VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 6, SECTION 2
The Ancients' Pen, Only the Facts
The last section started from the word no and made clear the stroke of laying out positions and passing no verdict, and Laozi's teaching without words that set its root. This section opens the history books and looks at how the pen of the ancestors, writing history, laid out the facts with not one word of praise or blame, and still let people a thousand years later see it all perfectly clearly. Follow the ancient pen, and learn how to lay a thing out so that it speaks for itself.
Look first at one of the oldest histories there is, the Spring and Autumn Annals, which Confucius put in order. The way it records things has a trait that later ages gave a name, the brushwork of the Spring and Autumn. The remarkable thing about it is that it almost never comments. It only sets down, with great exactness, who did what, and when. And yet, behind that bare recording, the praise and the blame show themselves.
Take the most famous instance. For the same act, a man was killed, the Annals uses different words. When a man above rightly does away with a man who was guilty, it uses one word. When a man below rises against his lord and destroys a man who should not have been destroyed, it uses another. When a man is quietly disposed of, with his guard down, it uses another still. The Annals does not say, in this place it was right, and in that place it was wrong. It only, with great care, picks the single most exact word and lays the event down with it. And the moment you read that word, the scale inside you moves on its own. You yourself have weighed out whether the thing was warranted or not.
An English reader has this closer to hand than it might seem. In English too, killing has a hundred words, and each already carries the verdict. Execute, and murder, and assassinate, and put down, and slay. No one has to add a word of comment. The word chosen has already done the judging. That is the whole of the brushwork of the Spring and Autumn. The writer keeps to the recorder's seat. I only pick the word to the finest exactness, and lay the event out to the fullest clarity. The verdict, I hand you not one word of. But laid out that exactly, you see it for yourself. Confucius, putting the Annals in order, used this very stroke of the pen. The credit is his.
Look next at another book, Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian, which the chapters before this have called on more than once. There is a famous line about how Sima Qian wrote. He did not inflate the good, and he did not hide the bad. He simply, honestly, laid a thing out as it was. Back in the fourth chapter, the passage from the Records about Zhang Tang trying his cases was quoted. Remember how Sima Qian wrote it? He did not write, Zhang Tang was a monster, he threw lives away like weeds, he deserved to die a thousand deaths. Not one word of that kind. He only laid it down flat. Zhang Tang tried his cases so that whenever the throne wanted a man convicted, he handed the case to the subordinate who judged the hardest.
Just that, laid down flat. And reading that one line, what rises in you? You see for yourself how cold, and how frightening, that way of trying cases was. Sima Qian used not a single bad, and yet he runs a chill down your back that a hundred bads could not. That is the skill in the ancient pen. The dirtiest, coldest thing, set down with the flattest, stillest hand. The flatter the pen, the more the thing appalls. Because that appalling is a thing that grew up out of your own heart, and was not poured into you through the writer's adjectives.
A reader might ask, did Sima Qian then have no praise and blame in his own heart? Of course he did. He knew, better than anyone, who was good and who was foul. But he pressed that praise and blame down under the pen, pressed it into every word he chose, and simply would not leap out to shout for you, this man is bad. That holding back, that leaving of the verdict to the people who come later, is the greatest thing about him as a historian.
Now drive one point all the way home. Why does the flat pen carry more force than the shout? Picture two scenes. In the first, a man points at another man's nose and curses him. You villain. You are disgusting. You are standing to the side, watching. What runs through you? Most likely you begin, despite yourself, hunting up reasons for the man being cursed. Does he have some hardship of his own? The instant the cursing starts, your attention slides off the thing that was done and onto the cursing itself. The deed is buried under the violence of the words. In the second scene, a man calmly lays out, one by one, the things another has done, and adds not a word of comment. You are standing to the side, watching. No one stands between you and the thing, and you see it, directly, in its own shape. The scale inside you moves on its own. And because this is a weight you took yourself, you believe it, and you hold onto it. The curse plants the writer in front of the thing. The flat pen steps the writer aside and lets you and the thing meet face to face. The curse passes the verdict for you, and you push back against it. The flat pen invites you to pass it yourself, and you are won over.
That is why the ancients wrote their history with a flat pen. Not because they had no feeling. Precisely because they understood that the deepest feeling, the heaviest praise and blame, can only be carried by the stillest pen. The moment you get worked up and start to curse, the weight of it goes light, and scatters.
And now raise this one more level. Laying out positions and passing no verdict is not only a technique of writing. It is, in itself, a virtue. Which virtue? Restraint, and humility. Where is the restraint? He plainly has praise and blame in him, plainly has a bellyful he wants to pour out, and he holds it, and presses down the urge to leap out as the judge. That is restraint. Where is the humility? He does not take himself for the man who holds the final truth and is fit to convict all the rest. He knows he too is an ordinary person who misreads, who carries his own slant. So he dares not lightly hand down the verdict that ends the matter. He humbly hands the verdict back to more people, and to time. That is humility. And think back. Five chapters of torment, all of it about position poor people using the scrap of power in their hands to confirm that they still exist. So a writer who leaps out to convict this one and convict that one, setting himself on the highest moral ground, is he not also using a kind of moral power to confirm himself? See that, and you understand why passing no verdict is a virtue. It is the writer, again and again, reining in his own urge to be the judge. And that reining in, and a person behind a window reining in the urge to block someone, are the same piece of work.
So here is where this section leaves us. Following the ancient pen, we have learned the skill of only laying out the facts. The brushwork of the Spring and Autumn, one exact word and no comment, and the praise and blame show themselves. The Records of the Grand Historian, not inflating the good and not hiding the bad, the dirtiest thing set down with the flattest pen, colder than a hundred curses. The flat pen carries more force than the shout, because it steps the writer aside and lets you meet the thing face to face. And this stroke of the pen is, at bottom, a virtue, of restraint and of humility, the writer reining in the urge to be the judge. But then, laying out positions and passing no verdict sounds easy, as though the writer does nothing at all and only sets the thing down. Is that so? Just the opposite. To see a thing that clearly, and lay it out that exactly, is a skill far harder, and far deeper, than passing a verdict. The next section takes up that last one. Why seeing clearly is the real skill of the two. See you there.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.