VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 6, SECTION 3
Seeing Clearly Is the Harder Skill
This chapter has been about the book's own stroke of the pen, laying out positions and passing no verdict. The first section took the word no. The second watched the ancients write history with a flat pen. This section is the close of the chapter, and it answers a doubt many carry. Laying out positions and passing no verdict sounds as though the writer does nothing at all, just sets the thing down and is finished. Is that not a little too easy? This section turns that easy clean over. Seeing clearly, and passing no verdict, is a skill far harder and far deeper than passing a verdict.
Start with a line that may grate a little. Passing the verdict is the truly easy end of it. Why? Because passing a verdict does not require seeing the thing clearly. A person watches the window clerk block someone one trip, says he is a terrible person, and the verdict is done. Does he need to work out why the clerk is like this? No. Does he need to see the four gears turning behind it, view, cost, sense of position, satisfaction? No. Does he need to look in the mirror and ask whether the same resentment and the same scorn are in his own heart? Less than ever. One he is bad packs the whole thing up and throws it aside.
Passing a verdict is a shortcut. It lets you skip the thinking, skip the effort, skip the mirror, and stand comfortably up on the moral height, pointing at everything. Curse one bad, a second's work, satisfying and easy. So the truly easy thing, it turns out, is passing the verdict. A person who hands them down at the drop of a hat is not seeing deeper than everyone else. He is, precisely, too lazy to look, or does not dare to.
So what is hard about seeing clearly? It is hard because it asks of you the very things the verdict passer refuses to do. The first is that it asks you to look at that bad person as a person again. You cannot be done with him in one he is bad. You have to bore into his position. What seat is he sitting in? How did that seat, and those four gears, push him here, one notch at a time? That look is hard. Because it asks you to set down, for the moment, the satisfaction of I stand higher than he does, and to crouch down and see him at eye level.
The second is that it asks you to look in the mirror. The third chapter looked once. The hardest step in seeing torment clearly is to admit that the same resentment and the same scorn are in your own heart too, that you, sat down in that seat, would mostly do the very same thing. That step is a hundred times harder than cursing. Because cursing pushes the evil out, off onto someone else, and that is light work. The mirror pulls the evil back, and owns it as your own, and that is a heavy thing to carry.
The third is that it asks you to hold back. To hold back the urge to leap out and be the judge. The he is bad is right there on your lips, and it feels so good, and you have to swallow it and go on doing the harder thing, seeing clearly. That holding back, the last section said, is a virtue. Seeing clearly asks for seeing at eye level, for the mirror, and for holding back. Not one of the three is anywhere near as easy as cursing one bad. So passing no verdict was never the easy path. It is the choosing of the very hardest road there is.
A reader may still not be won over. All that effort to see clearly, and what does it get you? Better to curse the thing out and feel the relief. And here is where the most important use of seeing clearly comes in. Only by seeing clearly does real change become possible at all. Think about it. What can a curse change? You curse the window clerk for a villain. Will he, on account of that cursing, stop tormenting people tomorrow? He will not. He will only decide that you are a fierce and difficult sort, and then take the anger you stirred in him and pour it out on the next, more honest, person at his window. The curse changes nothing about the position, and may well add one more measure of evil into it.
But seeing clearly is another thing. When a person truly sees how the four gears turn, and sees that he himself, in that seat, would helplessly turn along with them, and sees that Confucius's one word, trade, takes only a single second to jam the gears and stop them, then, and only then, does change become truly possible. Because he is no longer blindfolded and led along by the position. He has seen the string that has been pulling him all this time. And once he has seen the string, he can reach out and cut it. That is the deepest reason this whole book would rather walk the hard road of seeing clearly than take the shortcut of passing the verdict. The curse buys a moment's relief and changes nothing. Seeing clearly is hard, but it is the one and only starting point of every real change.
That closes the sixth chapter. Pull together what it has set down. This chapter was about the book's own stroke of the pen, laying out positions and passing no verdict. The first section, from the word no. The moment the no is out, a person jumps from recorder to judge, and the verdict runs on torment's own motion of measuring a person with a ruler. Passing no verdict is not having no right and wrong, it is handing the right and wrong back to the reader. Laozi's teaching without words set the root. The second section, the flat pen of the ancients, the brushwork of the Spring and Autumn and the plain record of the Grand Historian, the dirtiest thing set down with the stillest pen, carrying more force than any curse. And that stroke of the pen is a virtue, of restraint and of humility. The third section turned over the easy misunderstanding. Passing the verdict is the easy shortcut. Seeing clearly asks for eye level seeing, the mirror, and holding back, and it is the hardest road, but only seeing clearly makes real change possible.
That is the sixth stake this chapter drives. This whole book lays out positions and passes no verdict, not because that is easy but because it is the hardest and deepest road, for the plain reason that cursing changes nothing and seeing clearly is the starting point of all change. By now torment's sickness, its heart, its forms, its two directions, and the pen that sees all of it, have all been set on their footing.
But one heaviest question is still unanswered. Torment is a thing every single person suffers under, so why does it go on being handed down, one generation to the next, as though the chain could never be broken? The next chapter opens the secret hidden inside that handing down. It brings in Mozi, and looks at how a child, year by year, gets dyed into a person who torments. See you in the next chapter.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.