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A rhetoric of slowness and speed has been used by philosophers since the ancient periods to characterise and assess different ways of life. Buddhist, Confucian, and Daoist discourses exploit associations, literal and figurative, between slower styles of life and virtue, on the one hand, and hastier styles of life and vice, on the other. Kongzi (Confucius) praised the virtue of ‘timeliness’, which manifests in an ability to ‘advance when it is appropriate to advance and remain still when it is appropriate to remain still’. A timely person acts and speaks in thoughtful, considerate, considered ways, guided by the ‘rituals’ central to Confucian life.
Early Daoists texts, too, use speed and slowness as moral metaphors. Zhuangzi laments the ‘sadness’ of harried, overcommitted people whose lives are like ‘a horse galloping by, unstoppable’, always active, ‘exhausted to the point of collapse’. The unknown authors of the Daodejing diagnose this hastiness as a sign one has been swept away by drives to be ‘busy’ — a turbulent condition all-too-obvious in agitated Confucians, ‘regulated and confined by [their] own schemes’. Racing headlong through life is a sign we have ‘lost the Way’. The more one takes on, the faster one has to go, darting about, frantic to satisfy the duties, demands, and expectations of a corrupt social world from which the wise person retreats.
The Buddha, too, laments the distracting effects of the attachments and cravings of the lives of ‘unenlightened worldlings’. The Dhammapada says that ‘misguided’ people ‘strongly rush towards pleasurable objects’, swept away in an unceasing ‘flood of passionate thoughts’. In an Udana story, the Buddha compares them to moths flying into flames — ‘Rushing headlong, missing what’s essential’, the bugs keep ‘meeting their misfortune’, unable to recognise the self-destructiveness of their actions. Their frenetic activity offers a perfect image for the restless insatiability of worldly life:
Only causing ever newer bonds to grow.
So obsessed are some by what is seen and heard,
They fly just like these moths — straight into the flames.
By contrast, the lives of Buddhist monks and nuns are characterised by a deliberate slowness, literally and figuratively. Without giving into torpor and enervation, a monk or nun is ‘constantly scrupulous, cautious, observant’, an array of virtues shown in quietist stillness. The …
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