VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 12, SECTION 3
The Seed at the Plant Layer, Threaded Through by One
This chapter has been about how the hard bedrock passes, and how deep it goes. The first section, handed down in a single line. The second, Xunzi's wei, culture hard all the way into the cells. This section is the close of the chapter, and it takes up the deepest and the most alive layer. This bedrock is deep the way a seed is deep, and it generates and generates without end, threaded through by one thing, its look changing while its root never breaks. This is the deepest lesson, and it gathers the chapter up.
The section before said culture dyes to the cell layer and becomes a second nature. But there is a deeper metaphor, and a more alive one. Culture's deepest is at the plant layer. It is a seed. What is the difference between the cell layer and the plant layer? The cell layer says how deep culture goes, down into the body. The plant layer says how alive culture is, that it can grow. A seed is not a fixed, dead thing. It has life in it, and depending on the soil, the sun, the water, it will grow into plants of different looks. The same seed grows one way in the south and another in the north, and it is still the same seed. Culture is such a seed. The seed of culture the ancestors handed down will grow a different look in a different age. But however much the look changes, the core of that seed, the root, does not change. Take the plainest example. Filial care, that seed of culture, in the old farming society grew into the look of living under one roof with your parents and tending them in person. In today's society, where the children may work in another city, that same seed of filial care has grown a new look, calling often, coming home for the holidays, watching over the parents' health from a distance. The look is wholly different, and the core of the seed, caring for your parents and repaying what you owe them, has not changed. This is what is alive about culture as a seed. It does not rigidly stand guard over an old form, but grows a new look with each age, while keeping the root.
So, with the look forever changing, what exactly is the root that does not change? Confucius answered in one word. He said that his Way was threaded through, from start to finish, by one thing. What is that one? His student Zengzi explained it. Faithfulness, and reciprocity. Faithfulness is doing your utmost for others, and reciprocity is not doing to others what you would not want done to yourself, the Golden Rule from the first chapter. See it. The one thing that threads through the whole of Confucius's Way is that heart of thinking of others and not tormenting others, the very antidote to torment this whole volume has been about. This one thread is the core of the seed of culture. Across thousands of years, China's outward look changed beyond recognition. The dress went from the old robes to later styles to the suits of today. Travel went from the horse cart to the high-speed rail. Homes went from the courtyard house to the high-rise. The look changed past knowing. And yet the core of that seed, thinking of others, not tormenting, being warm to people, keeping faith, honoring and repaying those who raised you, this root, threaded through thousands of years by one thing, never broke. This is the true hard bedrock of Chinese culture, hard down to a seed, hard into the root, and no change of age can change it.
This seed of culture has one most precious quality. It generates and generates without end. The Book of Changes said it through in a single line. Generating and generating, that is what change means. That is to say, the ceaseless bringing forth of life is itself the deepest law of the universe, and of living things. That generating without end is exactly the life force in the seed of culture. It does not die because the age changes. Just the opposite. In each new age it puts out a new bud and grows a new look. The old form may wither, the way the old robes withered out of daily wear, but the life in the seed does not end with it, and it grew a new form, the way people today grew new ways of showing filial care and warmth. This is why the culture of China can go thousands of years unbroken. Not because it is fixed and unchanging, but precisely because it generates without end, and grows on within the changing. A truly living culture is never a specimen in a museum. It is a seed forever putting out shoots. In the hands of every generation of the living, it grows once anew. And this ties back to the wei of the last section, that completes. Culture works upon each generation, and each generation, in turn, gives culture a new life. The handing down is not a one-way business of the old dyeing the new. It is a two-way generating without end. The old generation gives the newborn the seed, and the new generation lets the seed grow a new look, and then hands it to a generation newer still. And so it generates without end.
All this about culture, its depth, its hardness, its being alive, comes to rest, in the end, on the daily life of each person. How do you live this hard bedrock? At three levels. The first is to see it. That was the whole point of the first semester. To see this culture-water you soak in, this bedrock hard to the point of being invisible. To see your language, your food, your reactions, your who am I, and see that they are dyed by culture and not simply born. Seeing is the starting point. The second is to recognize and to guard the good of it. Having seen clearly, tell apart which of this culture are the good seeds, thinking of others, keeping faith, honoring those who raised you, and which are the crooked sprouts of a bad soil, torment, the resenting of those who have more and the scorning of those who have less. Recognize and guard the good, and see through and clear away the bad. This is the key to living a culture. Not to swallow it whole, and not to throw it out whole, but to inherit it with discernment. The third is to hand it down. You stand at the juncture that carries the past and opens the future, and every ordinary thing you do in a day is dyeing the next generation. To live the hard bedrock, at its deepest, is this. To become, yourself, a good vat, a good seed, and let the next generation, soaking in what is around you, be dyed a good color. And this ties the whole volume together. From the do not torment of the first chapter, to the breaking of the chain in the seventh, to the handing down here, all of it points to one thing. You can, in your own daily life, choose to become a warmer and a better vat of culture. That is the most extraordinary thing an ordinary person is able to do.
That closes the twelfth chapter. Pull together what it has set down. How culture passes, and how deep. Handed down in a single line, one living generation dyeing the next by hand, unbroken for thousands of years. Xunzi's wei, culture hard into the cells and turned into a second nature, and the wrought completes rather than binds. And the deepest, culture is a seed, threaded through by one thing, the faithfulness and reciprocity at the heart of Confucius's Way, generating and generating without end in the words of the Book of Changes, its look changing while its root holds. And it comes to rest on living the hard bedrock, to see it, to guard the good of it, and to hand it down. That is the twelfth stake this chapter drives. Culture is handed down in a single line, hard into the cells and the seed, threaded through by one thing and generating without end, its look changing while the root never breaks.
By here, the main body of the first semester is nearly done. From torment, the sickness, to the hard bedrock, the root, to the handing down, how it passes, the tree of the culture of this first semester, its roots and its trunk, all stand up. The last chapter, the thirteenth, will draw this whole tree out complete, join it to the highest branches, the institutions of economy and politics and law, and call on several of the modern West's great minds, to see how they arrived, by different roads, at the same place, and then cross the bridge, at last, into the second semester. The next chapter is the finale of the first semester. See you in the next chapter.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.