Volume II

Cultural Infrastructure

VOLUME II

The Cultural Institution

Written for You Who Have Picked Up This Volume

This volume is called the Cultural Institution. You look at those words, and you may knit your brow a moment. Culture is culture, how has it become an institution? That knit of the brow is exactly the first thing this volume has to speak of.

Why the Cultural Institution. The frame of the seven volumes runs like this. The first volume, Despair. The second volume, the Cultural Institution. The third volume, the Economic Institution. The fourth volume, the Political Institution. The fifth volume, the Legal Institution. The sixth volume, Saving People, Racing the Clock Before the Blood Runs in Rivers. The seventh volume, Hope. Set the four words in the middle side by side and look at them a moment. Culture, economy, politics, law. The way most people rank them in their hearts runs like this. The economy is hard, politics is hard, the law is hard. Those three, that govern the money, and the power, and the right and wrong, are the real goods. And culture is soft, is empty, is the poem and the song and the chess and the painting, is that bit of refinement over the after-dinner tea. And these last few decades, one more word has set that misunderstanding in stone. Soft power. This volume means to take that word back. Culture is not soft. Culture is the hardest bedrock there is, harder than money, harder than the gun, harder than the statute in black on white. A country may lose its money, and have its armies beaten, and its institutions come down. And so long as that bedrock is still there, it can stand itself up again, one time after another. And the other way round, the money however great, the army however strong, the statutes however tidy, if that bedrock has gone empty, then all of those are towers in the air, and sooner or later they come down. And so this volume is not called Culture. It is called the Cultural Institution. Those two words are to stand there on a level with economy, and politics, and law. And having stood there, this volume has one fiercer thing still to say. The four of them are not, in truth, side by side. Economy, politics, law are three trees growing on the soil of culture. And culture is that soil.

This volume begins from the least respectable of small things. The books that speak of culture are already many on the shelf. Most of them speak from up high, from the poem, from the philosophy, from the chess and the painting, from the things set out in the museum and enshrined in the lecture hall. These are all of them culture, of course, and very good culture. And this volume does not begin from there. It begins from a small thing, a thing you may run into any day, and that no one has ever given a proper name to. Torment. You go to get a thing done. The person behind the window does not lift his head, and tosses you a line. Your papers are not in order, go back. You ask where they are not in order, and he says, look for yourself. You make the trip three times, and each time he tells you only one more thing that is missing, like squeezing a tube of toothpaste. He has broken no rule, and cursed you with not one foul word, and when you walk out of that door your chest is so stopped up you cannot speak. What this volume means to ask is this. A man who can hold forth on the Tang poems and the Song lyrics with the best of them, why is it that, seated behind that window, he can just as well pen a stranger into a corner with no way out? Then those poems he read, do they count, or do they not, as his culture? This one question asks straight down to the root of the volume. What it means to speak of is not the culture hung up high for people to look up at, but the culture that has drilled into the bones, come down into every day, hidden in the one word and the one act of you and me. And to see this culture that has come down into the real, the best incision is not, in fact, the respectable things. It is torment, the least respectable thing there is, and the one that every person has felt on his own skin. From how a person treats a stranger he is able to torment, you can see his real cultural bedrock more clearly than from how many poems he can recite. And so this volume is written the upside-down way. Where others speak from up high on down, this volume speaks from the lowest, the most daily, the most mortifying place, on up. It begins from that cold face behind the window, and speaks all the way up to the hard bedrock a people has kept for thousands of years, up to one tree, up to a forest, and at the very last, to the one thing in all the human world that alone can be left behind.

Twenty six chapters, and what road they walk. This volume falls into two semesters, twenty six chapters. The first semester, thirteen chapters, speaks of one tree. The first nine look at the sickness, and the sickness is named torment. The first chapter gives the thing its name, for to be in a bind and to torment are one word apart and a world apart. The second speaks of the position it happens in, that it is not the ones with great power who torment you but exactly the ones with only a little. The third speaks of its heart, to resent another's wealth and grudge another his want. The fourth speaks of its five forms. The fifth speaks of how a person, with a ruler another handed him, torments his own self a whole life long. The sixth speaks of the book's own way of writing, why it only lays out the position and passes no verdict. The seventh speaks of the handing down, Mozi before the dye vat, dyed in blue it comes out blue. The eighth speaks of the boundary of the institution, why a strict and clear law cannot govern torment. The ninth speaks of how to live all this into every day, and closes on Huineng's verse, originally not a single thing. The last four look at the root, and the root is named the hard bedrock. The tenth sets straight a word used backward, soft power. The eleventh takes this bedrock apart, that it is hard in the language, hard in the food, hard in that one unthinking flick of response when you come face to face with a person, hard in your whole feeling for time, and hard at the last in that who am I in your heart. The twelfth speaks of how it is handed on, in a single line, one living generation dyeing the next by its own hand. The thirteenth gathers it into a tree, that economy and politics and law, the three that look the hardest of all, in truth all grow up on this soil of culture, and that a few of the great modern learned minds of the West, Weber, Boas, Huntington, setting out each from his own road, all in the end walked to the place the ancestors had stood upon thousands of years before. The first semester told, you will have a whole tree in your hand. The root is culture. The trunk is the way of being a person and of doing a thing. And torment is the worm-holes and the crooked branches that grow when the tree's root is not strong and its trunk is sick.

The second semester, thirteen chapters, speaks of how this tree grows into a forest. Because one tree, however fine, has only the one lifetime. It will wither, and fall, and rot back into the soil. And it will set a seed, and the seed falls to the ground and grows a second tree. And a few thousand years on, the first has long since rotted into earth, and this forest is still there, and larger, and denser, and deeper. This process has a name. Education. The first six chapters speak of education. From the five layers of work the school carries, teaching being only one of them, to talent, to the eight characters of the teacher's way, to the two workings of teaching and steeping, to the five great minds of the West who each walked half the road, to how one tree grows into a forest, and back at the last onto those nine things in your own hand. Time, energy, attention, relationships, trust, health, skill, reputation, feeling. Those nine are the dye vat. And your child soaks in it, eighteen years. The last seven chapters speak of tools. Because into the human world today has come a thing that a few years ago did not exist. It can talk, can answer, can reason, can keep a child company, and never once tires. What is it? Which square does it stand in? The ancestors laid down three stones. The Records of the Examination of Craftsmen said, the wise create the thing, and the implement is always the object. The Book of Changes said, the Way comes before the implement. Mozi said, benefit people and do it, do not benefit people and stop. And Xunzi's character wei, wronged for two thousand years, is here cleared. What is made by a human hand is wei. The one who makes it is the potter, the one who places it is the pharmacy, and that licensed door bought with blood, it cannot get in at, because that is not the door of knowledge, it is the door of the body. It has no body. No body that can hurt, no life with a shape, no road already walked, no account it can carry, no boundary that ends. And so it can speak the Way, and cannot transmit the Way. And the chain that for three thousand years was handed down one generation to the next faces, for the first time, the danger of its clasps loosening on a great scale.

This volume is written by a few rules. The first, and the most important of all. Only lay out the position, pass no verdict. From its head to its tail this volume has hardly once cursed a tormentor as a bad person, nor once called that new thing a scourge. This is no smoothing-over. It is on purpose. Because a he is bad is too easy a thing to say, so easy that you need never again see anything clearly. And what this volume would do is exactly to ask you to see it clearly for yourself, and then hand the judging back to you. The right and wrong you have seen out for yourself holds far firmer than the kind another stuffs into you. The second. The ancestors are the protagonists. Not one of the things in this volume that truly stands was thought up by the one who wrote it. Do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself, and in teaching let there be no sorting of men into kinds, and teach each according to his material, are Confucius's. The fleabane that grows up among the hemp and stands straight unpropped, and to work upon the nature and raise the wrought, are Xunzi's. Dyed in blue it comes out blue, and benefit people and do it, are Mozi's. The teaching without words is Laozi's. Treat my own elders as elders and extend it to the elders of others, and the stripped-bare trees of Ox Mountain, are Mencius's. The Way is in the piss and the shit is Zhuangzi's. When the granaries are full they know propriety, and for the plan of a lifetime nothing is like the growing of people, are Guanzi's. The fuming and the steeping, the molding and the dyeing, is Yan Zhitui's. Transmitting the Way, teaching the craft, dispelling doubt, is Han Yu's. Learning high enough to teach, conduct upright enough to be a model, is Tao Xingzhi's. Originally not a single thing is Huineng's. What the one who wrote this book did was only to catch the positions they set down two thousand years and more ago, and tell them over, in the plain speech of today. The third. Wherever it quotes the ancestors, it uses without exception the customary name of respect. This volume does not call them by their bare personal names, because it stands in the position of a student receiving their words, and not in the position of a peer, still less of one up above, passing remarks upon them. The fourth. In the body of the text you will hardly see the one who wrote this book at all. Where an I ought to be said, for the most part it has used here, or someone, or the one who wrote this book. The further the writer steps back, the further forward the ancestors' words come to stand. And yet on the foot of every page there is signed one same line. Credit to the ancestors, the mistakes are mine. These two things are one thing. The credit is the ancestors', and so in the body there ought to be no place for the writer. And the mistakes must be owned by someone. Copied wrong, told crooked, understood shallow or understood askew, these errors cannot be laid at the ancestors' door. They have to be carried, by this one person who caught the words, alone. And so, the mistakes are Tiger Lyon's. This Tiger Lyon is the one who wrote this book. That he signs his name only at the mistakes end of the line is a thing he does willingly.

What you get for reading this volume. To speak honestly, read this volume through and you will be no one skill the richer, no one certificate the richer, and it will test out to nothing in an examination. What it can give you is, about, these few things. One is a name. You will come to know that the thing that has stopped up your chest for half a life, and that you could never put into words, is called torment. Give a thing a name, and you are no longer its captive. You can look at it now. One is an eye. You will see clear how the few gears turn in the heart of the one who blocks you. And you will see clear that the same gears are turning in your own heart too. This seeing is deeper than a hundred cursings of he is bad. One is a mirror. You will see clear what that dye vat is made of. It is your time, and your energy, and whose face your eyes are on, and whether you did the thing you promised, and what time you sleep, and how you treat your own mother. Your child soaks in these nine, and what color he will be one day, you have in truth known all along. One is a ruler. Mozi's ruler. Benefit people and do it, do not benefit people and stop. Hereafter, each time you meet with a new thing, you can ask one line. After a person has used it three months, has he come out of it the better, or the worse? And the last, and the one thing that this whole volume, circling twenty six chapters and bringing out so many ancestors, was, when all is said, only for. One second. The next time you sit down in the seat that can block a man, you may just call to mind that word, trade places, and hold a second, and loosen that little power at your hand. The next time the child comes over with a problem to ask you, and you are worn out and unwilling to stir, you may just call to mind that half second, and turn the phone face down, and say one line. Come, sit, let us look at it together. The first semester, spoken to its end, comes to rest on one second. The man seated behind the window let his hand go. The second semester, spoken to its end, comes to rest on half a second. The man seated on the sofa turned the phone face down. The two semesters, the twenty six chapters, are one same second. And this one second is the only thing you can, in your whole life, truly give away. Because the house will come down, and the money will scatter, and the name will fade, and the body is given back to the earth. Originally not a single thing. And the small thing you did in that one second will steep into another person, and through him, steep into the next generation, and steep on down, one turn and another, into some concrete person a few hundred years, a few thousand years, from now. A great love left in the human world.

Now, open it. Culture is in no other place. It is in this one second's choosing of yours. You let your hand go this one second, and this bedrock of a few thousand years has, on you, lived once. Now, you can decide whether or not to walk this road.

TABLE OF CONTENTS OF THIS VOLUME

FIRST SEMESTER, Laying the Root

Chapter 1 Do Not Torment

Chapter 2 A Little Power

Chapter 3 Resenting Another's Wealth, Grudging Another's Want

Chapter 4 The Five Forms of Torment

Chapter 5 The Ruler Turned Inward

Chapter 6 Only Lay Out the Position, Pass No Verdict

Chapter 7 Dyed in Blue It Comes Out Blue

Chapter 8 The Seam the Law Cannot Reach

Chapter 9 Living Torment, the Nine Things

Chapter 10 Culture Is Not Soft