplomacy and business. In the manuals on wisdom produced
by Daoists, we are repeatedly told that rather than impose a
plan or model on a situation, we should let others act
frantically, and then lightly adjust ourselves as we see the
direction that matters have evolved in.
In China’s Tang dynasty, many poets likened wu wei to the best
aspects of being drunk. It wasn’t alcoholism they were
promoting, but the decline in rigidity and anxiety that
sometimes comes with being a little drunk, and which can help
us to accomplish certain tasks. One poet compared someone
inspired by wu wei to a drunk man who falls uninjured from a
moving cart – such is their spiritual momentum that they are
unaffected by accidents and misfortunes that might break those
of a more controlled and controlling mindset.
Theories of painting from the Tang period onwards made wu
wei  central to artistic practice. Rather than laboriously
attempting to reproduce nature faithfully, the artist should find
nature within themselves and surrender to its calls. The
painter’s task is not to imitate the external surface of things,
but to present the qi or ‘spirit’ of things like mountains, trees,
birds and rivers by feeling some of this spirit in themselves  –
and then letting it flow out through the brush onto silk or
paper.
It followed that Daoist thinkers revered not just the finished
work of art, but the act of painting itself – and considered
artist’s studios as places of applied philosophy. The Tang
dynasty poet, Fu Zai, described a big party that had been
thrown to witness the painter Zhang Zao in action:
Right in the middle of the room he sat down with his legs
spread out, took a deep breath, and his inspiration began to
issue forth. Those present were as startled as if lightning were
shooting across the heavens or a whirlwind was sweeping up
into the sky. The ink seemed to spitting from his flying brush.
He clapped his hands with a cracking sound. Suddenly strange
shapes were born. When he had finished, there stood pine
trees, scaly and riven, crags steep and precipitous, clear water
and turbulent clouds. He threw down his brush, got up, and
looked around in every direction. It seemed as if the sky had
cleared after a storm, to reveal the true essence of ten
thousand things.
Fu Zai added of Zhang (whose works are sadly now lost) that,
‘he had left mere skill behind’ and that his art ‘was not painting,
but the very Dao itself’. Zhang Zao would often fling his ink and
spread it with his hands on a silk scroll, to create spontaneous
forms that he then worked up into expressive images of nature.
Splodges were incorporated and ingeniously made to flow back
into the work. All this was wu wei.
A good life could not be attained by wu wei alone – but this
Daoist concept captures a distinctive wisdom we may at times
be in desperate need of, when we are in danger of damaging
ourselves through an overly stern and unyielding adherence to
ideas which simply cannot fit the demands of the world as it is.

Guan Yin
There’s a small building in the centre of Nanjing, sandwiched
between an electronics shop and a scooter garage, painted ox-
blood red, with a traditional green tiled roof, in the middle of
which stands an almost life-sized carved stone statue of a
young woman. She is crossed-legged, looking at us with
compassionate, kindly eyes. She seems the sort of person one
might approach with a shameful confession or to receive
sympathy after a rebuff from the world, when one is feeling
defeated and without energy to put up the normal guard and
pretences. She has a shawl across her fragile shoulders, a
finely-sculpted chain around her neck and a lotus flower in the
left hand. It’s early evening and a group of people have
gathered around her, of varied ages and backgrounds,
construction workers and business people, schoolgirls and
bureaucrats. Some are mumbling, others smiling as one might
at the sight of an old friend. A few have brought gifts, sticks of
incense, sweets and little pancakes wrapped in brightly
coloured paper.

This is Guan Yin, a woman who Buddhist legend tells us was

born more than a thousand years ago into a wealthy royal
family in southwest China. Like the Buddha, she was at a young
age struck by the prevalence of suffering and, in rebellion
against the expectations of her parents, ran away from home in
order to join a monastery and devote herself to the needy. Her
cruel and self-righteous father was furious at what he took to
be her ingratitude and ordered her agents to track her down
and behead her without mercy. But the princess found shelter
among those she helped, changed her identity and was able to
carry out good works for many years undisturbed. Then one
night, news reached her that her father had fallen gravely ill.
She immediately returned to the royal palace, brewed a dose of
special medicine and slowly nursed her father back to health.
Grateful at her exceptional benevolence and lack of rancour,
the king begged for his daughter’s forgiveness and in a gesture
of atonement, ordered statues to be made of her and placed
across his kingdom.

Now Guan Yin is all over China and southeast Asia. She has an
alcove dedicated to her besides the Dior store in the
international departure area of Beijing airport and a ten metre
granite version of her overlooks Hong Kong harbour. She is also
available on a more domestic scale, eight centimetre tall Guan
Yins for the hallway and, of course, plastic self-adhesive ones
for the dashboard.
One goes to Guan Yin for relief from feelings of self-hatred. She
is a little like an ideal friend or family member, an imaginary
sister or mother. She suggests alternatives to despising
oneself. She knows that benevolence towards others has to
begin with self-acceptance. Her kindly eyes and smile have a
habit of making one cry – for as we know from films, the
moment one breaks down isn’t always or even mostly when one
is facing overt hostility, rather when, after a period of hardship,
one finally encounters kindness and space to admit to the
difficulties one has been labouring with in stoic lonely silence
for too long. One can be weak with Guan Yin, she isn’t
impressed by the normal worldly criteria of success, there is no
shame in crying in front of her and admitting the scale of one’s
distress. She has the measure of the difficulties involved in
trying to lead a halfway decent ordinary life.
Guan Yin is what Buddhists call a bodhisattva, and what
Christians would call a saint. The Mayana branch of Buddhism
to which Guan Yin belongs recognises many hundreds of
bodhisattvas, usually historical figures, born in a variety of
locations across Asia, whose qualities of character have earnt
them a divine status. The bodhisattvas are mentioned in books
and appear in paintings, but primarily, they feature as
sculptures, three dimensional beings ranging in size from small
dolls to light-housed sized giants and made in anything from
rubber to wood to jade. The figures attract reverential
ceremonies, one gives them presents, talks to them, puts them
in temples, keeps them clean and celebrates their birthdays
(Guan Yin’s is on the 19th day of the second lunar month).
Just as Christian saints will approximate the goodness of Jesus,
so the boddhisattvas are said to have a compassion and calm
akin to the Buddha himself. And yet, like saints, individual
bodhisattvas are revered for their talents in particular areas,
there are bodhisattvas who care especially about animals,
others who have an affinity for coping with physical pain, others
still who understand the challenges of bringing up children.
Guanyin is the Buddhist counterpart to the Virgin Mary and she
fulfills a similar role: that of hearing us in our distress, meeting
us with tenderness and strengthening us to face the tasks of
life. The centrality of these maternal figures in both Buddhism
and Christianity suggests that mature adult lives share
moments of deep self-doubt – and longings to recover some of
the security of childhood. We need to be reassured that these
wishes are not a sign that we have failed as human beings.

Mono No Aware
Mono no aware is a key term in Japanese culture. ‘Mono’ means
‘thing’ or ‘things’; ‘aware’ means ‘feeling’ or sentiment, and the
particle ‘no’ indicates something an object possesses. So mono
no aware signifies the deep feeling or pathos of things, the
powerful emotions that objects can evoke or instil in us. It is
often associated with a poignant feeling of transience, a
beautiful sadness in the passing of lives and objects, like the
glorious colour of autumn leaves as they are about to fall.
Japanese art and literature has been especially concerned with
the moods of pathos around mono no aware: falling blossoms,
the changes of the moon, the passing of the seasons, the
plaintive cries of birds or insects, and the absence of friends or
lovers.
The word ‘aware’ was first used, in the Heian period of Japan
(794-1185), as an exclamatory particle to express a
spontaneous and inarticulate feeling – as with the particles that
we use like ‘ah’ or ‘oh’ or ‘wow’. Mono no aware has hence also
been translated as ‘the “ahness” of things’. It is the way in
which something affects us immediately and involuntarily,
before we are able to put that feeling into words – and
Japanese art has often sought to present objects and
experiences whose emotional impact is both powerful and
obscure to us.    
Mono no aware is in deep sympathy with Japanese Buddhism,
which stresses the impermanence of life and states that we
should willingly and gracefully let go of our attachments to
transient things. Zeami Motokiyo (c.1363-c.1443), the major
theoretician, actor and writer of the Noh drama wrote that ‘the
flower is marvellous because it blooms, and singular because it
falls’.
For the eighteenth-century scholar of the Edo period, Motoori
Norinaga (1730-1801), mono no aware is more than just a
subjective feeling – it is also a form of knowledge. He wrote:
‘To know mono no aware is to discern the power and essence,
not just of the moon and the cherry blossoms, but of every
single thing existing in this world, and to be stirred by each of
them’. While science or abstract philosophy may give us a
knowledge of things in their generality, mono no aware is a
more immediate and direct knowledge of the distinctive
qualities that characterize a unique phenomenon – what cannot
be generalised, but can only be felt by the ‘heart-mind’ (the
Japanese word kokoro means both the heart and mind) as it
experiences something singular. Norinaga claimed that the
whole task of literature was to represent mono no aware. The
writing of poetry (uta or ‘song’), he suggested, was an act that
turned sighing into singing. The breath that sighed in
exclamations of wonder, pain or relief – the original meaning
of  aware as a word – was converted by the poet into articulate
patterns of language, images, and sound. Norinage believed
that this sharing of feeling between the poet and reader – the
way in which we can all be moved, for example, by the sad
beauty of falling petals – was the basis of human community
itself.
Norinaga hailed the classic Japanese novel of the Heian
period, The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (c.973-c.1014),
often considered the first real novel in world literature, for
being particularly saturated in mono no aware. The word
‘aware’ appears over 1000 times in the novel, roughly once on
every page. The episode that is most celebrated for its quality
of mono no aware in the novel is the parting of two lovers in
chapter 10, ‘The Sacred Tree’. Here, the novel’s main
character, the prince Genji, travels to a shrine to seek a
meeting with the ‘Rokujo lady’ – a former lover of Genji’s who
has renounced her love for him on account of his waning
feelings. As Genji walks to the temple, the natural setting is
richly evocative of mono no aware. It is autumn, the time of
year most suffused with ‘aware’ according to a famous
Japanese poem of antiquity. ‘The autumn flowers are gone’, we
are told, as Genji walks across a stark ‘reed plain’ and listens to
melancholy hum of insects and the wind sighing in the pine
trees. 
The prince seeks to win her back, but she will not be moved
from her decision to withdraw from human affairs into temple
life, and so the scene of their final encounter becomes filled
with an exquisite pathos. Genji stands on the veranda and talks
through the blind to his former lover. He passes through a
branch from a sacred tree to symbolise his love and they talk
until dawn through brief exchanges of poetry. The setting moon
epitomizes the melancholy farewell, and Genji exclaims: ‘A
dawn farewell is always drenched in dew, but sad is the autumn
sky as never before’. The Rokujo lady observes that the song of
a cricket is making the ‘autumn farewell’ even sadder. Not
wishing to be seen in full daylight, Genji decides to leave: ‘His
sleeves were made wet along the way with dew and with tears’.
Album leaf illustration, with calligraphic excerpts, of ‘The
Sacred Tree’ chapter of The Tale of Genji, by Tosa Mitsunobu
(active c. 1469-1522)
Norinaga believed that art like The Tale of Genji can train us to
become sensitive to the manifestations of ‘aware’. He believed
that Japanese culture needed to go back to the values of
sensibility enshrined in the court-based society of the Heian
period, which in the subsequent samurai-dominated periods,
with their prevailing masculine and warrior ethos, had fallen
into partial neglect. In the ‘Yugiri’ (Evening Mist) chapter of The
Tale of Genji, Murasaki had complained about the constricted
life that women were forced to lead even in Heian society, in
which they were denied self-expression: ‘How can we enjoy
prosperity in life or dispel the tedium of the ephemeral world
when we must hide within ourselves our understanding of
things that are deeply moving (mono no aware)?’ Murasaki was
a lady-in-waiting at the imperial court. Literature was the one
way in which lettered women like Murasaki and Sei Shonagon,
another Heian court lady and author of the famous Pillow
Book of her personal observations and reflections (completed in
1002), could give vent to their pent-up feelings.

Woodcut illustration of a scene from the Yugiri chapter of The

Tale of Genji, by Kunisada II (1857)
Norinaga’s essays on mono no aware also provided copious
quotations from the anthologies of early Japanese poetry. He
singled out poems that contained the phrase ‘mono no aware’
such as this:
How much I would like to ask
The person who knows the moving power of things (mono no
aware)
The feelings he has through an autumn night
As he gazes at the moon.
He also selected poems in which the word ‘aware’ was used as
a sigh or exclamation:
The wild pinks
At dusk
When the crickets cry.
I keep thinking, saying, ‘ah!’ (aware)
Time and time again.
The later haiku verse of the Edo period, at its height in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, continued to express
mono no aware in its imagery of the changing seasons, such as
the plaintive cry of the short-lived cicadas that is resonant of
the end of summer. As Basho wrote:
        A cicada’s shell
        It sang itself
        Utterly away
        (trans. R. H. Blyth)
Haiku poems often convey a sense of the ‘aware’ of things in
their focus on the transitory and the fleeting moment.
The most celebrated example of a natural phenomenon rich in
mono no aware is the spectacle of cherry blossoms (sakura). A
chapter of The Tale of Genji is centred around a Festival of the
Cherry Blossom. Norinaga went so far as to claim that ‘the soul
of Japan’ is embodied in the sight of cherry blossoms in the
morning sun. He went on a pilgrimage to observe the cherry
blossoms by Mount Yoshino, whose white flowers are famous
for matching the snow on the mountain peak, and requested
that a cherry tree be planted on his grave. Cherry blossom is
the most revered of all natural phenomena in Japan. To this
day, excited crowds of families and young people gather to
picnic under the cherry blossoms each spring. The custom is
known as hanami or ‘flower viewing’. Cherry blossom is not
more beautiful, say, than that of the plum or apple tree. What
makes it so cherished is the special quality of mono no
aware that is imparted by its brevity – the blossom falls within
a week. The delicate beauty of its white and pink flowers, so
fragile that they are easily carried away by the mildest breeze,
is given a heightened poignancy by this transience.

Hanami or cherry blossom picnic

Japanese painting has often depicted cherry blossom, seasonal
images, and the sights associated with  mono no aware. The
famous Genji Monogatari Emaki (Tale of Genji Scroll) of the
twelfth century, an illustrated handscroll of the novel, began a
tradition of painting evocative scenes from Murasaki’s
masterpiece alongside calligraphic renderings of the text. Often
these exquisite picture scrolls, painted in colour, look down
upon Genji (or his son in the latter part of the novel) at an
emotional moment with one of his lovers. They are viewed from
an elevated ‘bird’s-eye’ view, with the roof and ceiling omitted.

Scene from the ‘Oak Tree’ chapter of Genji, from a handscroll

circa 1130, at the Tokugawa Museum, Japan
The Rimpa school of artists from the sixteenth to the
nineteenth centuries, which painted on screens, fans, scrolls,
ceramics and textiles, often focused on the transitory
phenomena of mono no aware such as blossom or birds in flight
against a background of gold leaf. The most influential painting
of this school is a remarkably delicate and fine depiction of the
blossom of ‘Red and White Plum Trees’ (rather than the cherry)
by Ogata Korin (1558-1716). The trees in bloom are set against
a stream depicted in abstract and oily spirals, which convey a
strong sense of movement and heighten the sense or ‘aware’ of
passing time.   
Portion of ‘Red and White Plum Trees’ (Kohakubai-zu), circa
1714, by Ogata Korin
The mono no aware or pathos of things in art and nature can
not only train us to become more sensitive to beauty, as
Norinaga suggested. It can help us to reach more of an
acceptance of the mortality and transience that make life seem
so painful at times. As the Buddhist priest, Yoshida Kenko
(c.1283-c.1350), observed in his classic Essays on Idleness: ‘If
man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino, never
to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, how things would
lose their power to move us!’. The great source of sadness, the
perishable nature of things, is also what gives them such a
singular beauty and moving power. And Norinaga believed that
art and writing can be therapeutic in their channelling of
‘aware’. Our deepest emotions seek an outlet and expression –
and art helps to prevent such feelings from overwhelming us. It
gives to mono no aware what Norinaga called the ‘pattern’ of
art, such as the rhythm of a verse and its play of rhyme and
imagery. The greatest relief, for Norinaga, comes when
someone else appreciates our art and shares in its feeling. In
this small moment of collective ‘aware’ is the potential for a
more profound sense of community.  

Yinshi
A quiet life sounds like an option that only the defeated would
ever be inclined to praise. Our age is overwhelmingly alive to
the benefits of active, dynamic, ‘noisy’ ways of living. If
someone offered us a bigger salary for a job elsewhere, we’d
move. If someone showed us a route to fame, we’d take it. If
someone invited us to a party, we’d go. These seem like pure,
unambiguous gains. Lauding a quiet life has some of the
eccentricity of praising rain.
It’s hard for most of us to contemplate any potential in the idea
because the defenders of quiet lives have tended to come from
the most implausible sections of the community: slackers,
hippies, the work-shy, the fired…; people who seem like they
have never had a choice about how to arrange their affairs. A
quiet life seems like something imposed upon them by their
own ineptitude. It is a pitiable consolation prize.
And yet, when we examine matters closely, busy lives turn out
to have certain strikingly high incidental costs that we are
nevertheless collectively committed to ignoring. Visible success
brings us up against the envy and competitiveness of strangers.
We become plausible targets for disappointment and spite; it
can seem like it may be our fault that certain others have not
succeeded. Winning higher status makes us increasingly
sensitive to its loss; we start to note every possible new snub.
A slight decrease in sales, attention or adulation can feel like a
catastrophe. Our health suffers. We fall prey to scared,
paranoid thoughts; we see possible plots everywhere, and we
may not be wrong. The threat of vindictive scandal haunts us.
Alongside our privileges, we grow impoverished in curious
ways. We have very limited control over our time.
We may be able to shut down a factory in India and our every
word is listened to with trembling respect within the
organisation, but what we absolutely cannot do is admit that
we are also extremely tired and just want to spend the
afternoon reading on the sofa. We can no longer express our
more spontaneous, imaginative, vulnerable sides. Our words
are so consequential, we have to be guarded at all times;
others are looking to us for guidance and authority. Along the
way, we grow strangers to those who love us outside of our
wealth and status – while depending ever more on the fickle
attention of those for whom we are our achievements alone.
Our children see ever less of us. Our spouses grow bitter. We
may own the wealth of continents; but it has been ten years at
least since we last had the chance to do nothing for a day.

The most famous cultural figure in the history of the West was
very interested in the benefits that can attend quiet lives. In
Mark 6: 8-9, Jesus tells his disciples ‘to take nothing for their
journey except a staff – no bread, no bag, no money in their
belts – but to wear sandals and not put on two tunics.’
Christianity opens up vital space in our imaginations by making
a distinction between two kinds of poverty: what it
terms voluntary poverty on the one hand
and involuntary poverty on the other. We are at this point in
history so deeply fixated on the idea that poverty must always
be involuntary and therefore the result of lack of talent and
indigence, we can’t even imagine that it might be the result of
an intelligent and skilled person’s free choice based on a
rational evaluation of costs and benefits. It might sincerely be
possible for someone to decide not to take the better paid job,
not to publish another book, not to seek high office – and to do
so not because they had no chance, but because – having
surveyed the externalities involved – they chose not to fight for
them.
One of the central moments in Christian history came in 1204
when a wealthy young man we know today as St Francis of
Assisi willingly renounced his worldly goods, of which he had
quite a few (a couple of houses, a farm and a ship at least). He
did so not through any external compulsion. He just felt they
would interfere with other things he really wanted rather more
of: a chance to contemplate Jesus’s teachings, to honour the
creator of the earth, to admire the flowers and the trees – and
to help the poorest in society.
He did have other options: St Francis of Assisi renounces
worldly goods, painting attributed to Giotto di Bondone 
Chinese culture has also been reverent towards
the yinshi (recluse), someone who chooses to leave behind the
busy political and commercial world and live more simply,
usually up the side of a mountain – in a hut. The tradition
begins in the 4th century AD, when a high-ranking government
official named Tao Yuanming surrendered his position at court
and moved to the countryside to farm the land, make wine, and
write. In his poem, ‘On Drinking Wine’, he recounts the riches
that poverty have brought him:
Plucking chrysanthemums from the eastern hedge
I gaze into the distance at the southern mountain.
The mountain air is refreshing at sunset
As the flocking birds are returning home.
In such things we find true meaning,
But when I try to explain, I can’t find the words.

Tao Yuanming taking time to smell flowers – by Chen Hongshou

(1598-1652)
Portraits of Tao Yuanming became a major theme in Chinese
art and literature. His hut near Mount Lushan (‘Hut Mountain’)
gave others encouragement to see the advantages of cheaper,
simpler dwellings. A number of poets of the Tang dynasty went
through periods of seclusion. Bai Juyi (772-846) wrote a poem
lovingly describing the hut he’d bought himself on the edge of a
forest, listing its plain and natural materials (a thatched roof
with ‘stone steps, cassia pillars, and a fence of plaited
bamboo’). The poet Du Fu, living in Chengdu in the Sichuan
province, wrote a poem titled ‘My Thatched Hut Ruined by the
Autumn Wind’. It wasn’t a lament, more a celebration of the
freedom that came with living so simply, a storm might blow
over your house.

Reconstruction of Du Fu’s hut at Chengdu

There are for many of us plenty of options to take up certain
career paths that carry high prestige with them. We could have
something deeply impressive to answer those who ask us what
we do. But this does not necessarily mean we must or should
follow these possibilities. When we come to know the true price
some careers exact, we may slowly realise we are not willing to
pay for the ensuing envy, fear, deceit and anxiety. Our days
are limited on the earth. We may – for the sake of true riches –
willingly, and with no loss of dignity, opt to become a little
poorer and more obscure.

Sen no Rikyū
In the West, philosophers write long non-fiction books, often
using incomprehensible words and limit their involvement with
the world to lectures and committee meetings. In the East, and
especially in the Zen tradition, philosophers write poems, rake
gravel, go on pilgrimages, practice archery, write aphorisms on
scrolls, chant and, in the case of one of the very greatest Zen
thinkers, Sen no Rikyū, involve themselves in teaching people
how to drink tea in consoling and therapeutic ways.
Sen no Rikyū was born in 1522 in the wealthy seaport of Sakai,
near present day Osaka. His father, Tanaka Yohyoue, was a
warehouse owner who worked in the fish trade and wished his
son to join him in business. But Rikyū turned away from
commercial life and went in search of wisdom and self-
understanding instead. He became fascinated by Zen
Buddhism, apprenticed himself to a few Masters and took to a
life of wandering the countryside, with few possessions. We
remember him today because of the contributions he made to
the reform and appreciation of the chanoyu, the Japanese tea
ceremony.
The Japanese had been drinking tea since the 9th century, the
practice having been imported from China by merchants and
monks. The drink was considered healthy as well as calming
and spiritual. But it was Rikyū’s achievement to put the tea
ceremony on a more rigorous and profound philosophical
footing. Thanks to his efforts, which were both practical and
intellectual, drinking tea in highly ritualised and thoughtful
ways, in particular buildings which he helped to design, became
an integral part of Zen Buddhist practice; as central to this
spiritual philosophy as poetry or meditation.
The Japan of his era had grown image-conscious and money-
focused. Rikyū promoted an alternative set of values which he
termed wabi-sabi — a compound word combining wabi, or
simplicity, with sabi, an appreciation of the imperfect. Across
fields ranging from architecture to interior design, philosophy to
literature, Rikyū awakened in the Japanese a taste for the
pared down and the authentic, for the undecorated and the
humble.
His particular focus was the tea ceremony, which Rikyū
believed to hold a superlative potential to promote  wabi-sabi.
He made a number of changes to the rituals and aesthetics of
the ceremony. He began by revolutionising the space in which
the tea ceremony was held. It had grown common for wealthy
people to build extremely elaborate teahouses in prominent
public places, where they served as venues for worldly
gatherings and displays of status. Rikyū now argued that the
teahouse should be shrunk to a mere two metres square, that it
should be tucked away in secluded gardens and that its door
should be made deliberately a little too small, so that all who
came into it, even the mightiest, would have to bow and feel
equal to others. The idea was to create a barrier between the
teahouse and the world outside. The very path to the teahouse
was to pass around trees and stones, to create a meander that
would help break ties with the ordinary realm. 
Properly performed, a tea ceremony was meant to promote
what Rikyū termed “wa” or harmony, which would emerge as
participants rediscovered their connections to nature: in their
garden hut, smelling of unvarnished wood, moss and tea
leaves, they would be able to feel the wind and hear birds
outside – and feel at one with the non-human sphere. Then
might come an emotion known as “kei” or ‘sympathy’, the fruit
of sitting in a confined space with others, and being able to
converse with them free of the pressures and artifice of the
social world. A successful ceremony was to leave its
participants with a feeling of “jaku” or ‘tranquillity’, one of the
most central concepts in Rikyū’s gentle, calming philosophy.

The Tai-an tearoom in Kyoto, designed by Rikyū

Rikyū’s prescriptions for the ceremony extended to the
instruments employed. He argued that tea ceremonies
shouldn’t henceforth rely on expensive or conventionally
beautiful cups or teapots. He liked worn bamboo tea scoops
that made a virtue of their age. Because in Zen philosophy,
everything is impermanent, imperfect and incomplete, objects
which are themselves marked by time and haphazard marks
can, suggested Rikyū, embody a distinct wisdom and promote it
in their users. 
Bamboo glass made by Rikyū himself
A wabi-sabi style tea bowl, 16th century
It was one of Rikyū’s achievements to take an act which in the
West is one of the most routine and unremarkable activities
and imbue it with a solemnity and depth of meaning akin to a
Catholic Mass. Every aspect of the tea ceremony, from the
patient boiling of the water to the measuring out of green tea
powder, was coherently related to Zen’s philosophical tenets
about the importance of humility, the need to sympathise with
and respect nature and the sense of the importance of the
transient nature of existence.
It’s open ended where this approach to everyday life might go.
It leaves open the possibility that many actions and daily habits
might, with sufficient creative imagination, become similarly
elevated, important and rewarding in our lives. The point isn’t
so much that we should take part in tea ceremonies, rather
that we should make aspects of our everyday spiritual lives
more tangible by allying certain materials and sensuous rituals.
Rikyū reminds us that there is a latent sympathy between big
ideas about life and the little everyday things, such as certain
drinks, cups, implements and smells. These are not cut off from
the big themes; they can make those themes more alive for us.
It is the task of philosophy not just to formulate ideas, but also
to work out mechanisms by which they may stick more firmly
and viscerally in our minds.