VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, AFTERWORD
Written at the End of the Second Semester
This volume is finished, here.
The first semester wrote the root, and the second the use. The first semester spoke of that bedrock of culture, hard past all seeing, and of how torment grows up out of that bedrock. The second spoke of two things. One is education, of how the good in that bedrock is handed down, one generation to the next. The other is tools, of how, in the face of that new thing, a person is to be held.
While I was writing this volume, that new thing was growing, a new shape to it with every day. When I wrote the first word of the second semester, it could only answer a line or two. By the time I was writing the stretch on tools, it could already write a whole piece, take a person's course for him, keep a child company a whole night through. This book chased it, and the chasing was hard going. And chasing it to the end, the more I chased the clearer one thing grew. However fast it grows, it has not run out past those few squares the ancestors set down more than two thousand years ago. The implement is still the implement. The object is still the object. The Way can still only be erected by a person. What it changes is capability, which is quantity. What it has not changed is position, which is quality. What the ancestors set down was never the one concrete thing. It was the position. And so those few stones laid down two thousand years ago, not one of them has come loose today.
The ancestors brought out in this volume are more even than in the first. 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, and the Thousand Gold Prescriptions. Not one of them ever saw the thing of today. And the words they spoke, line upon line, read as though they were written for today on purpose. This is no coincidence. It is 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. What has changed is the implement in his hand, from the hoe, to the tray of printing type, to the thing of today. And the hand that holds the implement, and the heart, and the body that can hurt and can tire and will come to an end, are still the old way. The ancestors said their words onto that hand, and that heart, and that body. And so, however the implement is changed out, their words all still stand.
The hardest thing in writing this volume was not to say plainly what that thing is. It was to say plainly this. Having seen it to be this strong, what has a person left. It was not until the twenty fourth chapter of the second semester that I got this thing said to where my own heart was at rest. What a person has left is exactly the things it does not have. Limit. To hurt. To age. To die. To be unable, because he gave tonight to one person, to give it to another. These things, that look every one of them a shortcoming, are exactly the whole of a person's weight. A thing that can do everything and lacks for nothing is, on the contrary, a light thing. This layer is the largest thing I gained, myself, from the writing of this volume.
And then there is that half second. Writing the last chapter, all the words gathered onto that half second. A person's life is, for the most of it, pushed along. What is truly his own to decide is those half seconds, each too short to think in. And in that half second, the one that decides for him is not the reasoning. It is that body he has had raised in him over the better part of a life. This whole book, two volumes of it, raises, when all is said, exactly this half second. And this too is why, however strong that thing is, it cannot touch a person's last piece of ground. It cannot get itself into that half second.
Any line in this book that stands is the ancestors'. What I did was only to bring them out of the old books, and wipe them clean, and set them before you in the plain speech of today. And so, the credit goes to the ancestors. And wherever a thing is said wrong, said off the mark, said not far enough, wherever the ancestors' meaning was passed on crooked or passed on shallow, it is that I did not learn it well enough, and did not hand it on well, and has nothing to do with the ancestors. And so, the mistakes go to Tiger Lyon.
This volume is closed, and the set of books is not yet done. The next volume speaks of the Economic Institution. The bedrock of the economy lies closer against a person's daily life than culture does, and it is the easier, too, for making a person see only the money and not the people. May it be, when that time comes, that I still have the good fortune to go on handing the ancestors' words down, one line at a time.
May you carry the words of these two volumes back into your own days. Back into those half seconds of yours. And in that half second, may you always be able to lean toward the good.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
End of the volume.