CONSIDER this:

Old pond,

A frog leaps in,

Water’s sound.

That poem was written by Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), Japan’s greatest master of haiku — a succinct style of poetry that limits a poem to 17 syllables.

Without such limits, I might have described the same scene of serenity with more words: “Into an age-old pond a frog leaps, causing a splashing sound.”

And I would have been proud of cleverly adding “splashing” before “sound.”

However, as I read Basho’s original poem in Japanese and its English translations, I’ve come to see how redundant and pale “splashing” is in this context.

When a frog leaps into water, there’s naturally a “splash.” You don’t have to say “splash” to “hear” it in your mind’s ear.

And, when a frog leaps into water, there are possibly more nuanced voices than a mere “splash.” “Splash” cannot adequately convey the subtlety of aquatic sound associated with the leap of a frog.

How powerful, then, is Basho’s economical use of words — “water’s sound” catches all that comes to your ear.

Less is more, less is full.

Lessons from haiku

“The fairly popular form of Japanese poetry known as the haiku has a couple of interesting lessons to teach us why less is powerful,” says Leo Babauta, author of the book, “The Power of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential ... in Business and in Life.”

“The haiku, as you may know, is usually a nature-related poem of just seventeen syllables, written in three lines (five syllables, then seven, then five). A poet writing a haiku must work with those limitations, must express an entire idea or image in only that number of syllables,” he explains.

“So the lessons we can pick from the haiku are the first two principles of simple productivity: By setting limitations, we must choose the essential...; By choosing the essential, we create great impact with minimal resources...”

Indeed, haiku is about more than the power of poetry in its shortest possible form; it’s about the power of more with less, which is often neglected in a world of plenty and prosperity.

“We live in a world where, more often than not, more is better,” the author writes. “We are after more money, to buy bigger houses and cars, and more clothes and gadgets and furniture. We need bigger shopping malls rather than the small shops of yesterday. We consume more, and we produce more, and we do more than ever before.”

And the result?

“At some point, however, we run into limits,” he says. “There is only so much we can do or consume ... The problem with constantly trying to increase volume is that it doesn’t always produce the best results ... Doing more things means you’re likely to do a lot of unimportant things, and you’ll be overworked and stressed at the same time.”

You can be overfed, too.

A few weeks ago, I began to take rice congee as my main food in the morning, much to the chagrin of my parents and some of my acquaintances, who insisted that at least a chicken egg and a pork dumpling would be indispensable to my health.

Porridge alone is poor for your health, they speechified.

I began to dump eggs and meat dumplings and take congee as my main breakfast entree a few weeks ago, first because our newspaper group’s canteen had just provided us with a nice variety of congee as never before. It was also because I had just, for the first time in my life, read about the benefit of congee to one’s health.

Plain congee and long life

In his book, “Lao Lao Heng Yan” (An Elder’s Wisdom), Cao Tingdong (1699- 1785), a scholar known for living a long and healthy life, praises congee as an elixir of longevity.

“Every day, when your stomach is empty, do have a bowl of plain congee. It works wonders with your stomach and metabolism,” Cao wrote. “Make sure you eat only plain congee, not congee peppered with sweet or salty things.”

He cited Lu You (1125-1210), a great scholar-official during the Song Dynasty (AD 960-1279) as saying that, while most people aspire to longevity, they don’t know that eating congee every day goes a long way toward the wonderland of immortals.

How I wish I had read the book earlier.

I used to eat a lot of meat, eggs, salt and sugar. Despite regular exercise, I was sometimes diagnosed as having more fat than normal.

And each time I visited my parents in the past few decades, they would entertain me with a table of pork, beef, fish, chicken, eggs and pickled animal plucks. No congee, very few vegetables.

The other day, two middle-aged female janitors at our newspaper group also heard my congee story.

With puzzled eyes and dropped jaws, they asked: “What? A bowl of congee costs 1 or 1.5 yuan? It’s outrageous! You might as well spend that money on more substantial stuff like pork dumplings and eggs!”

I smiled to them for their well-intentioned suggestion, and explained why it’s better to soothe your empty stomach with congee than to overfeed and stuff it with meat and eggs.

They smiled back politely, but in their eyes I could see minds fixed by habit against less food and simpler recipes.

Author Leo Babauta was not born for a simple life. He achieved it step by step.

“I wasn’t exercising, and I was a smoker,” he recalls. “So I made a choice: I decided to simplify ... It started with quitting smoking — I focused on that first, and only that.”

By focusing on one goal a time, he says he has been able to take up running, begin eating healthier, train for and run two marathons, become an early riser, become a vegetarian, complete two triathlons, work two jobs and double his income.

Less is not always more, but it can be.

The power of less, as the author indicates, often eludes many of us in a society where more is too often misunderstood as better.

One who eats more is “healthier;” one who earns more is “happier;” and an extrovert who talks more is “smarter” than an introvert. The list of false equations goes on and on.

Single word resonates

Back to the power of fewer words.

In 1955, an African-American woman in her 40s got on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on a December evening.

As the bus filled with riders, the driver ordered her to give her seat to a white passenger and sit in the back of the bus. How did she reply?

American author Susan Cain recalls the scene: “The woman utters a single word that ignites one of the most important civil rights protests of the twentieth century, one word that helps America find its better self. The word is ‘no’.” The woman was Rosa Parks (1913 - 2005), known as the first lady of civil rights in America.

As Susan Cain explained, not all Americans could speak like Martin Luther King Jr, a formidable orator, and they didn’t have to. A single “no” from an introvert like Parks can be as formidable as “I have a dream.”

“Parks didn’t have the stuff to thrill a crowd if she’d tried to stand up [on the bus] and announce that she had a dream,” Susan Cain observes.

Indeed, in many cases, an introvert who says less is no less eloquent than an orator.

Say less, write less, and eat less, lest we clutter our otherwise better life.