If you have ever tried using chopsticks, you will find that it takes a bit of practice to pick up that piece of cauliflower. More practice to pick up the peas, and you’ll probably graduate as a master if you can manage to pick up tofu! So why invent such a difficult tool to master when all you want is put food into your mouth? For something hard, a fork will do nicely and for something soft or liquid, a spoon will do nicely, without going through a university course in chopsticks or worse, the frustration of using chopsticks when you’re very hungry! So why use chopsticks at all?For me, it is by nurture. I was born into a family who uses chopsticks, so chopsticks have become my “mother tool”, just as Mandarin is my mother tongue. Having used it all my life, you don’t notice it anymore until you find others having difficulty eating with chopsticks. Only then you realised that using chopsticks is quite difficult. Even those seasoned chopsticks users have difficulty doing it the “correct” way where the chopsticks do not cross each other. So what’s so special about chopsticks? Why are we still using them today? Using them must serve some purpose. A purposeless tool will become extinct sooner or later. So chopsticks must have some hidden treasures. Could they teach us something else other than picking up food?

Lesson 1: Chopsticks come in pairs

A significant and yet understated fact. It reminds us of working together, of the communal spirit, and of how no man is an island. How many examples can you think of that requires a pair to function? Eyes to see from, ears to hear from, legs to walk on, clapping your hands, fork and knife, a marriage, a badminton match etc… it varies far and wide and the list is endless. The most often quoted area for improvement in a corporate environment is communication breakdown. It takes 2 for communication to work, obvious I know. They probably haven’t understood the wisdom of chopsticks!

Lesson 2: Co-operate

When compared to a fork, chopsticks do not pierce, they clamp. Although Japanese chopsticks do have pointed ends on their chopsticks, allowing them to pierce the food, Chinese chopsticks are normally blunt at the end. More on this later. But we’ll focus on Chinese chopsticks now, as I have been using them all these while.

The requirement of not piercing is actually quite a noble one. You are taught to work with your food. Not pierce through it. You are taught to co-operate with your food, and not destroy it. You do break it down eventually when it reaches your mouth, but that’s the purpose of food - to be eaten. Lifting it from dish to mouth is a different process. This process has evolved throughout the human history - from the ancient man who bites off the flesh straight from the dead bird, to the modern man who cooks everything and eat them in small chunks, possibly using chopsticks. The advancement from ancient to modern is only possible once you understand the food and its source - i.e by working together with them. You have to understand animals to be able to capture them for the ancient man or breed them sustainably for the modern man. You have to understand the plants before you can eat them, or find a sustainable way of growing them. You can’t understand something if you continually destroy them. They’ll become extinct and then there’s no way to understand them again.

Let me repeat - advancement is only possible by working together, by co-operating. Often this message is lost to our society where the “one” is highly regarded and highly rewarded but the “many” is ignored. By doing so, we are ignoring the wisdom of the many in favour of the one. So much so that we allow the one to become the dictator of the many, doing as he/she pleases.

As we as a human race advance, there is more and more reason to reinforce the collaborative spirit. The information we have now outweighs any one human to be able to fully assimilate those information and improve on them. It takes 2 (see lesson 1) or at least 2. It takes a co-operative spirit.

As a side note, I do wonder if the wisdom of chopsticks were used by Zheng He and his fleet in the book 1421: The Year China discoverd the world where they did not conquer those lands they discover, unlike all the conquerers after that, whom i hazard a guess, used forks? Or even Japan in world war 2 who used pointed chopsticks, tried to conquer the whole of Asia?

Lesson 3: Be sensitive

When clamping your food, you can’t clamp it too tight or it’ll break your food. You can’t under-clamp it either, as that won’t provide the necessary grip required to transport the food into your mouth. So you have to “listen” to your food and work together with it. You’ll have to know if your food is brittle like fish, soft like tofu, hard like a chicken wing, or bouncy like a fishball. All the different kinds of food will require different types of grip.

Similarly in life, you have to adapt to the situation, the environment, the people. No one technique works everytime, everywhere and for everyone. Each circumstances is unique. Be sensitive.

Lesson 4: Respect

Using a pair of chopsticks sounds complicated, but millions of people have been doing this, so the rule must be a simple one - to respect your food. By respecting your food, you think about how it takes effort to bring food to the table. How thankful to even have food on the table. How it affects the environment. How we should treat the environment to continue to bring food to the table. How we shouldn’t waste them. How it takes effort to finish eating using chopsticks. Like using a toothbrush to scrub the floor. And speaking of using a small tool to accomplish a big task, it lends itself to the next lesson…

Lesson 5: Patience

Speaks for itself.

So there you have it. The 5 lessons from the humble chopsticks. Can you think of anymore? And for the tai ji readers, can you see the parellels of chopsticks in your training?