2 Samuel 19:35 · World English Bible
I am eighty years old, today. Can I discern between good and bad? Can your servant taste what I eat or what I drink? Can I hear the voice of singing men and singing women any more? Why then should your servant be a burden to my lord the king?
Jarā: Aging Jarā is the body's decline over the years. Eighty years, today: Barzillai offers the number to David as his whole answer, and it is enough of one.
From the Buddhism reading below.
The same verse, read by one tradition.
BUDDHISM
Jarā: Aging Jarā is the body's decline over the years. Eighty years, today: Barzillai offers the number to David as his whole answer, and it is enough of one. He has crossed the Jordan to see the king home and now measures himself honestly, treating his age as a fact about a body rather than a grievance to be soothed.
Indriya: The sense faculties Indriya are the powers of eye, ear, tongue, and the rest. Taste has gone flat and the singers have grown faint, so the king's table and the court musicians would be wasted on him. These are borrowed tools that thin with use, and he has been honest enough to check his own before accepting an invitation built entirely on their working.
Anicca: Impermanence Anicca is the passing quality of all conditioned things. "Any more" carries the weight: he once tasted, he once heard the singing men and singing women, and those powers left the way daylight leaves a room. Nothing was stolen from him. What he had was on loan the whole time, and eighty years is long enough to watch the loan come due.
Devadūta: The divine messenger Devadūta names the aged, the sick, and the dying as messengers who wake the rest of us. An old man before a king, listing what he can no longer taste or hear, is that message delivered in person. David is riding back to his throne at the height of his restoration, and the friend who fed him in the wilderness is the one telling him what waits at the end of the road.
Maraṇasati: Mindfulness of death Maraṇasati is keeping one's own death in plain view. Barzillai turns down a room in Jerusalem because he has already settled where he wants to lie, near his father and mother in his own city. Having a rough sense of how far he has left tells him exactly what to do with the little that remains.
Santuṭṭhi: Contentment Santuṭṭhi is being satisfied with what one already has. "Why should your servant be a burden" is the question of a man who can no longer enjoy the reward and so declines to consume it. Wealthy enough to have supplied an army, he asks only for a short walk home, and he sends young Chimham to take the seat at the king's table in his place.
Buddhism lens
What have you been holding onto out of habit, that you no longer actually want?
The body passes through childhood, youth, and old age the way a person changes worn clothes for new ones. Seeing that clearly, the wise neither mourn the change nor pretend it is not happening.
Seneca said he would not quarrel with old age or ask it to give back what it has taken. Accept what the years have done to the body, and you still own the one thing age cannot touch, the choice of how to meet it.
Knowing when you have enough is real wealth, and knowing yourself is clearer sight than any judgment of others. The one who stops grasping leaves nothing behind that needs defending.
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Buddhism