VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 9, SECTION 3
Skill, Reputation, Feeling, Originally Not a Single Thing
Here we come to the last section of the whole great line of torment. The two sections before held onto six things, time, energy, attention, relationships, trust, health. This section holds onto the last three, the three most able to hold up a whole life. Skill, reputation, and feeling. And then it gathers all nine chapters back into one saying, the emptiest and the fullest there is, and rounds off this whole road through torment. This is the closing lesson, and the last on this great line.
The first is skill, the real ability by which you make your way and stand on your own feet. How could torment reach as far as your skill? Here is a deep thing. A person grown used to being tormented, and to tormenting, slowly moves his mind off of getting the real skill down and onto managing people well and working the connections well. Picture a young person starting out at a workplace. He could put all his strength into getting good at the work, into doing it beautifully. But he finds that doing the work well, on its own, gets him nowhere, that he also has to read faces, has to handle the torment, has to keep his connections in good order. And so, day after day, he puts more and more of his mind into these. By the time he comes to, years have gone by, and the thing he is best at is not the craft at all. It is maneuvering among people. The real skill he could have stood his whole life on has gone to seed. This is the most hidden bill torment runs up against your skill. It does not steal your ability outright. It draws the mind that should have gone to growing your ability off somewhere else, a little at a time. A whole society competing over who is better at managing and maneuvering grows a generation that holds real skill cheap. So how do you hold onto your skill? By holding to one hard truth. Getting your craft down cold is the firmest backbone your life can have, and it is more to be counted on than any amount of maneuvering. You may be tormented, but do not, on that account, come to believe the line that skill is useless and only connections work. Hold your respect for real skill, and you hold onto a self that can stand up straight without any maneuvering at all. Put it as a picture. Two carpenters come into the same shop. One spends his days working out how to flatter the master and how to manage the peers who love to torment. The other keeps his head down and hones his plane and his chisel to a marvel. For the first few years, the first one seems to be doing splendidly. But ten years on, the shop breaks up and everyone goes his own way, and the first, all maneuver and no craft, has to start reading new faces wherever he lands, while the second, on the strength of that one real skill in his hands, is fought over everywhere he goes. Real skill grows on your own body, and no one can torment it away from you. What is gained by maneuvering grows on other people's faces, and the first wind carries it off.
The second is reputation, the kind of person you are in other people's hearts. How does torment reach your reputation? By the most direct road there is. A person tormented badly enough, the moment he comes into a bit of position of his own, very easily pays it back. He dumps the anger of all those years onto whoever he can now torment. To him, it feels like evening the score. But the others watching take it down differently. What they record is, here is a person who uses power to the hilt the instant he has any, a person who pays back every slight. The harder he works that little position, the worse the person he becomes in the others' hearts. A reputation is built up, a bit at a time, over decades, and to ruin it takes only a few torments of a little power pushed to its limit. People will not remember how wronged you were when you were the one tormented. People will only remember how ugly you looked when you were the one tormenting. So how do you hold onto your reputation? Go back to the first chapter, and Confucius, do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself. You have been tormented, and you know how bad that feels. So the moment you sit down in that position, do not add that feeling onto someone else. When you hold back that one urge to pay it back, what you hold onto is not only one less torment for another person, it is your own clean name in this world. A reputation is built out of your holding back, again and again, from pushing the position to its limit. A small example. There was a clerk who, when he was young, took his fill of anger at one window after another. Later he came to sit at a window himself. He could have dumped all that old anger back out. But he did not. On his watch, whatever could be accommodated, he accommodated. Whatever could be said in one go, he never made a person come back a second time for. Ten and more years on, the people who came to get things done, at the mention of him, put their thumbs up. Go to that one, you cannot go wrong, he is a solid man. That clean, dependable name was not awarded him by anyone. He built it, one day at a time, out of holding back the urge to pay it back.
The third thing is the deepest of all. Feeling. The bit of warmth still left in your heart, the heart that can still be moved for another person. This is the last thing torment comes to collect, and the cruelest. A person tormented too long feels his heart cool and harden, a little at a time. He comes to feel the world is not worth being good to anyone in, and slowly he gathers up and locks away that inborn wince of compassion, the heart that cannot bear another's distress, that Mencius named back in the third chapter. He becomes a person who loves no one and aches for no one, because he is afraid of being hurt again. But a person who locks his feeling away looks as though he can never be hurt again, and in truth he has made himself into a hollow shell. The real proof that a person has lived his one life is not how many things he got done. It is whom he loved, whom he worried over, who warmed him, and whom he warmed. Lose that bit of feeling, and even if you win against every torment in the world, you have lost your one life. So how do you hold onto your feeling? Holding onto your feeling is where all the holding of all nine chapters finally comes to rest. You hold your time, your energy, your health, your skill, your reputation, and round and round it goes, and in the end it is all to hold onto that bit of warmth in you that can still move for another. Do not let torment grind you, from a person who can ache for others and be moved for others, into a cold one. You have been tormented by this world, and yet you refuse, on purpose, to charge that bill to the next person, and you are still willing, on purpose, to be good to a stranger. That is the most beautiful blow you can strike back at torment.
Now the nine are held. Time, energy, attention, relationships, trust, health, skill, reputation, feeling. These nine are the most precious goods a person owns across a lifetime, and they are exactly what torment means to draw out of you, one at a time. Held to the last, gather the nine back one step further, into a saying that is the emptiest and the fullest there is. Across the eight and a half chapters before this, the ancestors called on have been Confucius, Xunzi, Mencius, Zhuangzi, Mozi, Laozi, the ancestors of the Confucian and the Daoist streams. For this close, one more is called, a patriarch of the Buddhist gate, to gather in this last stroke. The great river of Chinese culture has three streams in it, the Confucian, the Daoist, and the Buddhist, and they merged long ago and have run together for more than a thousand years. And holding onto torment, at its very highest, is said most thoroughly of all by one Buddhist verse. The sixth patriarch of Chan, Huineng, gave a verse. Originally there is not a single thing, so where could the dust ever alight. Originally there is nothing at all, so where is there for the dust to settle? Used here, what does it mean? It does not mean the nine are not wanted, that all of it is empty. Just the opposite. It means this. The tighter you clutch those nine, in fear that torment will steal them away, the more easily they are stolen, because the moment you fear, you are already in the tormentor's grip. But once you have seen all the way through, and torment is no more than a little dust that a position turned out, then that place in your heart that is originally clean, originally wide, simply does not receive it, and the dust has nowhere to land. In the moment of being tormented, you lie awake and burning because you received the dust and fed it into your heart. See originally not a single thing, and the dust lifts and passes, and cannot come to rest in the clean place in your heart. Holding onto the nine, at its very highest, is this one line. A heart as wide as the sky, so that the little dust of a torment drifts across and is gone, and the sky is still the sky.
That closes the ninth chapter, and the great line of torment that has run nine chapters comes to its end. Round it off. This chapter was about living it. Seeing torment clearly is, in the end, for holding onto nine things in yourself. Time, energy, and attention, the most solid. Relationships, trust, and health, the hardest to get back. Skill, reputation, and feeling, the ones that hold up a whole life. And at its very highest, Huineng, originally not a single thing, a heart as wide as the sky, so that the dust of torment drifts across and is gone. That is the ninth stake this chapter drives, and the last place this whole great line of torment comes to rest. See torment clearly, not in order to point at others, but only to hold onto the nine most precious things of your own life, and, held to the last, a heart wide enough that the dust cannot settle on it. And here the nine chapters of torment are all done. From a line off the internet to a verse of Huineng's, this thing that happens every day and went a few hundred years without a name has been seen, head to tail, and held, once, all the way through.
But this is only the first half of the volume. Torment is the crooked sprout that comes up when the soil of culture has gone wrong. What comes next turns around the other way, to look at the proper form of that soil, at the hard bedrock that holds a whole nation up when its culture goes hard. The next chapter takes a fresh breath and starts from a word that has been used backward, soft power. See you in the next chapter.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.