VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 9
Living It
Eight chapters have taken torment apart, and a body of understanding, however clear, that cannot be lived into every day is still a dead thing on the page. This last chapter of the great line of torment gathers the eight into a single word, live. Seeing torment clearly is not for cursing more or pointing from a height. It is for holding onto the things that, the moment you are tormented, get drained away for nothing, the nine most precious things a person owns across a life.
The first section holds the three most solid. Time, which once spent can never be earned back, so a person does the math and does not pour it without limit into a game set up to drain him. Energy, where the churning between the trips burns ten times the trips themselves, and seeing that it is the position doing the work, not a person set against you, is the best stop-loss there is. And attention, the scarcest thing of this age, so that you do not let a person not worth it move into your head and live there rent free. Run the numbers and a torment priced at two hours collects three days, and it can only collect them because you keep feeding it your time, your energy, your attention, so the whole holding comes to cutting the tube that feeds it.
The second section holds three deeper things, harder to get back. Relationships, because the anger you dare not vent on the tormentor gets vented on the ones closest to you, so you set the fire down before your door and do not charge the outside bill to a family that is innocent. Trust, your basic trust in the world, which torment turns into a hard shell that trusts no one and so takes in no warmth either, held by keeping that one tormentor separate from the whole world. And health, where all the holding comes to rest, because every swallowed breath of anger is written on the body's account, and it is not worth trading your body for what a position turned out. And these three are strung on one rope, so that a father tormented all week hurts his body, wrecks the home, and steeps a color of distrust into his watching child, which is the handing down again, and cutting the rope at yourself is the chain-breaking of the seventh chapter.
The third section holds the last three, the ones that hold up a life. Skill, because torment draws the mind that should grow real ability off into maneuvering among people, and real skill grows on your own body where no one can torment it away, while what is gained by maneuvering grows on other faces and blows off in the first wind. Reputation, because a person who pays his torment back the moment he has a little power becomes, in others' hearts, one who uses power to the hilt, so holding back that urge, in Confucius's do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself, is how a clean name gets built. And feeling, the deepest, the bit of warmth still able to move for another, which torment would grind into a cold shell, so that to still be good to a stranger on purpose is the most beautiful blow struck back at torment. Then the nine are gathered into Huineng's verse, originally not a single thing, where could the dust alight, which does not mean the nine do not matter but that a heart clutching them in fear is the easiest to rob, while a heart as wide as the sky lets the dust of a torment drift across and be gone.
That is the ninth stake, and the last place the great line of torment comes to rest. See torment clearly, only to hold the nine most precious things of your own life, and, held to the last, a heart wide enough that the dust cannot settle. This is only the first half of the volume. Torment was the crooked sprout of a soil gone wrong. What comes next turns around to the proper form of that soil, the hard bedrock, starting from a word used backward, soft power.
SECTION
SECTION 1 Time, energy, attention
SECTION 2 Relationships, trust, health
SECTION 3 Skill, reputation, feeling, originally not a single thing
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.