6.11

It’s easy to skim past a verse this specific — cloth, antelope skin, kusha grass, a seat neither too high nor too low — as mere ritual detail. But the specificity itself is the instruction: a teaching this careful about a physical seat is telling you that the container for practice matters as much as the practice, not incidental to it.

“Neither too high nor too low” sounds like a throwaway qualifier here, but it’s the same madhyama, middle-position principle the chapter names explicitly a few verses later for eating and sleeping. The seat instruction isn’t a separate concern from that later teaching on balanced living — it’s the same design principle applied first to furniture, before it’s applied to appetite and rest. Consistency of a principle across trivial and significant domains is itself part of what’s being taught here.