One thing that I have gleaned from my many years of involvement with Buddhism (for which, see my thinkBuddha.org blog) is a deep and abiding appreciation of the aesthetic pleasures of lists. Buddhists, that is to say, love making lists: the four noble truths, the eightfold path, the thirty-seven factors conducive to awakening, the five august breakfast foods, the eight perfections and so forth. Indeed, Buddhists are so enthusiastic about lists, and have so many lists at their disposal, that they even make lists of lists. The pleasures of making lists, as one ancient Buddhist text proclaims, are infinite.

So I was pleased to come across the following list about a year ago in the work of the Chinese sixth century literary critic Liu Xie 劉勰, setting out how “men of letters have erred.” And I thought that the list was worth sharing here, as it is both entertaining and instructive. The sample below is adapted from Wong, Lo and Lam’s translation of Liu Xie’s “Carving of Dragons and the Literary Mind (Wenxin diaolong 文心雕龍), published as “The Book of Literary Design” by Hong Kong University Press. Liu Xie, incidentally, was strongly influenced by Buddhism, and took the robe shortly before his death, and so we can conclude that he himself was no stranger to the pleasures of list-making. Here’s his list of some of the erring men of letters of the past, and the manner in which they erred.

• Sima Xiangru snatched a wife and had his palm greased
• Yan Xiong drank excessively and miscalculated
• Feng Yan failed to meet the demands of decorum
• Du Du could not be satisfied
• Ban Gu sucked up to Dou Xian and made a nuisance of himself
• Ma Rong took bribes
• Mi Hen died because he was fanatical
• Wang Can was frivolous and impatient
• Chen Lin was ignorant and inconsistent
• Ding Yi, being avaricious, begged
• Lu Cui would eat and drink and be shameless
• Pan Yue played a dirty trick on Prince Minhuai…

“These,” Liu says, “are blemishes of which men of letters have been found guilty.” And certainly, on the evidence of this list alone, it strikes me that writers seems a particularly hapless bunch. However, perhaps you could raise similar kinds of questions about any group of people—academics, lumberjacks or Buddhists—and compile similar kinds of lists about the haplessness of certain members of these groups also. To provide some degree of balance, Liu Xie points out that some writers have lived exemplary lives; not all writers have been mad, bad or both. But he is interested in the errancy of writers for a reason, and the reason is that he wants to make clear that writing and living are very different kinds of activities, and being competent in one domain doesn’t necessarily translate into the other. “It is idle,” Liu Xie writes “to expect all men to be equipped in all things.” Writerly excellence and excellence in living are not the same thing, even if “the ideal is to do equally well in literature and in a life of action.”

What this does, I think, is undermines any facile notions that writing may be an automatically improving activity. Writing is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for self-improvement (if self-improvement is what we should want to engage in, which I’m not sure it is). Of course, it might be that insights that come from writing can—if reflected on in the right way, if taken to heart, if translated into the right kinds of actions—contribute to living our lives more wisely or more kindly; but there is nothing predetermined about this process. And perhaps reading is the same. Like writing, it is an activity that does not necessarily lead to living better, wiser or kinder lives. Those who read greatly may find that reading can contribute to living well. Others who read greatly may still go on to be ignorant, inconsistent, avaricious, shameless, to make nuisances of themselves, to miscalculate, and to play dirty tricks on princes (although princes, being princes, might, I can’t help feeling, often deserve it).

And yet, for all this, I think that we should not be too harsh in our judgements: in writing as in life, it is perhaps good not to set the bar too high when it comes to deciding how others are faring. Neither writing nor living one’s life are particularly easy affairs to handle; and to do a half-way good job in one or in the other is already something of an achievement.