Introduction
You live in a world driven by relentless ambition, mechanical efficiency, and spiritual fatigue. This over-civilization leaves you stressed, disconnected from your physical senses, and trapped by modern humbugs.
Lin Yutang offers a remedy in The Importance of Living. The central idea is that true wisdom lies in a lyrical, reasonable naturalism that balances human dreams and reality through humor, leisure, and the direct enjoyment of earthly life.
The book guides you from understanding your animal heritage and physical drives to reclaiming human dignity through play and freedom. You will learn to embrace the art of loafing, domestic comfort, and the healing power of nature and art.
- How can you accept your animal nature without guilt?
- What is the value of leisure and idle time?
- How do you cultivate a home and an enjoyment of everyday senses?
1. A Lyrical Philosophy of Life
Approach to Life
Philosophy should be a personal, lyrical testimony of life and thought rather than an objective, academic system. You must reject formal academic philosophy, logic, and claims to eternal truths in favor of an unconventional approach. You read life at first hand and rely entirely on intuitive judgment.
True philosophical insights can be gathered from obscure, everyday sources rather than solely from canonical academic texts.
The author draws inspiration from ordinary people and everyday observations:
- Mrs. Huang, a family amah;
- a Soochow boat-woman;
- a Shanghai street car conductor;
- a lion cub in the zoo;
- a squirrel in Central Park.
He grounds his modern perspective in a select historical company of unconventional, non-orthodox spirits and poets. You can view historical figures from various dynasties, such as the eighth-century Po Chüyi and the eleventh-century Su Tungp'o, as spiritual collaborators who share your independent judgment.
The highest ideal of Chinese culture is a state of detachment based on wise disenchantment, leading to high-mindedness and the intense joy of living.
You achieve emotional emancipation, freedom, and nonchalance by viewing life with sweet irony and gentle tolerance. You abandon extravagant illusions to attain takuan, meaning detachment, and k'uanghuai, meaning high-mindedness.
A Pseudo-Scientific Formula
Wisdom is generated when reality and dreams are balanced and tempered by a healthy sense of humor.
Realism eliminates non-essentials in philosophy, while humor acts as a critical check against fanatical or overly grand ideals. Realism forces you to test every activity against the end of living itself rather than abstract metaphysics. Humor acts as a gentle buffer against the harsh shocks of reality.
National characteristics can be roughly mapped using weighted ingredients of reality, dreams, humor, and sensitivity. Using arbitrary numerical values from 1 to 4, the author scores various nations:
- R 3 D 2 H 2 S 1 for the English;
- R 2 D 3 H 3 S 3 for the French;
- R 3 D 3 H 2 S 2 for the Americans;
- R 3 D 4 H 1 S 2 for the Germans;
- R 2 D 4 H 1 S 1 for the Russians;
- R 2 D 3 H 1 S 1 for the Japanese;
- R 4 D 1 H 3 S 3 for the Chinese.
2. Biological Views of Mankind
Views of Mankind
The traditional Christian view creates a dichotomy between spirit and flesh. It teaches that human nature is totally depraved and that enjoyment of life is sinful. Christian theology introduced the concept of the Fall of Man caused by knowledge and the introduction of the Devil working through the body.
Christian missionaries generally try to make converts by first impressing upon them a consciousness of sin and human wickedness.
The Greek pagan view embraced mortality and made their gods human. This led to a love of this life and the exercise of a free speculative spirit.
Socrates proposed a libation to the gods just before drinking hemlock, reflecting an easy familiarity with the divine similar to Confucius.
The Chinese view takes a reasonable and naturalistic approach to human nature. It treats passions and desires as normal and expects neither too much nor too little from life.
Human nature is earth-bound and natural, requiring a reconciliation of spirit and flesh rather than ascetic denial.
Good philosophy must recognize that you have a body and senses. The traditional over-emphasis on a bodiless spirit is fatal to a rounded view of life.
A bodiless angel or ghost would be incapable of drinking iced orange juice, painting without pigment, or experiencing the satisfaction of scratching an itch. Light might dart in ethereal waves at 183,000 miles per second, but a senseless spirit cannot feel the earth.
A Biological View
Humans are earth-bound and transient guests on a beautiful planet. Accepting this temporary span brings spiritual harmony.
Henry David Thoreau felt a kinship to the sod and the patience of woodchucks, finding happiness in earthly reality rather than seeking an abstract spirit.
The human body operates as a self-regulating, self-repairing machine. It possesses an intrinsic intelligence that commands deep scientific respect.
When a loop of the intestine is wounded, it temporarily becomes immobile. Another intestinal loop or the omentum spontaneously adheres to it to occlude the opening within four or five hours. The body keeps up a normal temperature within a tenth of a Fahrenheit degree.
3. Our Animal Heritage and Stomach
Our Animal Heritage
Recognizing our animal ancestry helps you achieve a sense of human comedy and a forgiving tolerance for human flaws.
By remembering that you are a descendant of Neanderthals and anthropoid apes, you stop taking human follies so seriously. You develop the capacity to laugh at your limitations. This understanding allows you to forgive the censors, dictators, lawmakers, and busybodies who constantly interfere in other people's lives.
Clarence Day's essay "This Simian World" and the Chinese monkey epic "Hsiyuchi" use monkey imagery to illustrate human intellectual cleverness combined with lower passions and lack of balance. Monkey Wuk'ung and Pig Pachieh embody these enduring traits.
Human civilization forces a wholesale transformation of natural instincts into social crimes, making normal animal behaviors appear savage or immoral. While wild animals are perfectly adapted to nature and their instincts are healthy, you must adapt to an artificial civilization. In a social context, natural behaviors like stealing in mice, killing in lions, or public reproduction in beasts are recoded as theft, murder, and obscenity. Every cat tearing up possessions or every dog barking too much is viewed through civilization's lens as an unfaithful husband or a noisy vandal.
The shared biological limit of human mortality creates a natural democracy and forms the foundation of all poetry, philosophy, and historical forgiveness. Because princes and paupers alike are limited to a body of five or six feet and a lifespan of fifty or sixty years, no one truly owns the earth as a permanent landlord. You remain a transient guest. Shakespeare's Hamlet traces the dust of Alexander the Great to a beer-barrel bung-hole, while Chuangtse drums on a basin and sings when his wife dies.
On Having a Stomach
Expressing open joy in eating and rejecting overly repressed table manners preserves mental health and encourages the culinary arts. Suppressing the natural joy of eating through overly strict table manners leads to melancholy and neurosis. True enjoyment of food keeps your psychology frank and healthy.
- Imitate the French by sighing an expression of approval when a good cutlet arrives.
- Make an honest animal grunt of satisfaction after tasting the first mouthful.
The Chinese smack their lips over good soup and get deep spiritual happiness from a well-filled stomach compared to miserable Western dining decorum. Human society is divided between herbivorous natures who mind their own business and carnivorous natures who thrive on pugilism and politics. Biological ancestry divides humans into peaceful herbivorous types, such as creative artists and quiet professors, and pugnacious carnivorous types who love wire-pulling, double-crossing, and meddling in the lives of others. Lin Yutang abandoned politics after four months upon discovering he lacked a carnivorous temperament.
Having mortal bodies susceptible to murder means that human disputes are historically settled through a combination of strong muscles, force, and chatter. While angels settle arguments purely through chatter and brutes settle them purely through might, humans combine both into a tea house method where chattering continues until the party with the stronger arm imposes their will and claims to be right. Galileo retracted his scientific discoveries because his mortal body was susceptible to torture and prison cells.
The human mind is charming precisely because of its unreasonableness, inconsistencies, and irrationality rather than cold logical perfection. The human brain evolved primarily as an organ to sniff food and sense danger, much like an octopus with tentacles feeling the truth through perceptual reality rather than conceptual reality. Julius Caesar nearly regards an empire for Cleopatra, and Newton or literary figures yield to sudden irrational impulses. Preventing societal reversion to animal savagery requires cultivating a warm spirit of reasonableness and emotional education rather than cold intellect.
4. On Human Dignity and Freedom
Human dignity rests on playful curiosity, dreams, humor, and individual waywardness against regimented automation.
On Human Dignity
Human dignity consists of four specific characteristics embodied by the cultural figure of the scamp. These traits include playful curiosity, a capacity for dreams, a sense of humor, and a certain waywardness of behavior. You can see this as a Chinese version of individualism.
Human civilization and free inquiry originated from the playful curiosity and fumbling activity made possible by the emancipation of human hands. Assuming an erect posture freed the hands from walking, led to tool use, and increased brain size through manipulation.
Observing monkeys in a zoo turning about ear-lobes and eyelids for sheer fun illustrates the biological promise of an Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein.
The evolutionary shift to an erect bipedal posture introduced anatomical maladjustments, sexual modesty, and the subjection of women. A pregnant Pleistocene mother had to shamefacedly walk on all floors when unobserved to relieve her aching spine.
Suppression of thought liberty by autocratic governments degrades human intelligence and sows the seeds of their own downfall. Euripides defined the slave as a man who has lost his liberty of thought or opinion.
Human progress and perpetual dissatisfaction are driven by imagination and the capacity to dream of alternative realities. Childhood dreamers like Thomas Edison, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Sir Walter Scott translated inner longings into reality while nations spent five billion pounds on rearmament.
A sense of humor acts chemically rather than physically, altering thought texture and preventing fanaticism and war. Kaiser Wilhelm lost an empire because he lacked humor and took himself too seriously with an upturned mustache.
The Doctrine of the Individual
True simplicity in scholarship is the outward sign of deep thought achieved through intellectual digestion and maturity. The prose of Su Tungp'o gradually shed its youthful pedantry to approach naturalness.
Human recalcitrance and wayward behavior are the only remaining sparks of human dignity against the regimented patriotic automaton. Soldiers who find themselves landed in Spain or Ethiopia exhibit either sweet compliance or human recalcitrance.
The individual is the final fact of life, and all social philosophies and states exist solely to serve the happy individual life. Two brothers given identical education shape completely different lives according to their inner laws.
5. Philosophy of Living and Half-and-Half
Wise living avoids worldly humbugs and embraces Taoist naturalness and the balanced Doctrine of the Golden Mean.
In the busy pursuit of worldly living, you lose your true self and inner breath. Mencius compares the artificial life of civilization to the constant deforestation of the Niu Mountain, which destroys the natural heart of love and righteousness.
Chuangtse went to the park at Tiao-ling and saw a strange bird, a mantis, and a cicada all forgetting their natural safety in pursuit of prey. You see how loss follows the pursuit of gain when driven by ambition.
Philosophy of Living
The great humbugs of life are fame, wealth, and power, which dominate human lives through the fear of failure, poverty, and obscurity. People often disguise their fears behind the pursuit of success, leading them to unnecessarily interfere in the lives of others.
Emperor Ch'ien-lung saw hundreds of sailing ships on the China Sea, and his minister remarked that there were only two ships, named Fame and Wealth.
Passion, wisdom, and courage form the essential qualities of a great soul capable of enjoying life. An old lady of seventy-eight years told a friend that looking back, it still made her happy to think of when she sinned, but she could never forgive herself for the times she was stupid.
Laotse's philosophy teaches the strength of weakness, the advantage of camouflage, and the wisdom of foolishness to avoid contention. When Confucius passed seven days without food while hemmed in between Ch'en and Ts'ai, the minister Jen taught him the parable of the modest i-erh birds in the eastern sea that never strive to be first and thus escape trouble.
Philosophy of Half-and-Half
The Philosophy of the Half-and-Half offers the sanest and happiest middle-class ideal by balancing action and inaction. Tsesse's Doctrine of the Golden Mean provides a balanced life lying between extremes.
T'ao Yuanming stands as the supreme example of a harmonious lover of life who achieved a balance between the senses and the spirit toward the end of the fourth century. On November, A. D. 405, T'ao resigned as magistrate of P'engcheh after a government delegate demanded formal attire, stating he could not bend and bow for the sake of five bushels of rice, and wrote his famous poem Ah, Homeward Bound I Go!
6. The Enjoyment of Sensuous Happiness
The true end and purpose of human life is simply the enjoyment of it, rather than seeking abstract metaphysical goals.
Questioning the mystic purpose of life is a vain endeavor influenced by theological preoccupations with salvation. Instead, living a life to find the greatest happiness is a practical question similar to planning a weekend. Out of the fifty or sixty years given as the average period of human life to a man, you must make happiness the central focus of philosophy.
The Problem of Happiness
Human Happiness Is Sensuous
All human happiness is biological and sensuous, intimately connected with bodily functions and the five senses. Lin rejects the artificial separation of pleasures into material and spiritual categories. The spirit itself depends on physical conditions, and happiness is largely a matter of digestion and bodily movement.
An American college president famously advised each incoming freshman class to keep two things in mind: read the Bible and keep their bowels open.
Henry David Thoreau observed the creak of crickets in the rocks, noting that their eternal song suggests a wisdom mature and above temporal considerations. Walt Whitman took a two-hour walk through the woods during a morning snowstorm, noting the musical low murmur through the pines and the scent of snow. Byron claimed to have known true happiness for only three hours during his entire existence.
Chin Shengt'an and his friend were shut up in a temple for ten days due to rainy weather. During this time Chin enumerated thirty-three happy moments.
Chin Shengt'an described a happy moment during a blistering hot June day when a sudden rumbling of thunder, black clouds, and a pouring rain brought instant relief and allowed him to eat his rice.
7. The Art of Loafing and Leisure
Civilization makes getting food increasingly difficult, occupying over ninety per cent of human activities. This relentless toil leads to over-civilization and physical ailments from overwork.
Man is the only working animal, as civilization and complex society force humanity to labor constantly just to secure food.
A pigeon flies freely without worrying about lunch, whereas a human's simple meal involves a highly complicated system of cultivation, merchandising, and preparation engaging thousands of people.
Culture is essentially a product of leisure, and the art of culture is fundamentally the art of loafing wisely.
Culture is the product of leisure, requiring freedom from the American vices of efficiency and relentless ambition.
Efficiency, punctuality, and the relentless desire for achievement and success are the three great American vices that destroy leisure. An engineering firm advertised with the words "Nearly Right Is Not Enough", contrasting with the Chinese view that nearly right is good enough. American engineers use precision measurements like one-tenth of an inch when building bridges.
You can observe the romantic cult of the idle life as a democratic achievement rooted in a profound love of life. Poet Yüan Chunglang wrote seven successive petitions to his superior to complain of eternal kowtowings and begged to return to a free and careless life.
8. The Enjoyment of the Home
The ultimate test of any civilization is the quality of husbands, wives, fathers, and mothers it produces.
Ninety per cent of mankind are husbands or wives, and one hundred per cent have parents. All other achievements of civilization like art, philosophy, and technology are secondary means toward the primary end of shaping better family members. A Hindu creation story written four thousand years ago describes Adam repeatedly asking God to take Eve away because he could not live with her, and then begging for her back because he could not live without her.
Intellectual achievements and public honors yield only a cold, intellectual chuckle compared to the profound fulfillment of seeing your children grow. Herbert Spencer, near death, piled the eighteen volumes of his Synthetic Philosophy on his lap and wondered if he would not have done better to have a grandchild instead.
The Chinese Family Ideal
Successful marriage requires a mutual mingling of personalities, symbolized by the metaphor of mixing clay and water. Madame Kuan wrote a poem to her cooling husband, suggesting they break down clay images of themselves, add water, and remake them so that her clay contains him and his clay contains her.
The Chinese family system operates on a stream-of-life theory, viewing you not as an isolated entity but as a branch of a continuous family tree. Confucian scholar Yen Yuan undertook a journey of over a thousand miles across China, pasting placards on city gates and inns, simply to find his missing brother so his ancestral family line could have a male heir.
Traditional Chinese culture places an absolute premium on advancing age, celebrating milestones like the fifty-first, sixty-first, seventy-first, and eighty-first birthday.
Adult children have a natural obligation and right to care for, feed, and serve aging parents. Traditional manuals prescribe concrete daily routines for juniors:
- In the summer months, stand by the parents' side and fan them to drive away heat, flies, and mosquitoes.
- In winter, ensure bed quilts are warm enough, stove fire is hot enough, and check for holes or crevices in doors and windows to prevent drafts.
- A child above ten should get up before parents, go to their bed, and ask if they had a good night.
- If parents have already gotten up, curtsy to them before inquiring after health, and retire with another curtsy.
- Before going to bed at night, prepare the bed, stand by until they fall asleep, pull down the bed curtain, and retire.
9. Enjoyment of Living and Domestic Comforts
Daily existence is enriched by comfort, tea, smoking, wine, good food, and harmonious interior architecture.
Enjoyment of Living
Lying in bed is an important art of living that fosters deep philosophical, scientific, and creative thought.
Nine-tenths of the world's most important discoveries are made when curled up in bed at two or five o'clock in the morning. Confucius never lay straight in bed like a corpse, but always curled up on one side.
You can follow these simple postures:
- Curl up one's legs in bed instead of lying straight.
- Prop oneself with big soft pillows at an angle of thirty degrees.
- Place one or both arms behind the back of one's head.
10. The Appeal of Nature and Art
Immersion in nature, rocks, trees, and flowers cures megalomania and aligns the human spirit with cosmic beauty.
Nature serves as a psychological sanatorium that cures human megalomania, egocentricity, and spiritual ailments. Chinese landscape art captures this by painting human figures as tiny specks in vast mountainscapes to put man in his proper place and cleanse the breast of foolish ambitions. A painting fifteen inches high features a squatting human body about an inch high.
You can observe a mountain stage a hundred miles wide and three miles high. The author recalls lying on a mountain in Kuling and looking at two ant-sized creatures in Nanking intriguing against each other, which made political ambition seem comical.
On Bigness
Modern urban civilization locks man in apartments and cuts him off from the soil, breeding conceit and artificiality. Providing land allows people to grow their own trees and let children experience nature directly.
You should follow these rules for land and nature:
- Give man land and plenty of it so he can own his trees and rocks.
- Choose sites with full-grown trees or plant fast-growing ones like bamboos and willows.
- Allow birds, frogs, lizards, and spiders to arrive naturally through proper landscaping.
Governor Yüan Yüan built an islet about a hundred yards across, rising barely a foot above the water on the West Lake and refused to put any obtrusive monument or pavilion on it, planting it entirely with willows so it harmonized magically with the water.
On Rocks and Trees
Rocks in Chinese art and gardens symbolize eternity, strength of character, and detachment from life, valuing irregularity and natural ruggedness over symmetry. You can see peaks a thousand feet high from their visible base and half a mile long.
You can select and arrange rocks with these practices:
- Select rocks that suggest majesty, silence, and independence like great heroes or retired scholars.
- Build rockeries to have the composition, contrast, and depth of a painting.
- Use uncut rocks, fossilized bark, or lake rocks bearing perforations and irregularity of outline.
- Insert a small pebble if a perforation happens to be perfectly round.
At Mutu near Taihu Lake, four ancient cypress trees are named Pure, Rare, Antique, and Quaint based on their zigzag and spiral trunk formations. A tree ten or fifteen feet high stands vertically nearby.
10 Key Ideas
- True wisdom relies on a lyrical, reasonable naturalism that balances human dreams and reality through humor, leisure, and the direct enjoyment of earthly life.
- Recognizing our animal ancestry helps you achieve a sense of human comedy and a forgiving tolerance for human flaws.
- Human dignity rests on playful curiosity, dreams, humor, and individual waywardness against regimented automation.
- Wise living avoids worldly humbugs and embraces Taoist naturalness and the balanced Doctrine of the Golden Mean.
- The true end and purpose of human life is simply the enjoyment of it through bodily functions and the five senses, rather than seeking abstract metaphysical goals.
- Culture is essentially a product of leisure, and the art of culture is fundamentally the art of loafing wisely without the American vices of efficiency and ambition.
- All other achievements of civilization like art, philosophy, and technology are secondary means toward the primary end of shaping better family members.
- Daily existence is deeply enriched by domestic comforts, tea, wine, good food, and the important art of lying in bed.
- Immersion in nature, rocks, trees, and flowers cures human megalomania and aligns the human spirit with cosmic beauty.
- Preventing societal reversion to animal savagery requires cultivating a warm spirit of reasonableness and emotional education rather than cold intellect.