VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2

Putting It to Use

Written for You Who Have Picked Up This Book

Before you decide whether or not to read this book, read this piece through first. This piece is not taught in the classroom, and no teacher will spend the time on it. It is an accounting written for you yourself to read, an accounting of what this book speaks of, and how it speaks of it, and why it speaks of it so, and how you are to read it. Read this piece through, and you will have in your mind a whole map. And then you can decide whether or not to spend a semester walking this road.

This semester goes on from where the last one left off. The first semester spoke of the root. It spoke of that bedrock of culture, hard past all seeing, and of how the torments between one person and another grow up out of that bedrock, and are handed down one generation to the next. Walk it to the end, and you have in your hand a whole tree. The root is culture. The trunk is the way of being a person and of doing a thing. And torment is the worm-holes and the crooked branches that grow when the tree's root is not strong and its trunk is sick. The first semester stood that root up. And a root stood up is a thing to be used. This semester speaks, exactly, of the use. If you have not read the first semester, it is no great matter. Each time the second semester puts one of the first semester's lines to use, it says it over once more, and will not leave you behind. This semester on the use falls into two great stretches. One speaks of education. One speaks of tools. The one asks, this hard bedrock, how does it pass from the last generation over onto the next? The other asks, today a new thing has come that can talk, can answer, can keep a person company, and which square does it stand in, and how are we, in the face of it, to hold the person?

Thirteen chapters are a road from handing down to holding. The thirteen chapters of the second semester fall into the two great stretches. The first six speak of education, and the last seven of tools. What they speak of is the two sides of one same root. The one side is to hand it down. The other is to hold it in the face of the new thing.

The first six chapters speak of education. And the education they speak of is not the one you may have looked for. They do not speak of how to raise a score, how to test well, how to get into a good school. They speak of a thing more at the root than that. This bedrock of culture, how in truth is it handed down? The fourteenth chapter first finds the true place of education, which is not in the curriculum but on the person, and speaks of just which layers of work the yard of the school is carrying for the society. The fifteenth chapter speaks of the two workings by which culture is handed down. Teaching, and steeping. The one has intention in it, the other is without a sound, and the deepest of them is steeping. The sixteenth chapter brings out the five great minds who spoke of education in the West over the last near four hundred years, to see where each of them saw, and where each of them stopped. The seventeenth chapter gathers what came before into a tree, and sees how this tree grows into a forest. The eighteenth chapter takes Han Yu's ruler, transmitting the Way and teaching the craft and dispelling doubt, and measures with it the new thing of today, to see at which layer it can be measured no further. The nineteenth chapter is the drawing-in of the stretch on education. Living education, the vat you have to be yourself. It gathers all of it back onto the nine things of the first weight in your own hand.

The last seven chapters turn round, and speak of tools. Today that new thing has come, and all the world is quarreling over whether it is good or is bad. This book does not quarrel. It does one thing only. It sets its position straight. The twentieth chapter has the ancestors lay down three stones. The implement is the object. The Way comes before the implement. What benefits people is done. From the twenty first chapter to the twenty third, square by square, it speaks of the one who makes it, the one who places it, the one who governs it, and what each of them has to keep. The twenty fourth chapter speaks of why it cannot become a person, because it has no body, and because it is too strong, too strong to have that limit that makes a person a person. The twenty fifth chapter speaks of that chain handed down three thousand years, of where it is falling in today, and of how it is to be mended. The twenty sixth chapter is the closing chapter of the whole volume, and draws the hundreds of thousands of words of these two semesters in onto eight characters. Originally not a single thing, a great love left in the human world. Walk the thirteen chapters through, and you will see one thing clear. This root of culture grows on the person. It is handed down by people, and it is held by people. However great the tool, however the age changes, the one that holds, the one that decides, the one that leaves love behind, is always a person, one after another, limited, able to hurt and to tire and to come to an end, and yet still willing, in that half second, to lean toward the good.

This book is written by a few rules. You have only this book in your hand, with no teacher off to the side to explain. So there are a few rules to tell you first, that you may read with a settled mind. The first. Only lay out the position, pass no verdict. From its head to its tail this book has hardly once passed a verdict of this is the wrong thing to do. It only lays a thing out to its clearest, and lets you see it for yourself, and then hands the judging back to you. Because the right and wrong you have seen out for yourself holds far firmer than the kind another stuffs into you. And this rule matters the more in the stretch on tools. The talk today about that new thing runs each telling more frightening than the last, each more clamorous than the last, and this book does not quarrel along with a word of it. It only sets the position straight. The second. The ancestors are the protagonists. Not one of the things in this book that truly stands was thought up by the one who wrote it. Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi, Mozi, Guanzi, Han Feizi, and the Great Learning, and the Doctrine of the Mean, and the Record of Learning, and the Book of Changes, and the Records of the Examination of Craftsmen. What this book did was only to catch the positions they set down two thousand years and more ago, and tell them over, in the plain speech of today. Not one of them ever saw the new thing of today, and the words they spoke, line upon line, read as though written for today on purpose. Because what they spoke of was never one time and one matter. It was the person. And the person, in two thousand years, has not much changed. The third. On the foot of every page you will see one same line. Credit to the ancestors, the mistakes are mine. This line is a real one, and no mere courtesy. The credit is the ancestors'. And the one who catches their words will, unavoidably, catch some of them wrong, and those errors are carried, by this one person who wrote the book, alone. The whole meaning of this line is spoken, in earnest, in the afterword at the book's end.

How this book is to be read. The thirteen chapters of the second semester, each of three sections, are thirty nine sections in all. A section is some twenty five hundred to three thousand words, the measure of one class. Read three sections a week, and thirteen weeks, one semester, reads it through just so. Before each chapter there is a guide of some hundred words, that tells you what the chapter is to stand. At the end of each section it is made plain what the section has stood, and what the next is to speak of. Follow along this line, and you will not lose your way. And a word of counsel in the reading. Do not hurry on ahead. When a section is read, stop a while, and take the thing and think it onto your own self. The things this semester speaks of are especially to be read so. Because the stretch on tools speaks of no thing far off at the edge of the sky. That new thing may well be at this very moment at your own hand, at your child's hand. Every line you read, you can take back that same night into your own days, and try it out.

What you get for reading this book. To speak honestly, read this book through and you will be no one skill the richer, no one certificate the richer, and it will test out to nothing in an examination. What it can give you is, about, these few things. One is a sense of position. You will see clear where the thing called education truly happens, not in the curriculum, but in those few hours left over in your day, in where you put your heart. And you will see clear which square that new thing of today stands in. It is an implement, the finest of instruments, the fastest of helpers, and it cannot sign that name in your stead, because it has no body. One is a ruler. Hereafter, when you take up that new thing again, you will ask one line more. This once, in using it, did it grow me, this person, or shrink me? Was it addition, or subtraction? That one question alone can help you, in the face of it, hold your own self. And one more is that half second. All the reasoning this semester speaks of comes at the last to rest on that half second. What a person truly decides in a life is one half second after another, each too short to think in. Someone treads on you, and you flare or you do not. The child speaks to you, and you lift your head or you do not. A thing that wrongs your conscience is set before you, and you nod or you do not. You read this book not to have you know a few more things. It is so that, when that half second comes, you can lean toward the side of the good. The root is in no other place. It is in this one second's choosing of yours. Now, you can decide whether or not to walk this road.

SECOND SEMESTER, TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 14 The True Place of Education Is Not in the Curriculum

Chapter 15 Teaching and Steeping, the Two Workings by Which Culture Is Handed Down

Chapter 16 Five Branches, and the Whole Tree

Chapter 17 How One Tree Grows into a Forest

Chapter 18 Taking Han Yu's Ruler to Measure This New Thing

Chapter 19 Living Education, the Vat You Have to Be Yourself

Chapter 20 The Ancestors' View of Tools, Three Stones

Chapter 21 The Hands That Make It, Wei in Our Own Day

Chapter 22 The Ones Who Place It, Setting the Guards

Chapter 23 The Licensed Door, the Way Stands by a Person

Chapter 24 Limit Is the Capital, and What Holds the World Up Is the One Who Stands as a Person