Life Wisdom - By Words of Taoism - The Trap of Always More - Taoism

Episode Date: December 10, 2025

When desires have no end.Free resources, books and more on ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://wordsoftaoism.com/⁠⁠My blog ⁠⁠https://taoismteachings.substack.com/⁠

There exists a hunger that knows no satiation, not the hunger of the body that asks for its nourishment and is satisfied when it receives it. But another hunger, more obscure, that continues to demand even when we have obtained what we desired. This hunger does not truly seek to be filled. It seeks to perpetuate itself. A monk once asked his master,

why he always felt dissatisfied, despite all he had received. The master handed him a bowl and told him to fill it with water. The master then took a stone and pierced a hole in the bottom of the bowl. The water drained out immediately. Fill it again, said the master, and the water drained out once more. For all the water of the river, said the master, the bowl will never be full. Your hunger is this whole. It is not the quantity of what you receive that poses the problem.

It is the way in which you receive it. This parable illuminates our modern condition with troubling precision. We live in a civilization that ceaselessly pours into pierced bowls, convinced that the problem comes from the quantity poured and not from the state of the vessel. So, we pour more, faster, without ever stopping to examine why nothing remains. Veracity is distinguished from simple desire by its bottomless character. Natural desire has a form, contours, an end. I am thirsty, I drink, the thirst subsides.

I am cold, I cover myself, the cold retreats. These desires inscrime. themselves in a cycle where lack calls for satisfaction and where satisfaction brings back a form of rest. The body knows how to be content. It finds its balance, returns to its baseline, asks for nothing more once its essential needs are met. Veracity ignores this rest. It transforms each satisfaction into a springboard toward a new desire. No sooner have we obtained what we coveted, than our attention already shifts toward the next object. The pleasure of possession vanishes almost as soon as it appears, replaced by the anxiety of what we still lack.

We thus dwell perpetually in insufficiency, not because we truly lack something, but because our relationship to desire has become disordered. A Tauas fisherman was one day observing a rich man who complained bitterly about his life. The man possessed land, servants, full granaries, and yet he spoke like someone who had nothing. The fisherman asked him how many meals he could eat per day. The man answered three, perhaps four. And how many beds can you occupy for sleeping? Only one, the man admitted, said the fisherman. said the fisherman, you already possess a hundred times more than you need,

and you complain as if you had nothing to live on tomorrow. Your poverty is not in your granaries, it is in your gaze. The always more never travels alone. It is always accompanied by its twin, the right now. These two demands are the two phases of the same agitation. One refuses the limits of quantity, the other refuses the limits of time. Together they create a state of permanent lack where nothing that is present can ever suffice and where nothing can ever arrive quickly enough.

Immediacy has become not only possible but expected, demanded, normal. Waiting has become an anomaly, almost an offense. The technologies we created to serve us have ended up reconfiguring our expectations, and through them, our relationship to time itself. When everything can be obtained instantly, patience atrophies like a muscle no longer used. Yet the ancients knew that certain things cannot be accelerated without being destroyed. Bamboo doesn't grow faster because you pull on it,

fruit does not ripen sooner because you stare at it. A child does not learn to walk more quickly because you rush them. These processes have their own temporality inscribed in their very nature. To want to force them is to break them. A Zen gardener was planting a tree when an impatient visitor asked him how long it would take before it bore fruit. The gardener replied, perhaps ten years. Ten years, exclaimed the visitor, but you might be dead by then. The gardener smiled and said that was precisely why he was planting it today.

The interval between desire and its satisfaction is not a void to be suppressed. It is the very place where something essential unfolds. In this space, desire clarified. itself. We sometimes discover that what we thought we wanted was not what we truly wanted. Waiting teaches us, transforms us, prepares in us the capacity to receive what will come. Immediacy short-circuits this process. It gives us what we ask for before we have been able to question our request. It deprives us of this silent maturation that transits. transforms raw desire into right aspiration.

We obtain faster, but we receive less deeply. Quantity increases. Quality evaporates. A calligrapher was teaching his student the art of the brush. The student, impatient to produce beautiful works, ceaselessly asked when he could begin writing real characters. The master first had him grind ink for months, then hold the brush motionless for months more, then trace a simple horizontal stroke for an entire year.

The student complained that it was too long. The master replied that if he wanted to go fast, he would have to find another art, for calligraphy gives itself only to those who know how to wait. Years later, having become a master in turn, the student understood that this waiting was not an obstacle to learning, but learning itself. What is obtained too easily cannot be truly received. Instant satisfaction evaporates instantly, leaving neither trace nor deep memory.

The time invested in obtaining becomes an integral part of the value received. The meal long prepared nourishes differently, than the reheated dish. The friendship built over years offers something other than immediate connection. The know-how acquired through patient practice provides a satisfaction inaccessible to the shortcut. The Taoist compared this law to that of water carving stone.

It is not the force of the current that sculpts deep gorges, it is its constancy over millennia. Each drop seems insignificant, each day seems to change nothing, and yet the result surpasses all that violence could have accomplished. Patience is not the enemy of accomplishment. It is its secret condition. When we demand everything immediately,

we deprive ourselves of this slow alchemy. We accumulate moments without letting them time to settle, to integrate, to become part of us. Our life then resembles a river in flood that sweeps everything away without fertilizing anything. When it could resemble a peaceful river that nourishes every shore it touches. A Zen master was receiving a very prosperous businessman who complained of being constantly exhausted, despite his success. The master invited him to take tea. He began to pour into the visitor's cup

and continued pouring as the cup overflowed, the tea spreading over the table then onto the floor. The man cried out to stop, that the cup was full and could contain nothing more. The master set down the teapot and said that, like this cup, the man was full of his activities, his projects, his ambitions, and that he could receive nothing new

until he had first emptied himself. This image of overflowing reveals a truth that veracity refuses to hear. We have a limited capacity for reception. Not that our being is small or narrow, but true attention cannot extend to infinity. When we want everything, we can truly have nothing. When we run toward everything, we can truly arrive nowhere, true fullness comes not from accumulation, but from presence to what is already there.

The Towers' masters taught the usefulness of emptiness. The hub of the wheel is useful only through its central hollow. The vase can contain only thanks to its interior space. The house is habitable only through its openings and empty rooms. Likewise, our capacity to receive, depends on our capacity to make room. One who is already full can welcome nothing. One who wants to add always has no more space for anything.

Veracity claims to seek pleasure, but in reality flees something else. Beneath the agitation of desire often hides an anxiety that temporary acquisition soothes, a fear that perpetual movement prevents from rising to the surface. We consume so as not to feel, we accelerate so as not to hear, we accumulate so as not to see. Each new object, each new experience, each new distraction pushes back a little more, the silence we fear. But this silence is not empty. It is full of a presence that agitation prevents us from perceiving.

The contemplatives of all traditions have discovered this. At the heart of the silence they fled, they found not nothingness but fullness. What they sought everywhere else awaited them where they refused to stop. A Taoist hermit lived alone in the mountains with almost nothing. A traveler asked him if he did not suffer from lacking so many things. The hermit replied by asking what he lacked. The traveler enumerated. comforts, entertainments, company, possessions. The hermit listened patiently, then replied that it was

strange, for he himself had never felt the absence of these things. Perhaps he said, lack is not in what we do not have, but in our way of thinking about what we do not have. He had simply stopped counting what he did not have and had begun to fully inhabit what he had. The Taoist tradition teaches that nature knows no haste. Spring does not hurry to replace winter. The sun does not grow impatient, crossing the sky. The seed does not agitate to become a tree faster. And yet everything is accomplished,

each thing in its time, according to its own rhythm, with a perfection that our precipitation could never be. could never... This observation does not invite immobility, but alignment. When we cease forcing the course of things in order to accord ourselves with it, our action becomes more effective, not less. The archer, who releases his arrow at the right moment,

reaches his target without apparent effort. The swimmer who follows the current advances faster than one who struggles against it. The sage who acts in natural timing accomplishes more than the hurried man who constantly agitates. Zhuanzi told the story of a butcher whose knife remained sharp after 19 years of use, while other butchers had to sharpen theirs every month.

His secret was not in the quality of the blade, but in his way of cutting. He followed the natural interstices of the flesh, The empty spaces between bones and tendons where the knife could glide without effort. He never forced, never struggled against the structure of what he worked. Likewise, one who knows the natural lines of life can advance without exhausting himself, accomplish without wearing himself out. Contentment is not the death of desire, but it's transformation. There exists a difference between the desire that devours and the one that savors, between the hunger that gulps and the one that appreciates.

The first always leaves us empty, even when it obtains what it wants. The second leaves us fulfilled, even when it does not obtain. One is a source of perpetual agitation, the other of lasting peace. The Zen masters spoke of the beginner's mind that marvels at what the expert no longer sees. The first bowl of rice of the hungry monk after a fasting retreat contains more nourishment than the banquet of the jaded king. It is not the quantity that has changed. It is the quality of reception.

One eats with his whole being, the other barely with his body. This quality of reception can be cultivated. It requires slowing down, doing less, letting each experience fully infuse before moving on to the next. A single fruit eaten with attention nourishes more than ten fruits swallowed distractedly. A single true conversation satisfies more than a hundred superficial exchanges. A single day, full. Only lived is worth more than years traversed as a sleepwalker.

Laozzi said that one who knows that enough is enough will always have enough. This phrase seems almost incomprehensible to our modern ears. So much does it contradict the certainties of our era. And yet it contains a key we have lost. Enough is not a fixed quantity, but a quality of relationship. of relationship. It is not determined by what we have, but by how we have what we have. Two people possessing exactly the same thing can live in opposite worlds. One in abundance, the other in lack. The difference is not external, it is in the gaze. A monk possessed

only three objects, a bowl, a robe, and a walking staff. A thief entered his hut one night, and found nothing to take. The monk awakened told him he was sorry he could not offer him more. He looked through the window and added that he wished he could give him that magnificent moon. The thief fled, troubled. Years later he returned, having become an honest man, and asked the monk to accept him as a disciple. He said he had realized that night that the monk with almost a monk,

almost nothing, was richer than all those he had robbed. Modern veracity tells us that stopping is dangerous, that rest is laziness, that contentment is mediocrity. It keeps us in a perpetual race where the finish line always retreats one step when we approach. We run not toward something, but flee the sensation of not running. But the sages have always known that true power is in the capacity to stop. Anyone can begin, anyone can continue under the effect of momentum. But knowing how to stop at the right moment, before excess, before exhaustion,

before too much destroys what enough had built, this requires a mastery that veracity can never attain. A famous archer shot only one arrow per day. His disciples asked him why when he could have shot hundreds. He replied that a single arrow shot with total presence was worth more than a thousand arrows shot by habit. Each morning he prepared at length, waited for the perfect moment, then shot. That single arrow contained his whole life of that day. afterward he set down his bow for he knew he had done what there was to do the return to the present is not a technique but a recognition

it is not about fabricating a new state but about ceasing to flee the one already there the present does not need to be reached it only needs to be noticed It is not somewhere at the end of a quest. It is here now, simply waiting for us to stop looking elsewhere. In this inhabited present, the always more loses its urgency. Why run toward tomorrow when today is full? Why desire what we do not have when what we have reveals its hidden riches? The race stops not by force, but by evidence. one who has found water does not continue seeking the well.

An old master was sitting by a river when a hurried young man asked him the path to happiness. The master pointed at the river. The young man looked and saw nothing special. He asked what he should see. The master simply replied the river. The young man impatient went off to find someone more useful. Years later, exhausted by his quest, he returned to the same place.

The old master had long since died, but the river still flowed. The young man, grown old in turn, sat by the bank and looked. And this time, he saw. The bottomless hunger cannot be sated, because it is not truly hunger. It is agitation disguised as appetite, fear disgust. as desire, flight disguised as quest, giving it what it asks only strengthens it, like feeding a fire with wood. The only way to calm it is to see what it truly is. This seeing does not require extraordinary effort. It requires only that we stop long enough to look. In that tranquil gaze,

the hunger reveals its nature. It is not a monster to be fought, but a confusion to be be dispelled. It disappears like the morning mist when the sun rises, not because we have chased it away, but because the light has come. And in that space where the hunger has fallen silent, we discover something unexpected. We had never lacked anything. What we saw it everywhere had been there all along, masked by the very agitation of our search. The bowl was not pierced. We had simply never set it down long enough to see that it was already full.