The five colors the human eye will blind.
The five notes the human ear will rend.
The five tastes the human mouth offend.
Racing and hunting will human hearts turn mad,
Objects of prize make human conduct bad.
Therefore the holy man attends to the inner and not to the outer. He abandons the latter and chooses the former.
Translation: Paul Carus, 1898 (public domain)
Sit With This
The next time you reach for the screen out of habit rather than need, can you pause long enough to feel the quieter hunger underneath the loud one — and ask what it actually wants?
A Practice
Pick one stretch of today — a meal, a walk, a short errand — and take it with the screen left behind. Let one sense have your full attention: the actual taste of the food, the sounds of the street, the air on your skin. Notice what returns when nothing is competing for it.
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Western Commentary
Lao Tzu lines up the whole menu of pleasure — the five colours, the five tones, the five flavours — and then names what happens in excess: each one cancels the very sense it was meant to delight. The eye flooded with colour stops seeing. The ear crowded with sound stops hearing. The palate chased from taste to taste forgets what anything actually tastes like. The paradox is quiet and a little unwelcome: past a certain point, more stimulation buys you less of the thing you were chasing it for.
There is a part of all of us that leans toward the brighter thing, the louder one, the next one. The verse calls it the chase — the wild hunting that makes mad the mind — and the word madness is doing honest work there. It is not condemning desire; it is describing what happens to attention when it never gets to rest: a low, humming restlessness that more input only feeds. The hunger to be stimulated, it turns out, is rarely satisfied by stimulation. It just learns to want the next round sooner.
It is not hard to hear our own hours in these old lines. The feed engineered so the bottom of the screen never arrives. The autoplay that decides for you. The faint, familiar agitation of having looked at a great deal and taken in almost none of it. The holy man, the verse says, attends to the inner and not to the outer — chooses what genuinely nourishes over what merely flashes. You might notice, the next time the screen pulls at you, that there is a quieter hunger underneath the loud one, and that it asks for far less than the loud one claims. And if that pull ever feels heavier than something a single verse should carry — if it has the shape of a compulsion rather than a habit — that is worth honoring too; there is no weakness in reaching for real support.
It would be easy to read this as an old man scolding the senses, or a call to go grey and austere. It is not. The senses are how the world reaches you; the verse is pointing at proportion, not denial. A meal tastes like something when you are not already reaching for the next one. Colour returns when the eye is allowed to rest. What blinds is not the world's richness — it is the chase that never lets you actually arrive in it.