Lessons from a Teashop
“You will always be short one teapot,” declared the owner of a shop specializing in Chinese antiques. Ceramics and purple clay teapots from various dynasties, predominantly Qing dyansty, have lined his well-lit shelves for three generations now.
The owner literally lives amidst a mountain of treasure. Three generations ago, his grandfather came into possession of valuable antiques dating to the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties. As a beneficiary of these valuable artifacts that have appreciated significantly in value over time, he has found himself at the intersection of inherited wealth (arguably the best kind) and culture. Indeed, antique teapots are a manifestation of the two.
It is a propitious spot to find oneself in, to say the least. But of course, this is 2020, so hundreds of teapots spanning centuries still isn’t enough.
When he made that comment—unsurprising in this day and age, I suppose—I thought of a line from the Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD) historian and philosopher, Sima Qian’s (司马迁), Records of the Grand Historian (史记)：
<夫千乘之主，萬家之侯，百室之君，尚猶患貧，而況匹夫編戶之民乎！>
Regardless of status or wealth, desire never desists, one feels it is not enough and continues to grasp and cling. Always short a dollar *sigh*
Two millennia later, nothing has changed. Our appetites and instinct to possess have all but secured their rule over modern minds. Our physical needs have become our emperors. We have indisputably made a good deal of measurable progress (man on the moon, etc.), but there is value to the immeasurable as well. Spending an afternoon obsessing over the best taco truck in a 20 mile radius or the new $2000 couch from West Elm is okay, but are there other questions that need to be asked for your own long-term contentedness?
We live in a contradictory world where material wealth and living standards show a trajectory up and to the right (yay!) but also show rates of suicide and clinical depression in the same direction. How to get to the root of the reason? How to reconcile the two?
I find the tea table to be the perfect setting in which is ask myself about how to understand desire, which is to say, the human condition, beyond a superficial level.
The consequence of desire, of course, is suffering or some sort of dissatisfaction if unhappiness is too strong a word for you. You want something (love, power, money) and you have expectations (of yourself and others) and when not all goes according to the images stored in your mind, when you don’t live up to the bar you set for yourself or when someone else doesn’t behave in the way you expect them to, there will inevitably be negative emotions on your end. It could be disappointment or more destructive, anger.
How then, to achieve without grasping, to love without expectation?