VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 5
Tormenting Yourself, the Law in the Heart
For four chapters the torment has come from the outside. This chapter turns to a second direction, from within, where the one being tormented and the one doing the tormenting are the same person, you. And this inward torment, added up over a life, runs ten times more often than the outward kind, because you take some law that others laid down and torment yourself with it all day long.
The first section drives it down to its plainest, least arguable footing, the reactions of the body. All day the body runs on its own, breathing, weeping, needing the toilet, wanting to break wind, and all day, because a law says you should not do this in front of others, you force those born reactions back. These laws are not the law, no police enforce them, and yet they grip harder than the law, because the instant you break one, before anyone else has judged you, you have already felt the shame yourself. Their lining is one sentence, if I do this, people will look down on me, which is the scorn of the third chapter turned back on your own body. And Zhuangzi set the root two thousand three hundred years ago, when a man pressed him for where the Way was and he answered, in the ants, in the weeds, in the tiles, and at last, in the piss and the shit. Which means the Way has no high and no low. At the one position every person shares, there is no rank to drop, and to torment your body with a law of high and low is to have taken someone else's law for the truth.
The second section pushes that one layer deeper, to a claim that sounds backwards. The highest dimension of culture is not in the spirit but in the body. To see how deep a culture is rooted in a person, you look not at whether his mouth can talk equality but at whether his body steps back half a step from a laborer with dirt on his hands. Culture bores in through four layers, knowledge, belief, habit, and the body's own reaction, deeper at every step, and at its most successful it makes you unable to feel it is there, so you take it for the person you were born as. Tormenting yourself torments at that deepest layer, which is why no amount of reasoning can undo it, and why the way back out is not thinking but steeping again, in a new position, a line the next chapter picks up. Zhuangzi reached for the piss and the shit precisely because he knew that to loosen a culture you must strike the layer where it is rooted deepest, the body.
The third section closes the chapter by driving one thing to the root. The ruler that torments others and the ruler that torments yourself are the same ruler, and the only difference is which way it is turned. A person hard on others is mostly hard on himself, and a person easy on himself is mostly easy on others, because there is only the one ruler in the hand. That ruler was handed to you by others and soaked into your body, which means it can be set down and swapped for one that is wider and warmer, though swapping out the cold ruler of torment is not the same as throwing away the warm proprieties worth keeping. And Confucius, do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself, brought out a third time and turned all the way inward, is one line that is the antidote to both directions at once, because the self it speaks of includes the you of this very moment.
That is the fifth stake. Torment has two directions, outward and inward, run on the same ruler, and that ruler is not inborn and can be swapped. And a careful reader will have noticed by now that across five chapters no tormentor has ever been called a bad person and no verdict has once been passed. That is no oversight. It is the most important stroke of the pen in the whole book, and the next chapter takes it up on its own.
SECTION
SECTION 1 The body's reactions, Zhuangzi and the piss and the shit
SECTION 2 The highest dimension of culture is in the body
SECTION 3 The same ruler, measuring out and measuring in
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
SECTION 1 The body's reactions, Zhuangzi and the piss and the shit