Ordinary People Chapter 1 Summary

Ordinary people in the world are thought to create their own suffering in the Buddhist and Taoist teachings. In their teachings they think the ordinary person, because of their wanting desires of things, creates their own disappointments because they can’t get what their mind wants. Especially in today’s world where everyone sees the best stuff that money can buy in commercials, movies, and online. Seeing these things makes people want them and although some people might have them, most people can’t get them and are left unhappy with maybe a worse version or older technology that isn’t as good in their eyes because the other version is better. And even the people that have whatever everyone wants will still suffer because they might have to

Like how some people say money is happiness or brings it and all the other things that it can buy. Chapter 9 of the Tao Te Ching explains this well, “rooms full of treasure can never be safe the vanity of success invites its own failure”(Laozi, 18). Even if someone has rooms full of treasure they are still not happy because at any instant it can be taken away, and once it is then all will be lost to that person who had all the money but now doesn’t, that is why sages don’t concern themselves with material things like that. In chapter 2 of the Tao Te Ching it explains how things only depend on our feelings toward them. “If that becomes beautiful this becomes ugly”(Laozi, 4), this explains how because of our feelings toward things we label them. This labeling then makes things ugly in comparison and then once someone has this ugly thing then they suffer because they’d rather have a beautiful thing instead. The same thing occurs with good and bad like it says in chapter 2, “If that becomes good then this becomes bad.”(Laozi, 4). People just create these positive and negative feelings toward everything and that is what makes them suffer. Everyone tries and tries to get the positives but obviously they can’t have them all and so they suffer for it. And for the Taoist even if they were to achieve these positives they would eventually turn into its opposite negative, whatever that may be. It explains this in chapter 13 of the Tao Te Ching, “Favor and disgrace come with a warning...favor turns into disfavor gaining it comes with a warning losing it comes with a warning”(Laozi, 26). This might seem a little crazy at first because obviously favor is the opposite of disgrace and with more favor comes less disgrace, but Wang Chen explains how this change happens or can happen. Page 26 of the Tao Te Ching he says, “People who are