VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 6
Passing No Verdict
Five chapters on torment have gone by, and from the first to the last no tormentor was ever called a bad person and no verdict of this is wrong was ever passed. That is no oversight. It is the single most important stroke of the pen in this whole book, and this chapter takes it up on its own. Why the book only lays out positions, and will not set down that one word, no.
The first section starts from the word no itself. The same event can be told two ways, one that lays the fact down and leaves the verdict to the reader, and one that adds a no and convicts on his behalf. Behind them sit two seats, the recorder and the judge. And the moment that no leaves your mouth, you jump from a person who sees to a person who judges, with a ruler of right and wrong in your hand, which is the very motion of torment, laying a law against a living person and punishing where it does not fit. So a person who stands all day on the moral height handing out convictions is fighting torment with torment's own method, and that is why the book will not lightly say no. Passing no verdict is not having no right and wrong. It is handing the right and wrong back to the reader, which is a form of respect, and it is Laozi's teaching without words, carried on twenty five centuries later.
The second section opens the history books. The brushwork of the Spring and Autumn, which Confucius put in order, comments almost never, and only picks the single most exact word, one word for a righteous killing and another for a foul one, so that the praise and blame show themselves, the way English lets execute and murder and assassinate each carry the verdict with no comment added. Sima Qian, who did not inflate the good or hide the bad, laid the harsh official Zhang Tang down flat and ran a chill down the back that a hundred curses could not, because the appalling grew from the reader's own heart and was not poured in through adjectives. The flat pen carries more force than the shout, because it steps the writer aside and lets the reader meet the thing face to face. And this stroke of the pen is itself a virtue, of restraint and of humility, the writer reining in his own urge to be the judge, the same piece of work as a clerk reining in the urge to block.
The third section turns over the notion that passing no verdict is easy. Passing the verdict is in fact the shortcut, because it needs no seeing clearly at all, one he is bad and the whole thing is packed up and thrown aside. Seeing clearly is the hard road, because it asks the three things a verdict refuses, to look at the bad person as a person again and crouch to his eye level, to look in the mirror and own the same resentment and scorn in yourself, and to hold back the urge to be the judge. And only seeing clearly makes real change possible, because a curse changes nothing of the position and only moves the anger down the line, while a person who has seen the four gears turn and seen the string that pulls him can at last reach out and cut it.
That is the sixth stake. The book lays out positions and passes no verdict, not because it is easy but because it is the hardest and deepest road, since cursing changes nothing and seeing clearly is the start of all change. Torment's sickness, its heart, its forms, its two directions, and the pen that sees them, are all now set. What remains is the heaviest question of all. Why does torment go on being handed down, one generation to the next, as though the chain could never break? The next chapter brings in Mozi and looks at how a child gets dyed, year by year, into a person who torments.
SECTION
SECTION 1 The word no draws the line
SECTION 2 The ancients' pen, only the facts
SECTION 3 Seeing clearly is the harder skill
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.