Your name or your person,
Which is dearer?
Your person or your goods,
Which is worth more?
Gain or loss,
Which is a greater bane?
That is why excessive meanness
Is sure to lead to great expense;
Too much store
Is sure to end in immense loss.
Know contentment
And you will suffer no disgrace;
Know when to stop
And you will meet with no danger.
You can then endure.
Gain or loss, Which is a greater bane? Gain is the bane, without question. Thought it’s very difficult to accept this truth. Only when I look back over my life can I find evidence of the bane of gain. Gain never brought me contentment. If anything it wets my appetite for more and MORE. Note how we tend to celebrate gain… which is adding to gain.
Loss is something which grounds me and returns me to reality. Only in reality can I hope to find contentment.
This chapter offers advice helping to set personal priorities—basically, how to live a happy life. Personal priorities determine the course of ones life. Priorities which are driven by transient pleasures and desires lead away from contentment, though they promise just the opposite. As Buddha said in his 2nd Truth: `The desire to live for the enjoyment of self entangles us in a net of sorrow, pleasures are the bait and the result is pain’.
Knowing that gain is the greater bane makes it much easier to be content. Part of what makes life unsettled is the constant push for gain (and avoidance of loss) which we BELIEVE will bring us a happy contentment once gained. KNOWING that it won’t calms our desires.
These tips on life are absent from society at large. Putting store into, and gaining more of this or that is the modern theme. Society doesn’t advocate the view that what you place store in determines your loss, not to mention the greater the store, the more immense the loss. Insurance has become our answer to loss.
My name correlates to personal integrity. This is where inner security lies. When I lack this inner sense of security, then my person becomes my security. And after that my goods become my security. The more inwardly secure I feel, the less attached to the rest I am, plain and simple. Security lies in giving up and embracing loss as my life’s companion. The more I let go to this, the more secure I am.