VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 7, SECTION 2
Mozi, Dyed in Blue It Comes Out Blue
The last section said torment passes down two ways, the craft by the hammer, the heart by the steep, and at bottom it comes to one thing, a soaking, a dyeing. What surroundings a child soaks in are the color he gets dyed. This word, dyeing, was not coined here. Twenty three centuries ago Mozi stood in front of a dye vat and took how a person gets dyed by his surroundings all the way down to the root. This section brings Mozi in and drives that root of handing down home.
There is a chapter in the writings of Mozi called On Dyeing. It opens with a scene. Mozi watched a dyer at work dyeing silk, and watched, and let out a sigh, and said, dyed in blue it comes out blue, dyed in yellow it comes out yellow. The vat it goes into changes, and its color changes with it. What a plain thing to say. A skein of white silk begins with no color of its own. What color it ends up is not decided by the silk itself, but by which vat it was put in. The blue vat dyes it blue, the yellow vat dyes it yellow. The silk is the passive thing. The vat is what decides its color.
Why would the sight of silk being dyed make Mozi sigh? Because all at once he saw the human being in it. A person, is he not that skein of white silk? A child just born is like a skein of white silk, with no color of his own to start. What kind of person he grows into, kind or mean, easy or quick to torment, is not decided by what he was born, but by which vat he was soaked in from the time he was small.
That word of Mozi's, dyeing, is more exact than any other word for it. Set it beside the word teaching and you see where its exactness lies. Teaching is done on purpose. It is sitting a person down and telling him, point by point. Dyeing is not. Dyeing is done without intent. The silk soaks in the vat and, without knowing it, has changed color. The last section said the heart is steeped in, that no parent formally teaches a child to hate the rich. That is dyeing, exactly. No one taught the silk to turn blue. The silk soaked in the blue vat and turned blue on its own. A child who soaks in a home that resents the rich and scorns the poor dyes on that same heart. The whole thing goes on without a sound, and the child himself does not know the moment his color changed. That is the deepest thing about the word dyeing. It happens without your knowing, and you cannot guard against it. You can guard against someone coming to teach you something bad on purpose. You cannot guard against the vat you soak in day after day tinting you its color, drop by drop. By the time you notice, you are already that color. And Mozi went on to say a heavier thing still. Not only silk is like this, he said, but a person, and a family, and even a whole state, and so one cannot but be careful about what one is dyed by. You cannot but take the greatest care over the vat you are soaking in. Because the color of that vat is the color you will be.
This vat Mozi speaks of sounds a little abstract. Bring it down to the ground and look at which vats a child actually soaks in, from morning to night. The first is the vat of the home. This is the one he soaks in the longest, and it dyes him the deepest. The child opens his eyes, and the first thing he sees is how his parents speak, and how they treat people. His father takes a call, and it is one voice for the man under him and, turning his head, quite another voice for the boss. That scene, the child takes in. What he learns is not either voice. It is the knack of sizing a person up and serving him accordingly. His mother hangs up on a relative and says, offhand, that family of theirs, they are nothing special. That sourness, that little grudge, soaks into the child too. Whatever color the vat of the home is, that is the first coat of color on the child.
The second is the vat of the school. The child gets to school and watches how the teachers treat the students who score well and the ones who score badly, watches how the class officers order around the classmates they have charge of, watches how the students lift up the ones above them and step on the ones below. In this vat, a little power stands live in front of the child for the first time. A child who has been made a group leader, and how he treats the few classmates who now have to do as he says, is his first attempt at dyeing the color of torment onto himself. The third is the bigger vat he soaks in every day without seeing it, the whole climate of how things get done in the society around him. The child trails the grown ups on their errands and sees the faces behind the windows. He scrolls through his phone and sees how people fawn over the rich and jeer at the down and out. This vat is the biggest and the most diffuse, and it is everywhere, and it too is laying color on the child, drop by drop. Three vats, the home, the school, and the society, soaking this child layer over layer. Blue vat, blue. Yellow vat, yellow. By the time he is grown, the color on him is the three vats mixed into one. And he still thinks it is the person he was born as.
One thing here has to be said with care. On how a person is shaped by his surroundings, there is another and very famous old account, told from the side of inborn nature. It holds that people's natures start out much the same, and only later, bit by bit, grow far apart. Is that the same thing Mozi's dyeing is saying? It is close. But Mozi's dyeing is more exact, and it is deeper. The account of natures much the same and later grown apart still rests its weight on nature, still caught in the argument over whether people begin good or bad, alike or not. Mozi's dyeing steps around that argument altogether. He does not argue over what the silk is at the start. He says the silk is white, without color, and to argue what it was at the start is beside the point. What matters is not the silk. It is the vat. It is the vat you were put in that decides the color you end up. See how high a turn Mozi has made. He has moved all the weight from what a person is born to what surroundings a person was put in. And that move carries the responsibility, and the hope, over onto the vat, which is to say, over onto the very thing a hand can reach in and change. What a person is born, you cannot change. What color that vat is, you can. It is because Mozi's dyeing is more exact, deeper, and more useful than the account from nature that this whole book uses Mozi's dyeing to set the root of handing down. The credit is Mozi's.
Now carry Mozi's vat over and set it in front of torment. Why does a child grow up into a person who torments? Not because he was born bad. Because he soaked, from the time he was small, in a vat that loves to torment. The vat he soaked in has its walls written all over. Getting anything done takes connections. A scrap of power is there to be used to the full. See someone stronger than you, and go sour inside. See someone weaker, and put frost on your face. He soaks in these, day after day. Blue vat, blue. Yellow vat, yellow. Soak ten years, twenty, and he is dyed the color of the vat. By the time he sits down at the little window himself, every move of torment he makes was dyed onto him by that vat long ago.
See that one layer, and two things come to the ground at once. The first is sympathy. This person who torments was once a skein of white silk too. He was not born this way. He was dyed this way. See that, and the condescending condemnation cannot come down. The second, and it matters more, is hope. Since the color was dyed on, and is not inborn, the color can be dyed over again. The vat can be changed. And that is what the next section is about. Passed on or broken, kept going or stopped, whose hand does that choice lie in?
So here is where this section leaves us. Mozi, and the root of handing down driven home. Standing in front of the dye vat, with dyed in blue it comes out blue, dyed in yellow it comes out yellow, the vat it enters changes and its color changes too, Mozi carried how a person is dyed by his surroundings all the way to the root. A person is like a skein of white silk, with no color to start, and dyed the color of whichever vat he soaks in. The word dyeing is more exact than teaching, because it happens without your knowing and you cannot guard against it, and deeper than the account from nature, because it moves the weight off what a person is born and onto which vat he soaks in, onto the thing a hand can reach and change. Torment is dyed, and not inborn. A child soaked in a vat that loves to torment is dyed into a person who torments. And seeing that lays down sympathy and hope together. The color is dyed, so the vat can be changed. So can it be changed? Can this torment that runs down the generations be broken at some one generation? Whose hand is that break in? The next section, the last of the seventh chapter, answers that most important, and most heartening, question. See you there.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.