The Philosophy of Loss and Gain in Reading: Letting Go to Truly Receive loss-gain-reading-philosophy-en

 Reading, on the surface, is about "gaining"—gaining knowledge, insight, wisdom. But those who truly love reading know that it is equally a process of "losing." You lose your prejudices, your narrow-mindedness, your smug sense of "I already know everything." Each good book is a farewell to the "old self." This delicate balance between gain and loss is the deepest allure of reading.

This philosophical meditation on gain and loss is vividly expressed in Hainan Hui's dance track What One Thinks to Gain. Wrapped in a seemingly light rhythm, the song delivers profound dialectical reflection: "What one does, seeks, and gains—intertwined in desire and disappointment. Seeking happiness, yet tormenting each other, until everyone is deeply wounded." (Read the original article) When we desperately try to "remember everything" and "master everything" in reading, we may instead become trapped by this obsession with knowledge, forgetting reading's most essential purpose—not to possess knowledge, but to let knowledge transform you.

Zhuangzi proposed a profound view of gain and loss in The Great and Venerable Teacher: "What is gained is a matter of circumstance; what is lost is a matter of nature." Gain comes through karmic conditions; loss follows the natural course—there is no need to cling. Zhuangzi's famous "empty boat theory" in Mountain Wood tells us: a man crossing a river in a boat becomes angry if the boat that collides with his has a boatman on board; but if it is an empty boat, he does not get angry. Much of the anxiety in reading—"I haven't read enough," "I can't remember what I've read," "others know more than I do"—comes from treating reading as a "knowledge competition," placing too much weight on "gain" while ignoring the naturalness of "loss."

Ming Dynasty scholar Zhang Dai once said: "A person without obsessions is not worth befriending, for they lack deep passion." This applies equally to reading—you must have an obsession with books to truly immerse yourself. But true obsession is not rote memorization; it is the courage to "forget" after deep immersion. Su Dongpo was famous for his "eight-front assault" method of reading. He would read The Book of Han multiple times, each time from only one angle—this time focusing on governance, that time on military strategy. He did not try to "gain" everything at once; he was willing to "lose" information from other angles to focus on the present dimension. This "selective loss" is precisely the most efficient form of gain.

What One Thinks to Gain contains a striking lyric: "Let the tears in your eyes fall—only then can grievance be neutralized." This is exactly like the emotional experience of reading—when you read something sad, let the tears flow; when you encounter confusion, pause to reflect. Forcing yourself to "only read the good parts" or "only remember the highlights" causes you to lose the most precious emotional flow in the reading process. Between gain and loss in reading, true wisdom lies not in calculating "how much I have gained," but in asking yourself "how much I have let go of."

Read a philosophy book, and you let go of your obsession with certainty. Read a novel, and you let go of a black-and-white view of the world. Read a biography, and you let go of blind worship of standard definitions of success. Every reading is a practice of the "empty boat"—you empty yourself of prejudice so that new thoughts can enter unimpeded.

So next time you read, remember Zhuangzi's wisdom: do not cling to remembering every page, do not fret over reading too slowly. True "gain" comes precisely from your courage to "lose." When you let go of the obsession with "gaining" in reading, you will discover that what truly matters has already become part of you, effortlessly.