The Abundance of Less by Andy Couturier
The Book in Three Sentences
Presented as a collection of ten stories of life in rural Japan, this book encompasses a wealth of knowledge that Andy Couturier collected from elders and translated over the course of fifteen years. Instead of a typical interview format, each chapter is framed as a dialogue where the author places himself in the narrative as if he is being mentored. While themes are wide-ranging, they can best be summarized by five points: Gentle, Small, Humble, Slow, and Simple.
Notes
There is a lot of depth to this book, but you’ll need to slow down and spend the time to unpack the wisdom contained within it. I don’t like to set an ambitious annual book goal just in case something like this comes along and I need 4–5 weeks of careful reading. Coming from a background in Anthropology, the level of effort to put something together like this is not lost on me: this book has profoundly affected the way I think about life. Currently it is my favourite book I’ve read in 2020, and I will continue to revisit this book for many years to come. It is now on my books to gift short list (something I should really publish).
1 San Oizumi — The Teahouse
Before I go to bed at night—although my kids tell me to pipe down—I say aloud how grateful I am for this unlikely and gorgeous day. (p13)
I notice how the seemingly random placement of the outbuildings gives a meandering and intimate feeling to this place. I come upon a stone pathway leading down the hill. On the ground floor of the building that I slept in last night, I discover a room that seems newly converted to a private library. The door to the small room is finely constructed of both Japanese joinery and gnarled pieces of driftwood. (p16)
The Way of Tea is one of humility and poetic sentiments, not of grandiosity and gorgeousness. (p23)
I went to Italy, Spain, and around Europe and all the buildings we made from stone—the churches, the castle walls, and ramparts. That would take a tremendous amount of energy in a time when there were no bulldozers. With everything done by hand, they would have needed some kind of slavery system to build them. When I saw that, I thought, “wow Asia was still relatively peaceful back in the olden days.” (p26)
When you use money to solve problems, the necessity to think for yourself disappears. You can resolve all your difficulties by using money, or buying a product to fix it for you. But for me, the opportunity to think for yourself is too valuable to be wasted that way. Who knows long we’ll be here, you’ve got to treasure the time we have. (p30)
2 Osamu Nakamura — Woodblock Craftsman
Nakamura’s way of speaking, like the minute geometric designs he chisels into wooden blocks, is both precise and evocative, but never overly serious. (p42)
A craftsperson’s job is half meditation, half creation. If you keep working, all of a sudden you slip into a timeless space, where the work and you cease to be separate. There’s only the work itself — when you come out you don’t know if several minutes or several hours have passed. (p51)
Muneyoshi Yanagi (The Culture of Handicrafts), asked himself “What is beautiful”, and the answer for him was “Everyday things: the things used in daily life by ordinary people.” (p53)
Nakamura’s approach to life is modelled on Yanagi’s philosophy, “the beauty of usefulness.” (p54)
For his woodblock prints, however, he will accept no money. “If I did, it might spoil the enjoyment I get from the process of carving.” (p56)
Nakamura only keeps a few books and rereads the most important oneness every two or three years. As he grows older and changes, he receives different things from the same words. (pp56–57)
“If you have a lot of time, a lot of things are enjoyable. Making this kind of woodblock, or collecting the wood for the fire, or even cleaning things—it’s all enjoyable and satisfying if you give yourself time.” (p57)
Nakamura keeps his presence so calm by reducing the number of plans he makes so that they fit easily into the time he has available, instead of trying to accelerate his life to accomplish a long list of projects. How to live a satisfying life because he has set a pace slow enough to observe the process of the mind. “I felt ill at ease and irritable all the time. I eventually learned, however, to adjust my imagination, and plans, to what was actually possible.” (p58)
“To have more time than things to do in that time, that is a very rich kind of feeling.” (p66)
3 Atsuko Watanabe — Mother and Activist
“If you are selling your time, no matter how much money you get, you can’t ever buy back that time. I knew from when I was eleven or twelve years old I didn’t want to live that kind of life.” (p.70)
I saw the people living around me: every day they just gobbled up their food and then fell asleep. That was it.” (p75)
“It’s totally rude to say that because you cannot understand it, you will ignore it.” (p92)
“There’s a width to the truth, and it’s very wide. This is truth, and this also is truth, and this too is truth.” The reason I personally believe something is correct is because that is what is necessary for me to grow: something may be truth for me, but to someone else it’s not truth. (p92)
The actions each of us needs to take for our development are different. Everyone has some wish, idea, impulse or desire to do better. Painting helped me evolve, though I was not aware of it. (p99)
“Most people have directed their attention toward having things more than time, and that’s why they are always running.” (p101)
4 Kogan Murata — On Buddhism
“Confucius: not interesting. But Lao Tzu and Chang Tzu: really unusual. They turned Confucius’ morality completely upside down and backward.” (p112)
Murata travelled to India and spent a lot of time free to do anything he wished. He spent a lot of time acting “slowly”, drinking tea, and walking around town. (p114)
Whenever I [author] visit Murata, he always has time to talk. There’s no rush inside of him, no conflict in his soul between talking all day and some other thing he might have to do. (p119).
That’s the way of Zen: they don’t teach. You are just supposed to simply do it. (p125)
Some new people write one song after another, for me, this is shallow. There are perhaps forty classic tunes, I’ve chosen seven. I can play them over and over, I can spend all day doing that. (p125)
“It doesn’t matter to me how people react, to play is good, that is all.” The presence of a monk embarked on a lifelong devotion to meditation reminds me of my own practice, and reminds us of the importance of our inner life. (p129)
“The Zen way is not like you think, with the reigns pulled tight all the time. Some periods, of course, are very strict, but others are looser. If things are too strict, you can’t continue your practice.” And, continuing is everything.
The very worst thing, as the Buddha said, is attachment. I decided that little by little, try to reduce your craving and greed for things. The fewer things you have, the better. “I want, I want” is the beginning of suffering. (pp140–141)
5 Asha Amemiya — Mother and teacher of good enough
In Amemiya’s writing, I find the part of her that is drawn to the slow, the gentle, and the beautiful: she writes of the mists that cloud the tea plantations around Darjeeling, or the sound of a hard rain on the rooftops of an old mountain town, or the simple pleasure of drinking a cup of tea in the middle of a crowded bazaar while gazing purposelessly at the people passing by. Her line drawings depict how to put on local gowns or clothing, traditional kitchen tools and how to use them, and diagrams of thatched-roof construction. (p160)
Amemiya’s daughter is critical of the choices her parents made, but I have to remind myself of the almost universal tendency for grown-up children in their early twenties to focus primarily on the faults of their parents and not the struggles they went through to make their kids become what they are. (p165)
There are all kinds of disagreeable things in life—I just think, that’s my job. Otherwise, you start to think, “I did that yesterday, why do I have to do that again?” It’s much better to say to yourself, “If I cut back the weeds, then the eggplants will get big, and I’ll be really happy.” (p168)
6 Akira Ito — The art and craft of the ordinary
As he hands me the book Ito says, “This may sound strange, but though I never met him, this man was my teacher.” (p186)
Ito studied Motai’s writings, archived his works, and made copies of his paintings, he steeped himself in the artist’s influence, and this is how Motai became Ito’s mentor, even though he had died nearly two decades before. (p193)
Have you ever seen Ito’s workroom? He has such a huge amount of drawings and sketches. It’s like a mountain! Those people who think that being an artist has to be glorious and shining—they’re the ones who give up. You’ve got to be like Ito: just keep walking, on and on, creating your work. (p195)
Ito prefers handcraft and unsophisticated art, things made by common people. Without artifice, professionalism, or clever devices, the essence of an expression can shine through. (p204)
For Ito, handwork is not simply the means to do something: it is the meaning itself. (p209)
“In more than the three-thousand-year history of these distinctive paintings, it is only recently that they have been painted on paper. Traditionally they were painted on the walls of the house and were thought of as women’s work, in the same way as cooking, cleaning, and doing the laundry were, so girls would learn to do it as they grew up. These paintings were always regarded as offerings to the gods, and it was not until recently that they were thought of as decorative, or as art.” From “The Folk Paintings of Mithila Village: Returning after a Twenty Years’ Absence” by Akira Ito, reprinted on pp212–214.
“The West has placed great importance on ‘respect for life,’ as well as those things that are immutable and things that last forever. In the East, as a way to stay in touch with our own spirit, predominance has been put on obeying the basic law of ceaseless change headed in the direction of absolute nothingness.” From “On the Eastern Conception of the Universe” by Akira Ito, reprinted on p217.
7 Wakako Oe — Spirituality and staying grounded
Spiritual life can play a role in one’s vitality. Without the presence of ‘the gods’, people can lose themselves, and not know what they’re doing, what their values and principles are. They get confused. But when the eyes of the gods are on you, you become visible to yourself; you reexamine who you are. (p231)
Doesn’t it make you angry? “It’s not like that,” she says. I see it, but “you have to stay grounded, and act from your convictions, not just react to everything that pops up. You have to rely on your own vision.” (p252)
8 Gufu Watanabe — Journaling and observing patterns
As Gufu travelled around India and Nepal, his journals grew organically, evolving as he did. While the early ones were more like collections of notes, later journals began to have richer, more detailed illustrations. “More space opened up in my heart and my mind.” Over time the journals began to change him: he was still the same person, but his way of relating to the journey was different. Keeping track of the details became fore more than a record: it became a way of intensifying the experience and a fuller interaction with life. Eventually, the journals became the primary reason for staying in India: the recording of the experience became one with the experience itself. (p271)
When travelling Gufu illustrated the many specific curry and thali meals just as they were set before him, each small dish labelled with notes on recipes and ratios of ingredients. “Sometimes before I finished drawing and colouring the pictures, the plates of food would have gotten completely cold. But that was okay with me because I could always make them again later once I had written them down.” Even though he hasn’t been back in over two decades, he’s still able to make a lot of the subcontinental dishes. The time he took then keeps giving to him over and over. (p270)
By means of his garden and a cheap spiral-bound notebook, Gufu immersed himself in the complexity of the world for more than a decade without spending hardly any money. It’s an abundance that most of us forget to notice. He turned his attention to the actual rhythms of nature rather than to some conceptual idea of them. (p277)
“It’s important to me to be someone who has time. There’s a term we have in Japanese, furyu: the characters are ‘wind’ and ‘flow’. Someone with furyu has time to write haiku, or can appreciate flowers, and they have space in their emotions to look at the moon or the stars.” People that are too busy making money don’t have furyu, and they’re not full people. (293)
9 Koichi Yamashita
The floorboards are stained a rich saddle brown and are shiny from years of people sitting and talking, living on them. (p303)
“Surrounded on all sides by the inconvenience of countryside living, you can get a rich enjoyment of the flavour of your own humanness.” From “Attempting Food Self-sufficiency” by Koichi Yamashita, reprinted on p306.
Think about eating a meal: if you include all the time it takes to till the soil, pull the weeds, harvest the vegetables, cut the vegetables, cook them, and serve them to a table, the process of eating might take about four hours. Now you can pop something in a microwave and be done in minutes — but what did you do with all that extra time? You’re busy, busy, busy all the way up to the minute before you put it in there. (p311)
10 Masanori Oe
“Whatever medium I use, I’m pursuing the same theme: ‘Who am I? Where from, where to?’ I simply try to find the best tool, the easiest-to-use tool at the time to go deeper… the medium doesn’t matter so much.” (p350)
Afterword
Andy Couturier uses five words to summarize his book fifteen years in the making:
Gentle
Small
Humble
Slow
Simple. (p387)
Couturier describes how he has modified his life to use many of the principles he’s learned from writing the book. In particular, he prioritizes having time to “sink into the experience, and not just rushing back right after a weekend vacation. I have enough room to try things and to make mistakes, to reach dead ends and turn around. There’s space in my mind, and on the calendar, to start again.” p396
In light of all the wonders of our life on the land, I reconsider Thoreau, who, as Nakamura reminded me, left his cabin after two years. Perhaps you will also be encouraged to re-fortify your vision, even if ‘life’ pushes back. Renew, renew, renew, your passion for a better way to live, and for a better world for others. That renewal is part, I think, of what the poet David Whyte calls, “The conversational nature of reality.” (pp 403–404)
Lessons
“As my Japanese improved, I came to understand that they were living out a real philosophy: they set up their lives and days so that they have time to think about the most important questions.” (p.xvii)
Reducing things down to only a few important things. For Murata: only 7 songs, practiced over and over for decades to know it well. For Nakamura, only a few books, read over and over to see new things as he changed.
