MEDITATIONS: DOKKODO; THE WAY OF ALONENESS XIV.

Principle Fourteen

Do not hold on to possessions you no longer need. (Miyamoto, Musashi)

All clinging is the conquest of fear over one’s faith, in himself and in the world. Fear is the freezing emotion, the fragile crystallization of ice and the brittle petrification of stone. Therefore, to value too highly the quantity and duration of the possession of an object—or even a relationship—is to cease self-transformation and to stop along the Way.

This, like so many other aspects of human existence, is a matter of misplaced and misarranged values.

In regard to material wealth, this wisdom is generally accepted, if not also practiced. It follows naturally and logically that, if a car or house or collection of baubles fails to help make the owner happy, then the possession no longer serves its function. It shifts psychological category from useful tool to burden of mind, space, and time: a car must be fueled and kept in operating condition; a house likewise needs fixing and maintenance; and a book collection clutters up multiple shelves as well as brain space in the form of worry about loss or damage. If one’s goal is happiness, or even just contentment, accruing excess material possessions, by definition, runs counter to one’s own interest.

Beyond the pragmatic argument lies the moral case for Musashi’s wisdom. This reasoning is also widely argued, that mistaking the object for the happiness it helps to facilitate orients one away from spreading and sustaining the positive experience or contentment itself and toward protecting and sustaining the tool used as part of the process to attain it—at the cost of the thing itself. Practicing clinging in this fashion not only overburdens the collector, but it leads to the sacrifice of the long-term objective for the sake of a transient, short-term benefit doomed to evaporate with the changes of the winds.

But that does not plumb the full depths of letting go of excess possessions. If one extends possessions to mean immaterial belonging as well (as in, “belonging to a group”), relationships, titles, credentials, and memberships all fall into this category. To cling to any of these does no less damage to one’s dignity than does devolving into an insatiable goblin possessed by a shiny ring. The boxer who clings too long to his championship title is eventually defeated, and when he falls, it disgraces his legacy. The same can be said of the sages of yester-year’s heyday. They were once the pinnacle sources of learned wisdom, but in time, those who came after climbed and surmounted their gargantuan shoulders. Such sages who refuse to update their self-conceptions, clinging to their credentials for their sense of worth and competence, become mocked when they might have otherwise been venerated. And to speak of updating conceptions as a means of sustaining reputation, one cannot overlook group membership. In the west, in the age of information, political factions prove a perfect example of this. Parties across the democratic world have transformed so rapidly, they are no longer identifiable with themselves just a decade prior. And yet, the constituents, whose values have not changed so radically, cling blindly to their party membership, making marks of themselves, dupes and hypocrites, every side rightly critiquing the inconsistency of the others.

People would do better to remember the wisdom as described in Lao-tzu’s Tao Te Ching:

if you judge yourself by material things
that are temporarily in your possession
you will always be worried about who will take possession of them next (Lao-tzu 18)

. . .

have just enough talent
have just enough skill
have just the right amount of tools for work
have just the right amount of weapons for protection (142)

. . .

the ancient child asks
but where can you find the connection
it is a bright moment that cannot be grasped (50)

“Do not hold on to possessions you no longer need.” Learn to let go of both material and immaterial possession so that your hands are free to receive what is to come—for life is not the things you pick up along your journey, it is the Way itself.

Lao-tzu. Tao Te Ching; An Authentic Taoist Translation, translated by John Bright-Fey, Sweetwater Press, 2014.

Miyamoto, Musashi. Dokkodo, translator unknown, 1645.