How to Read “Listening and understanding the law”
Kikitori hōmon
Meaning of “Listening and understanding the law”
“Listening and understanding the law” is a proverb that means listening carefully to others is the first step toward understanding. It teaches the importance of accurately hearing what someone is trying to communicate and grasping their true intention.
This proverb holds special meaning in discussions and conversations. It teaches that listening to others first, before asserting your own opinion, leads to true understanding. It explains the value of being a good listener.
This wisdom still applies today as a foundation of communication. Instead of rushing to argue back or interrupting, carefully listening to someone’s words until the end prevents misunderstandings and creates deeper understanding.
In questions and dialogues, the ability to listen is the most important skill. This proverb reminds us of this truth.
Origin and Etymology
The origin of “Listening and understanding the law” doesn’t seem to have clear documentation in historical records. However, we can make interesting observations from how the phrase is constructed.
Let’s focus on the word “hōmon” (法問). This is a Buddhist term meaning questions or dialogues about Buddhist teachings. Picture a scene at a temple where monks give sermons and disciples seek teachings. In such settings, carefully listening to the master’s words was most important.
Buddhist training has long emphasized three stages: “hearing, thinking, and practicing.” First you hear the teachings, then you think about them, and finally you put them into practice. This proverb likely emphasizes the importance of “hearing,” the first of these stages.
The word “kikitori” (listening and understanding) contains more than just hearing sounds. It includes the meaning of understanding someone’s true intention. Even in advanced dialogues called hōmon, accurately listening to the other person’s words is the first step toward understanding. This teaching is embedded in the proverb.
This Buddhist approach to learning likely spread over time as wisdom for general human relationships.
Usage Examples
- When I really listened to the new employee’s opinion, I realized they had noticed an important problem. That’s “Listening and understanding the law.”
- She has great sales numbers, and I think it’s because she practices “Listening and understanding the law.”
Universal Wisdom
The universal wisdom shown by “Listening and understanding the law” relates deeply to one of humanity’s fundamental desires: the wish to be understood. Everyone wants someone to listen to their words.
But interestingly, people are eager to speak themselves yet surprisingly careless about listening to others. While someone is talking, they think about what they’ll say next. This is unchanging human nature across all times and places.
This proverb has been passed down for so long because people have continuously experienced how difficult listening truly is. While speaking comes instinctively, truly listening is a skill that requires conscious effort.
As a deeper insight, this proverb teaches the truth that “understanding is not one-way.” To gain knowledge, you must first enter the other person’s world. You need the humility to set aside your own framework and accept the other person’s words.
Many problems in human relationships actually arise from “not listening.” Conflicts and misunderstandings often have a lack of listening attitude at their root. Our ancestors saw through this essential human psychology and conveyed it to future generations in simple words.
When AI Hears This
Hearing the same information a hundred times is actually the same mechanism as “error correction through redundancy” in communication engineering. In digital communication, when sending important data, the same information is deliberately sent multiple times.
For example, signals from satellites degrade due to noise in space. So the same bit sequence is transmitted multiple times, and the receiving end uses majority voting to restore the correct data.
Human gossip has the same structure. When information travels like a game of telephone from Person A to Person Z, “noise” is added at each stage. Someone mishears, misremembers, or intentionally exaggerates the story.
But if you hear the same story from a hundred people, you can statistically identify the parts that appear consistently as the “true signal” and the scattered parts as “noise.”
What’s interesting is the “channel coding theorem” proved by information theory founder Claude Shannon. This theorem states that no matter how noisy a communication channel is, if you add sufficient redundancy, you can theoretically transmit information with zero errors.
In other words, hearing something a hundred times is an “error correction code” that humans have instinctively practiced. Modern internet communication and ancient human wisdom share the same underlying mathematics.
Lessons for Today
What this proverb teaches modern people is that precisely because we live in a speed-focused era, we should have the courage to stop and listen.
Now that instant responses on social media and messaging apps have become normal, we tend to reply reflexively without hearing someone’s words to the end. But truly valuable dialogue doesn’t emerge from such speed.
Next time you talk with someone, try being a bit more conscious. Stop preparing your opinion in your mind until the other person finishes speaking. Just focus on listening.
Then something strange happens. You start to see what the other person really wants to communicate.
Becoming a good listener also expands your own world. The more carefully you listen to people, the more you encounter new perspectives and ways of thinking. This is a realm of understanding you could never reach alone.
There’s a small practice you can start today. When someone is talking, try listening without interrupting until the end. Just that alone will surely begin to change your relationships.
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