VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 5, SECTION 2
The Highest Dimension of Culture Is in the Body
The last section said a plain thing. Even breaking wind, weeping, needing the toilet, the born reactions of the body, are each governed by laws that other people laid down. This section pushes that plain thing one layer deeper, to a startling conclusion. The highest dimension of culture is not in the spirit. It is in the body. Heard the first time, that sounds backwards. We are used to thinking of culture as a high thing, poetry, painting, philosophy, the pursuits of the spirit, so how could it come down to rest in a place as low as the body? This section straightens the backwards claim out, one layer at a time.
Look first at how culture usually gets understood. Ask a person what culture is, and mostly he will say, it is reading widely, having learning, knowing the arts, speaking with refinement, having a high reach of spirit. It runs upward, in short, and the more spiritual it is the more cultured it is. By that account the body is the lowest end of culture. Eating and drinking and pissing and shitting are the body's business, not fit for the fine hall, things to be hidden and reined in. The more a person can rein in the body, and rise above the body, the more cultured he is.
That account is backwards. Why? Run the simplest test there is. To find out whether a culture is rooted deep in a person, do you look at whether his mouth can talk culture, or do you look at whether the culture has bored down into his body and taken hold of his reactions? A person can talk all beings are equal until the sky lights up, and then a laborer with dirt on his hands comes near and his body, on its own, takes half a step back. That half step is a thing the mouth cannot fake. His mouth's equality floats on the very top. The half step his body took back is the culture that has bored all the way into the bone. So to test how deep a culture is rooted, do not look at the mouth, look at the body. The mouth is the shallowest layer. The body is the deepest. The further a culture bores into the body, the deeper it is rooted. That is the first thing meant by the highest dimension of culture being in the body.
So how does culture bore into the body? Take the passage apart layer by layer. The outermost layer is knowledge. You read a book and learn a principle, that all people are equal, say. This layer is the shallowest and the easiest to change. You believe it today, and tomorrow you read another book and you may not. Knowledge floats on the surface of the water. A layer in is belief. You have turned the principle over long enough that you have come to hold it, and it has become a view of yours, a stand you take. This is deeper than knowledge, but it is still up in the head, still a thing arrived at by thinking, and it can still be turned around by more thinking. A layer further in is habit. You have acted on the view long enough that it has become an unthinking motion, done without any thought at all. A person raised from childhood to yield will step aside for others before he knows he is doing it. This layer is already deep, deep enough that changing it takes real effort. And the innermost layer, the deepest of all, is the reaction of the body. At this layer, culture is no longer something you do. It is something your body does, on its own. You see a certain kind of person and your heart speeds up. You hear a certain accent and your brow tightens. You are put in a certain setting and your whole body goes uneasy. These reactions come faster than you can think. The body has reacted for you before you got there.
Look at the four layers. Knowledge, belief, habit, the reaction of the body. From the outside in, each one deeper than the last. A culture that stops at knowledge and belief is still a shallow thing, still open to change. But once it bores down into habit, and above all into the reactions of the body, it has become a part of you, so deep you can no longer feel that it is there, and you take it for the person you were simply born as. That is the deepest, and the most frightening, thing about culture. At the moment it succeeds most completely, it makes you unable to feel that it is there at all. You think the half step back at the laborer is the person you were born as. It is not. It is a culture that bored into your body long ago, and stepped that half step for you.
Now bring the four layers back to tormenting yourself, and it comes clear. Tormenting yourself torments at the very deepest layer, the reaction of the body. Everything in the last section, wanting to break wind in a meeting and holding it, grief rising and being forced back, needing the toilet and holding it, all of it happens at the layer of the body's reaction. Which is to say, the law that others laid down is no longer in your knowledge and no longer in your beliefs. It has bored into your body and become your automatic reaction. You do not have to think I should not break wind now, your body has already held the gas back a step ahead of you. You do not have to think I should not cry now, your tears have already been forced back a step ahead of you. This law grips you ten thousand times deeper than the law does, for the plain reason that it is not in your head. It is in your body.
And that brings out something worth marking carefully. Tormenting yourself is the hardest of all to undo, precisely because it torments at the deepest layer. You cannot reason it loose. Reasoning works at the layers of knowledge and belief, but tormenting yourself happens at the layer of the body's reaction. You reason at the outermost layer while it goes on reacting at the innermost. That is why so many people who have thought it all through, who understand the reasoning perfectly, still find that the moment they are in that setting, the body torments them anyway, on its own. So what can be done? A line planted here, to be picked up in the next chapter, on how things get handed down. Culture bores into the body not by telling but by steeping, by soaking year after year in a dye vat until it takes. And in the same way, to get it back out of the body, thinking alone will not do it. It takes standing in a new position and steeping again. More on that later.
Come back around and it is clearer still why the piss and the shit of the last section had to fall on the body. Zhuangzi was as sharp a mind as ever lived. To make the point that the Way has no high and no low, out of all the examples on earth, why did he reach for the piss and the shit, the least decent one there is? Because he knew that the place where the culture of high and low is rooted deepest is the body. Tell a person the Way has no high and no low, and at the layers of knowledge and belief he agrees easily, nodding hard. But that agreement floats on the surface, and surface agreement was not what Zhuangzi was after. His the Way is in the piss and the shit strikes straight down into the deepest layer of the body. He wants you, at the body's own reflex of feeling something base the instant it meets piss and shit, to jolt, to take a shock. Only that jolt has any chance of loosening the culture rooted down in the body. Two thousand three hundred years ago Zhuangzi already understood that to change a culture, reasoning at the mouth and in the head is useless, and you have to strike the body. That insight, that culture lives in the body, runs far deeper than any later understanding of culture that keeps to the spirit alone. The credit is Zhuangzi's.
So here is where this section leaves us. A backwards claim, set straight. The highest dimension of culture is not in the spirit but in the body. The usual notion, that the more spiritual a thing is the higher it is, runs backwards. To test how deep a culture goes, look not at the mouth but at the body. Culture bores in through four layers, knowledge, belief, habit, and the reaction of the body, deeper at every step. At its most successful it makes you unable to feel it is there, and you take it for the person you were born as. Tormenting yourself torments at the deepest layer, the body's reaction, which is why reasoning cannot undo it. And Zhuangzi's the Way is in the piss and the shit fell on the body precisely because he knew that to loosen a culture you have to strike the layer where it is rooted deepest.
By now the position of tormenting yourself has been carried from the body all the way down to the deepest layer of culture. But one last and most important question is still unanswered. Whether it is tormenting others or tormenting yourself, is there one root shared behind them both? The next section takes up the plainest and deepest answer. Turned outward or turned inward, it is one and the same ruler. See you there.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.