The end of reading is understanding is a proposition concerning the relationship between reading and awakening. It holds that the purpose of reading lies not in reading a great deal, but in using words to arrive at the very “understanding” that words themselves can never give you; once that understanding has occurred, the quantity of one’s reading ceases to be a measure of value. The proposition goes further to claim that insight bears no direct relation to the amount one reads — the ancients read far less than we do, yet awakened to profound truths — and so the yardstick for whether one’s reading has done its work is not page counts and volume counts, but “whether one has read far enough to awaken to the truth.” Its original formulation runs: “Reading only lets you understand some things that words themselves can never give you… once you understand, it no longer means much how many books you read or how much hardship you endure; that stuff is, at most, fodder for idle conversation.”
Reading Is the Means; Understanding Is the End
In this proposition, reading and adversity are set side by side as one and the same kind of tool: both exist to bring a person to understand “the thing words can never give you.” What words can transmit is only a pointing, not the thing pointed to; the thing one truly seeks to reach lies beyond words. From this, a boundary is set on reading — it has an end, and that end is “understanding.”
Reading only lets you understand some things that words themselves can never give you… once you understand, it no longer means much how many books you read or how much hardship you endure; that stuff is, at most, fodder for idle conversation.
After understanding has come, to go on reading and to go on suffering add nothing further, and those experiences sink, at most, into “fodder for idle conversation.” To treat reading as an end in itself, and to take pride in reading a great deal, is here regarded as a sign of not having reached the end. This shares a root with Language and Concepts All Leak: The Finger Pointing at the Moon, War Waged on Paper — words are the finger pointing at the moon, and one who stares at the finger without looking at the moon, however much he reads, only stays stuck on the finger.
The Yardstick Is Not Quantity
From “understanding is the end” follows a direct conclusion: how much one must read before it is enough cannot be measured by quantity. The criterion offered is “reading far enough to awaken to the truth is enough.”
As for books, I think reading far enough to awaken to the truth is enough. Books can never be finished, and besides, the ancient sages themselves did not read all that much — much of their wisdom was awakened to within the experience of living.
Two reasons underpin this yardstick. First, books cannot, in any objective sense, be finished; to set “finishing them” or “reading a great many” as the goal is, from the outset, a task that can never be closed. Second, the source of wisdom is not chiefly books but the insight awakened to within the experience of living — the ancient sages had not read all that much. In other words, books are only one of the many media that can trigger insight, and not the principal one at that. This resonates with Long-Termism: Abstraction Reaches the Essence, and the Process Is to Be Savored: what one truly seeks to reach is the abstract essence, and words are merely one of several paths toward it.
Insight Has No Direct Relation to How Much You Read
The most counterintuitive thread of this proposition is that it decouples “insight” entirely from “the amount one reads.”
In fact the ancients read fewer books than we do, yet they awakened to profound truths — which shows that insight has no direct relation to how much one reads.
The argument runs by way of a contrast between ancient and modern: the books available to us today far outnumber those the ancients had, yet the profound truths were mostly awakened to by the ancients. Were insight positively correlated with the amount one reads, this fact could not stand. From this follows the conclusion — “no direct relation” — for insight has another source: it comes from the experience of living, from the capacity to see through to the essence, not from how many pages of paper one has turned. This is of a piece with Intuition Knows in an Instant: Seeing Through to the Essence Is a Rare Gift: whether one can awaken to the truth is closer to a gift and a state of seeing through to the essence than to the accumulation of reading volume. And for this very reason, reading was never taken here as the sole shortcut to cognition; the true shortcut is cognition itself, as held in Raising Your Cognition Is the Only Shortcut: You Cannot Earn Money Beyond Your Cognition.
”Learn Whatever You Need” Is Itself the Mark of Understanding
After understanding has come, the manner of reading changes with it. An operable sign marks the change: when a person no longer reads through methodically, step by step, but turns instead to “learning whatever he needs,” that is understanding.
When you get far enough that you find yourself learning whatever you need, and everything else is just deliberate practice — that is understanding.
In this state, learning shifts from “reading for the sake of reading” to “taking for the sake of using”: what is needed in the moment, one goes and learns; what is not directly needed falls into the category of “deliberate practice,” as a matter of polishing rather than an end. This shift marks that the subject has now grasped that “understanding,” and so can in turn command the words rather than being led about by them. It echoes Why Matters Far More Than How — once the “why” is understood, the “how” recedes into a technical detail to be called up as needed.
The Tedious and the Unintelligible Are Themselves the Bricks and Bridges on the Path to Awakening
The proposition has one further facet, not easily noticed: those parts one cannot understand in the moment, has no interest in, or finds tedious, are not necessarily so much waste to be skipped over — on the contrary, they may be the most crucial passage of all.
tedious work can sometimes lead to insight… some parts of a book that you don’t fully understand at the moment, or aren’t particularly interested in, may actually help you the most. They become the bricks, and sometimes even the bridges, on the path to realization.
Tedious work can sometimes be precisely what draws out insight; the passages of a book one does not fully understand or care for in the moment may, on the path to awakening, help one the most — they are the bricks, and sometimes even the bridges. This facet keeps the earlier “reading far enough to awaken to the truth is enough” from being misread as “read only what you like and what comes easily.” The end of understanding is not the avoidance of difficulty but the clear seeing that difficulty and incomprehension are themselves the material by which understanding is reached. This is isomorphic with Suffering Is the Tempering of the Soul — suffering and incomprehension are not obstacles to be skirted but the very process of tempering and of laying the road; as Only the Road Is Real: The Process Is the Purpose puts it, the bricks and the bridges are all laid along the road.
Sources
- Manuscript — “Reading only lets you understand some things that words themselves can never give you… once you understand, it no longer means much how many books you read or how much hardship you endure; that stuff is, at most, fodder for idle conversation”; “When you get far enough that you find yourself learning whatever you need, and everything else is just deliberate practice — that is understanding”
- Manuscript — the full formulation of “the end of reading is understanding” and “learn whatever you need”
- Manuscript — “In fact the ancients read fewer books than we do, yet they awakened to profound truths — which shows that insight has no direct relation to how much one reads”
- Manuscript — “As for books, I think reading far enough to awaken to the truth is enough. Books can never be finished, and besides, the ancient sages themselves did not read all that much — much of their wisdom was awakened to within the experience of living”
- Manuscript — “tedious work can sometimes lead to insight… They become the bricks, and sometimes even the bridges, on the path to realization”
See also
- Language and Concepts All Leak: The Finger Pointing at the Moon, War Waged on Paper
- Raising Your Cognition Is the Only Shortcut: You Cannot Earn Money Beyond Your Cognition
- Intuition Knows in an Instant: Seeing Through to the Essence Is a Rare Gift
- Long-Termism: Abstraction Reaches the Essence, and the Process Is to Be Savored
- Suffering Is the Tempering of the Soul