VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 3
The Heart Behind It
The last chapter settled how torment happens, a position arrives and the gears turn on their own, but it could not explain one thing. Sit two people behind the same window and torment still goes especially hard at two kinds of person, blocking the well off with a relish and treading on the poor with an ease. That is not the force of the position. It is a turn of the heart, and this chapter opens it, one that has gone some three thousand years without being said straight out, in eight plain words. Resent those who have more, scorn those who have less.
The first section takes the upper half, resenting those who have more. This is not hate. Hate has an account behind it, a wrong you can point to. This resentment has none. It rises at nothing but the sight of someone doing better, and its unspoken line is why should he have it better than me. It runs in every heart, several times an ordinary day, and the person behind the window is only the one who got the chance to let it out. Which is why pulling up in a fine car gets you tormented worse, not better, because blocking a strong man pulls back the widest gap and runs the sense of position highest. And Confucius, at the second of seeing someone worthier, set a fork. Reach for his level, or breed resentment. He gives no order. He lays the two roads out and lets you choose.
The second section takes the lower half, scorning those who have less, and it is colder, because resentment still looks up with a thread of envy while scorn only looks down. Inside it are two workings. The footstool, treading someone lower to prove you are not the one at the bottom. And the pushing away of fear, pinning a crime on the other man's poverty, he is lazy, he had it coming, so that you feel safe from becoming him. The harder a person scorns the poor, the deeper his own fear of falling runs. Confucius laid out both ends, poor without fawning and rich without arrogance, where rich means any moment you stand higher than another, and noted that the ones who scorn hardest are exactly those who stand only a little higher, since only by treading down can that little height be seen. And Mencius set a position for the scorned, poverty cannot move him, poor is not low, and named the truth under it all, that the wince of compassion is the inborn heart and scorn is that heart pressed down, which means it can be let up again.
The third section turns the mirror around and holds it to your own face, and it is the chapter's most important lesson, because only there does the rest of it touch the ground. Have you ever held a little power, over a few people, a class, a child, a group? Did you ever drag out a reply on purpose, pick at a flaw that did not matter, leave a question sitting cold? And the resentment, and the scorn, whose day were those really? You have not only resented and scorned, you have been resented and scorned in your turn. You have sat at both ends your whole life, which is the plainest proof there is of the trade Confucius spoke of. So the old line comes down to land, do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself. You have been blocked, you know the taste. The only thing you are short of is one second, to remember it.
That is the third stake. Torment is work done by the hands, and this heart is its root, and which way the hands push is set by the heart. What is still left is the hands themselves. What exactly are the moves, the forms that hem a person in a whole life long? The next chapter gives each of them a name.
SECTION
SECTION 1 Resenting those who have more, the fork in a second
SECTION 2 Scorning those who have less, the footstool and the fear
SECTION 3 Turning the mirror around, you have sat on both sides
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
SECTION 1 Resenting those who have more, the fork in a second