VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1
Laying the Root
Written for You Who Have Picked Up This Book
Before you decide whether or not to read this book, read this piece through first. This piece is not taught in the classroom, and no teacher will spend the time on it. It is an accounting written for you yourself to read, an accounting of what this book speaks of, and how it speaks of it, and why it speaks of it so, and how you are to read it. Read this piece through, and you will have in your mind a whole map. And then you can decide whether or not to spend a semester walking this road.
This book speaks of culture. And the culture it speaks of is not quite the one you may have looked for. Say the word culture, and what many people think of is the poem and the song, the zither and the game of chess, the brush and the painting, the systems of philosophy, the things set out in the museum and enshrined in the lecture hall. These are culture, of course, and very good culture. But this book does not begin from there. This book 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, and 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. This is torment. What this book 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 once read, do they count, or do they not, as his culture? This one question asks straight down to the root of the book. 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 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 book is written the upside-down way. Where others speak from up high on down, this book 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, all the way up to one whole tree.
Thirteen chapters are a road from the sickness to the root. The first nine chapters speak of the sickness, torment. The last four turn round and speak of the root, the hard bedrock. What they look at is the two sides of one same tree.
The first nine chapters speak of the sickness, torment. The first chapter gives the thing a name. To be in a bind and to torment are one word apart and a world apart. To be in a bind is to have no way to help it. To torment is to have the way and pointedly withhold it. This chapter first gives a name to a thing that happens every day and has gone some centuries without a proper one. Confucius, do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself, stands here. The second chapter speaks of the position torment happens in. It is not the ones with great power in their hands who torment you. It is exactly the ones with only a little power. The clerk behind the window, the guard at the gate, the small functionary in the office. Why? Because it is a tiny power that gets used to its very limit. This chapter brings out Xunzi on force. The third chapter speaks of the heart of torment. That heart is eight characters. To resent another’s wealth, and to grudge another his want. Seeing one better off than himself, he goes sour inside. Seeing one weaker than himself, he hangs frost on his face. This is the hardest chapter in the book, because it asks you to look in the mirror. The fourth chapter speaks of the five forms of torment. Picking at the fine details, jerking you back and forth, the cold humiliation, the keeping of information dark, the enforcing of the rule only where it suits. One by one, each is named. Read it through, and you will find you have taken every one of these five on the chin in your life. The fifth chapter speaks of torment’s other direction, inward. A person does not torment only others. He takes up a ruler that someone else handed him, and torments his own self a whole life long. This chapter brings out the most startling line Zhuangzi ever spoke. The Way is in the piss and the shit. The sixth chapter speaks of the book’s own way of writing. Why it only lays out the position and passes no verdict. Five chapters of torment, and it never once cursed a bad person, and this is not a smoothing-over, it is on purpose. Laozi, the teaching without words, stands here. The seventh chapter speaks of the handing down. Torment wounds a person so, and why is it still handed on one generation to the next? Mozi, standing before the dye vat, dyed in blue it comes out blue, speaks the thing to its root. A person is dyed into what he is. And precisely because he is dyed, he can be dyed anew. The eighth chapter speaks of the boundary of the institution. A strict and clear law, why can it not govern torment? Because torment all happens inside the frame of the rules, hugging the line, and never over it. Confucius and Laozi cross hands in this chapter, and tell us this. The institution draws the line, and culture nurtures the heart. The ninth chapter speaks of how to live all of this into every day. To see torment clearly is not to curse anyone. It is to guard the nine things most precious in a life. Time, energy, attention, relationships, trust, health, skill, reputation, feeling. This chapter closes on Huineng’s verse. Originally there is not a single thing, so where would the dust alight?
The last four chapters turn round and speak of the root, the hard bedrock. The tenth chapter sets straight a word that has been used backward, soft power. Culture is not soft. Culture is the hardest bedrock a people has. Armies will be beaten, money will run out, and so long as the culture is still there, a people can stand itself up again, time after time. Guanzi, when the granaries are full they know propriety, is here read the other way round. The eleventh chapter takes this hard bedrock apart, to see just where it is hard. Hard in the language. Hard in the food. Hard in that one flick of unthinking 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 chapter speaks of how this bedrock is handed on. It goes by being handed down in a single line, one living generation dyeing the next by its own hand, the baton never once broken. Xunzi’s character wei is not the wei of falseness. It is the wei of the humanly-made, and it speaks of exactly this, that the shaping culture does, all of it after birth, can go deep enough to become a person’s second nature. The thirteenth chapter gathers it into a tree. Economy, politics, law, the three things that look the hardest of all, in truth all grow up on this soil of culture. A few of the great modern learned minds of the West, Weber, Boas, Huntington, setting out each from his own road, in the end all walked to the place the ancestors stood upon thousands of years ago. Culture is the root. Walk the thirteen chapters through, and 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.
This book is written by a few rules. You have only this book in your hand, with no teacher off to the side to explain. So there are a few rules to tell you first, that you may read with a settled mind. The first. Only lay out the position, pass no verdict. From its head to its tail this book has hardly once cursed a tormentor as a bad person, nor passed a verdict of this is the wrong thing to do. It only lays a thing out to its clearest, and lets you see it for yourself, and then hands the judging back to you. Because 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 book that truly stands was thought up by the one who wrote it. Confucius, Xunzi, Mencius, Zhuangzi, Mozi, Laozi, Guanzi, Yan Zhitui, Sima Qian, Huineng. What 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. On the foot of every page you will see one same line. Credit to the ancestors, the mistakes are mine. This line is a real one, and no mere courtesy. The credit is the ancestors’. And the one who catches their words will, unavoidably, catch some of them wrong, and those errors are carried, by this one person who wrote the book, alone. The whole meaning of this line is spoken, in earnest, in the afterword at the semester’s end.
How this book is to be read. The thirteen chapters of the first semester, each of three sections, are thirty nine sections in all. A section is some twenty five hundred to three thousand words, the measure of one class. Read three sections a week, and thirteen weeks, one semester, reads it through just so. Before each chapter there is a guide of some hundred words, that tells you what the chapter is to stand. At the end of each section it is made plain what the section has stood, and what the next is to speak of. Follow along this line, and you will not lose your way. And a word of counsel in the reading. Do not hurry on ahead. When a section is read, stop a while, and take the thing and think it onto your own self. The things this book speaks of, you have no need to commit to memory. Every one of them you have already lived through in your own person. What you read is not new knowledge. It is a name, and a position, given to an experience you had long since.
What you get for reading this book. To speak honestly, read this book 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 four 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. And one more thing. A one-second choice. 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 you are tormented into a belly full of anger, you may just call to mind that it is not the person that is bad, it is the position doing the work, and not carry that fire home to loose it on the ones dearest to you. These things are all of them small, so small as to be beneath mention. And this book, having circled so wide, having brought out so many ancestors, is, when all is said, for the sake of just these few small things. Culture is in no other place. It is in this one second’s choosing of yours. Now, you can decide whether or not to walk this road.
FIRST SEMESTER, TABLE OF CONTENTS
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
Chapter 11 The Hard Bedrock, Where It Is Hard
Chapter 12 Handed Down in a Single Line
Chapter 13 The Picture of One Tree
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.