VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 12
Hard into the Generations, Hard into the Cells
The last chapter took the hard bedrock apart layer by layer. This chapter takes up how it passes from one generation to the next, and how deep it goes, and its answer turns, at the end, into the most alive and hopeful thing in the volume.
The first section takes up Mozi's dyed silk again. The vat that dyes the child is not some dead thing off to one side, it is the living people around him, above all the generation just ahead, and culture is one living generation dyeing the next by hand, which is being handed down in a single line. A single line means culture has no backup road, only this one, kept not in books, which are only paper unread, but in the mouths and hands and daily life of the living, so that if one generation drops the baton it breaks forever, as the cultures of Egypt and Babylon broke. The Chinese people have carried this baton unbroken for thousands of years, which is why you read Confucius and feel your own living root, not a foreign dead book, and this is not a boast of superiority but a heavy responsibility, since every living generation is the juncture that carries the past and opens the future, dyeing the next generation with its every ordinary act.
The second section brings in Xunzi's much-misread word, wei. Today it means false, but Xunzi built it from a person and the act of doing, so it means the humanly wrought, the opposite of the merely born, the whole result of humankind civilizing itself. Work upon the nature and raise up the wrought takes the inborn instinct to grab and, through the deliberate work of culture, raises a person who waits and shares and considers others, worked so deep it becomes a second nature, the giving way to an elder without a thought. And the crucial correction is that the wrought does not bind but completes, for a person unworked by culture is not freer but only an animal driven by instinct, and a gardener's pruning does not bind a tree but lets it grow straight and tall into real timber, so that against the modern notion that natural is best, Xunzi saw that what lets a person truly stand is precisely the deep working of culture.
The third section takes the deepest and most alive layer, culture as a seed. The cell layer says how deep culture goes, the plant layer says how alive it is, that it grows, the same seed of filial care growing living-under-one-roof in the old society and calling-often-from-another-city today, the look changing while the core holds. And the root that does not change is what Confucius called the one thing that threads through his whole Way, which Zengzi named faithfulness and reciprocity, the doing your utmost for others and the not doing to others what you would not want, the very antidote to torment this volume is about, so that through robes and rail and high-rises the seed-core of thinking of others held unbroken. It generates and generates without end, in the Book of Changes' line that the ceaseless bringing forth of life is what change means, a living culture being no museum specimen but a seed forever putting out shoots, grown anew in each generation's hands. And it lands on living the hard bedrock at three levels, to see it, to guard the good seeds and clear away the crooked sprouts with discernment rather than swallow or reject it whole, and to hand it down by becoming, yourself, a warmer and better vat.
That is the twelfth stake. Culture is handed down in a single line, hard into the cells and into the seed, threaded through by one thing and generating without end, its look changing while the root never breaks. With the sickness, the bedrock, and the handing down all set, the tree of this first semester stands up in root and trunk. The last chapter draws the whole tree complete, joins it to the branches of economy and politics and law, calls on several of the modern West's great minds who arrived by other roads at the same place, and crosses the bridge into the second semester.
SECTION
SECTION 1 Handed down in a single line, Mozi's silk taken up again
SECTION 2 Hard into the cells, Xunzi's wei
SECTION 3 The seed at the plant layer, threaded through by one
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
SECTION 1 Handed down in a single line, Mozi's silk taken up again