The five colours blind the eye.
The five tones deafen the ear.
The five flavours cloy the palate.
Racing and hunting madden the mind.
Rare goods tempt men to do wrong.
Therefore, the Sage takes care of the belly, not the eye.
He prefers what it within to what is without.
The ignorant person imagines that colour is seen with the eye alone. For instance, he believes that the colour green is an intrinsic property of, let’s say, a tree, and that this is something the tree shares in common with grass, lizards and Aston Martin sports cars.
Were he really to see with the eye alone, it would be obvious that there are infinite shades of green and that each one is unique. But he does not see with the eye alone, he sees with his eye and his intellect. His intellect categorises whole swathes of these unique experiences according to the ‘five colours’ and then proceeds to draw spurious connections links between them.
He imagines relationships between things that have no relationship based on superficial colour resemblances, and then puts himself out of joint of the flow of things by imaging things shall happen when they shall not. This process is what the sage calls ‘blinding the eye’. The uniqueness of what is there we don’t see; but we do imagine we are seeing what in actual fact we are thinking. The same goes, of course, for what we hear, what we taste and indeed for anything that comes via the senses.
The antidote to this unfortunate tendency of ours is to pay much closer attention to the world that is around us. And we concentrate far better when our experience in to always being diluted by thought. Then the world presents itself in a much brighter more vivid way and it becomes much easier to see and believe that each colour is truly unique and defies simple categorisation.
Sometimes our impressions of things can be so powerfully unique and vivid that the intellectual conventions seem totally unreal. We might look at a daffodil, and it feels that we have never seen such a thing in our life, so powerful and novel is the experience. At some vague level we know that it is just as daffodil and that we have seen them countless times…but it somehow feels hard to believe. This beautiful feeling of something familiar feeling unfamiliar is the opposite of déjà vu and therefore gets called jamais vu!
This falling away of the ‘conceptual eye’ that blinds is particularly obvious when we encounter reflective objects: mirrors, windows, and in nature: puddles of water. With our normal eyes clouded we just see a puddle and give it no further thought. But when our eyes are truly present to the scene we see how a normal puddle is a perfect mirror of the world. But because we aren’t thinking about reflection at all, objects appear as doubles and strike us as doubles. There is a beautiful Zen proverb that captures this vision: ‘Fish swim in the trees, and birds fly in the ocean.’ When we walk through the world and truly pay attention we see that this is literally true.
Racing and hunting madden the mind.
Thrilling of course, but once we have come to appreciate true spiritual pleasure and the wholesome peace that follows with it, we start to realise just how unsettling pleasures of this kind are. It’s as if our bodies are already wired enough already, and then we get this extra cup of strong coffee that we didn’t need or want. As meditation practice establishes itself, many people find that their taste for stimulants slowly withers away, without the need to go cold turkey. This is because spiritual pleasures are of the same nature as our everyday thrills, and therefore act as a superior substitute once we find them.
Rare goods tempt men to do wrong.
A rare jewel is just a transient moment in time, just as a common pebble is. The person of true vision would not bother to covet the rare jewel, even if he had the money to buy it. The person of ordinary vision, that is vision based on spurious intellectual concepts buys the jewel if he has the money; if he does not he tries to get the money; if he despairs of ever getting the money, he steals it instead. Anyone who has ceased to covet what others covet has already exceeded his peers in wisdom.
Therefore, the Sage takes care of the belly, not the eye.
He prefers what it within to what is without.
One of the true strengths in this text is its ability to speak to all levels of the wisdom. It is of course always sensible to take care first of what is most important. Even those who struggle to grasp spiritual truth would hardly deny that it is more important to fill the belly, the inside, before worrying about what the eye looks at on the outside.
And there is a message too for those of keener spiritual insight. The ‘within’ refers symbolically to something that is with us wherever we go. Something that is close at hand wherever and whatever we are doing. This thing is the present moment itself: it is the form that all experience of any kind takes. When we learn to see the present moment, to focus on it and enter deeply into it, we shall find that it yields more enjoyment than any passing phenomenon ever could. It is therefore the mark of wisdom to find this present moment, and to live your life forever choosing it.
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