THERE’S A CONFUCIAN teaching that instructs people to eat until they are 80% full. As the saying goes, “eight parts of a full stomach sustain the man; the other two sustain the doctor.” I can’t remember who told me about this tradition, but it has stuck with me ever since, and I see echoes of this wisdom in various aspects of life that have nothing to do with eating. A broader interpretation of the teaching might be: “You don’t always have to fill something to its capacity.”
Two weeks ago my tea assistant — a young brain-injured patient of mine who I’ve been teaching the virtues of compassion and gentleness — scalded his hand when he picked up an overfull teapot and tried to pour tea from it. You know how young people are. They don’t want to be told how to do anything. The filling up of the teapot with water is his moment in the spotlight. It’s the one time during the hour-long group where everyone is silent and still. (I ask for a moment of silence and we sit and listen to the sound of the water being poured from the kettle to the teapot.) That moment of pouring, over the years, has taken on the aura of a sacrament, and all eyes and ears are on him and his pouring. Naturally, he wants to milk it for every second he can. Which means he overfills the teapot. Which means he spills some of it later when he pours it into the teacups. Which is how he ended up scalding his hand.
I told him about the 80% rule while we were washing the teacups two weeks ago, his hand still red from the hot tea, and after a reminder last week, he remembered this week without having to be told. He still doesn’t have a great sense of what 80% of a teapot looks like — he filled it to 95% yesterday — and I can tell it was a struggle for him to stop when he did, but it’s a start.
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