VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 15, SECTION 1

VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 15, SECTION 1

Teaching Without Teaching, the Operation of Steeping

The last chapter set the true position of education firmly in place: it is not in the timetable, it is in the person. But education actually has two operations. One is called teaching. It is deliberate, the kind that stands at a lectern or sits at a desk. The other has no name. No one has ever properly talked about it, and yet it is deeper than teaching, wider, and it works better. This chapter gives it a name: steeping. This lesson takes up steeping first.

One. A three-year-old child

First look at something you see every day and have never found strange. A three-year-old child has not spent a single day in school, and yet he already speaks fluently. He can use more than a thousand words, he can say complicated sentences, he can understand grown-ups when they talk around a thing, he can tell you the little hurt in his heart so that your heart goes soft. Now think back: who taught him? Who explained grammar to him? Who taught him from a textbook, one word at a time? Who set him a timetable, tested his listening, speaking, reading and writing? Not one person.

This child has only soaked in this home for three years. For three years he heard his parents talk, heard his grandparents talk, heard the television talk, heard the market talk. Soaking, second by second. Three years of soaking, and a language has grown into his body. Grown so deep that for the rest of his life he will dream in it. And if you carried this child to another country, to another family, and let him soak the same three years, what he spoke would be another language. Just as fluent, just as much the language of his dreams. The same child, the same three years. A different vat, and a different color comes out. This is steeping. Not taught, and yet taught all the same.

Two. The five marks of steeping

Take steeping apart and look at it. It has five marks. The first, it is unintended. Parents do not talk that way or act that way in order to teach the child. They are simply that kind of person, and that is simply how they live. This point matters most. Anything done on purpose for the child to see is already not steeping. That is performance, and the child can tell. A father who usually curses around the house suddenly turns gentle and refined when guests come. The child is watching from the side. What he steeps in is not gentleness and refinement. What he steeps in is this: so a person can have two faces.

The second, it repeats. Three hundred and sixty-five days a year, and in each day from opening the eyes to closing them. The same gesture, the same tone, the same look on the face, over and over, over and over. No single time is important. If you look at any one day, you see nothing. But ten years on, it has become the child's ground color. Steeping never relies on one great effort. It relies on never stopping.

The third, it comes from every side. It is not only when people speak that steeping happens. At the dinner table, at the door, in the kitchen, in the car, on the way to visit relatives, in that argument late at night when Mom and Dad thought the child was asleep. He is there for all of it, he is always there. You think he is playing, and in fact he is watching. You think he did not understand, and in fact he took it all in.

The fourth, it goes into the body. What is steeped in is not in the head, it is in the body. It is not something you call to mind. It is that before you have thought, the hand has already moved, the face has already darkened, the words are already out. The eleventh chapter of the first semester said that once culture has hardened to that layer, you cannot govern it at all. Steeping sends things straight to that layer. It goes around the head. So it is faster than any lesson, and deeper.

The fifth, it is very hard to turn back. A man, the year he is twenty-five, suddenly wakes up: I do not want to live like my father. He makes up his mind to change. But the year he is forty, in front of his son, a sentence slips out. The moment it is said, he freezes. That was his father's sentence, not one word different, even the tone the same. That is how things steeped into the body are. You can hate it, curse it, swear never to do it. But when that second comes, it is faster than you.

Three. These eighteen years, what the child has actually been soaking in

So what exactly is a child steeped in? Look at a few of the most ordinary scenes. Scene one. Grandma comes to dinner. The father picks up some food with his chopsticks and puts it in Grandma's bowl first. He says nothing, and does not glance at the child. The child, beside him, just shovels in his own rice. How will this child treat his own parents one day? That one chopstickful of food is already in him. Scene two. The delivery man comes to the door. The father opens it, takes the package, says thank you, and while he is at it holds the door, and only shuts it once the man has gone. How will this child treat the people he has "no use for"? It is right there in that holding of the door.

Scene three. The father comes home from work with a black face. The first thing he does through the door is slam his keys down on the table. The mother asks him something, and he shouts back. The child, in his own room, quietly closes his door. One day, when this child comes back to his own home after a long tiring day and stands at the door, what will he be like? Scene four. Qingming, and the family goes back to the countryside to sweep the graves. Before the ancestors' graves, the father kneels and knocks his head to the ground three times, gets up, and pulls out all the weeds. The whole time, not one word of grand principle. How will this child one day look at time, at family, at death itself? It is right there in those three kowtows.

Look clearly. In these four scenes, not one sentence is "teaching", not one sentence is "child, you must remember", not one sentence ever went into a textbook. And yet these four scenes are the deepest, hardest, least changeable ground this child will carry his whole life. The eleventh chapter of the first semester laid out five layers of hard bedrock: language, food, the reaction in the moment you meet someone face to face, your whole feel for time, and the "who am I" in your heart. Look back. Which layer was taught in a classroom? Not one. All of them were steeped.

Four. Mozi's dye vat, Xunzi's hemp field

Steeping, the ancestors spoke of it earlier than anyone, and more plainly than anyone. The seventh chapter of the first semester called on Mozi. He stood in the dye works watching people lower white silk into the vats, watched for a long time, and sighed:

Dyed in blue, it turns blue; dyed in yellow, it turns yellow. — Mozi, On Dyeing

Silk is white to begin with. Put it in the blue vat and it comes out blue; put it in the yellow vat and it comes out yellow. The silk itself, from start to finish, never made a single choice. The first semester used this line to show how torment is handed down, generation after generation. This chapter calls Mozi out again for the other side of the same principle: culture is handed down the same way. A child is that length of white silk; your home is that vat. You do not have to tell him anything. Whatever color you are, that is the color he is. Now call on Xunzi. He speaks of the same thing with a fiercer picture:

Fleabane growing among hemp stands straight without being propped; white sand in black mud turns black along with it. — Xunzi, An Exhortation to Learning

Fleabane is a soft, crooked grass, the kind that cannot stand up by itself. Growing in the open field, one gust of wind and it lies flat. But plant one fleabane in a field of hemp. Hemp grows dead straight, stalk against stalk, thick and upward. That fleabane in the middle of the hemp, with no one propping it, no one tying it, no one setting a stake beside it, straightens up all by itself. Why? Because on every side everything is straight. It can only grow upward. Even if it wanted to lean, there is nowhere to lean. Turn it around: white sand is white to begin with, but throw it into black mud, and with no dyeing it, no mixing it, after soaking a while it has gone black by itself.

Hold these two lines up against the five marks above. Did anyone prop it? No, that is unintended. Did it grow straight in a day? No, that is repetition. Was it one stalk of hemp that held it? No, it was hemp on every side. Did it straighten because it figured something out in its head? No, its body straightened. Once out of the hemp field, can it bend back? Hardly, it has already grown that way.

Two thousand three hundred years ago, Xunzi, in one line, covered all five marks of steeping. And here is one more thing to notice: when Xunzi says this, the word he uses is not "teach". It is "grow". Fleabane growing among hemp. Wherever a grass grows, that is the shape it grows into. Growing goes much deeper than teaching.

Five. Yan Zhitui's four words, and a mother who moved house three times

Yan Zhitui, whom the twelfth chapter of the first semester called on, more than fourteen hundred years ago, in the Family Instructions of the Yan Clan, took this all the way to the bone:

When a person is young, his spirit and temper are not yet settled. The people he is close to and spends his days with smoke him, soak him, mold him, dye him. Their words and laughter, their gestures and movements, he has no intention of learning, yet quietly and unseen he is changed, and naturally comes to resemble them. — Yan Zhitui, Family Instructions of the Yan Clan, On Admiring the Worthy

When a person is young, his nature is not yet settled. Whoever he spends his days with, he is smoked by them, soaked by them, molded by them, dyed by them. Their every word and laugh, every move and gesture, he never set out to learn, and yet just like that, quietly, unseen, he becomes exactly like them.

Look at these four words: smoke, soak, mold, dye. Smoke is smoke seeping in bit by bit; you cannot smell it, but your clothes are full of it. Soak is lying in water until soaked through, from the outside all the way in. Mold is clay pressed into a shape, and the clay does not know it is changing. Dye is putting on color, and once it is on, it does not wash out. All four words are passive, all are slow, all happen without your knowing. And Yan Zhitui added four more words: no intention of learning. He never meant to learn it, and yet he learned it. Fourteen hundred years ago, one old gentleman said in a single line everything today's books on family education have to say.

So when a parent sees this layer clearly, what does he do? Look at one mother, the mother of Mencius. Her family first lived beside a graveyard. What little Mencius saw every day was funerals, wailing, the building of graves. The game he played was imitating the wailing, imitating the burying. The mother saw it. She did not lecture him with a single word. She moved. The second place was beside the market. What little Mencius saw every day was hawking, haggling, weighing goods. The game he played turned into imitating people doing business. The mother saw this too. She moved again.

The third place was beside a school. What little Mencius saw every day was bowing and yielding, coming forward and stepping back, reading. The game he played turned into imitating people performing the rites. This time, the mother stayed. She said: here we can live. Think hard about those three moves. From start to finish, did this mother teach Mencius anything? She never once said "you must study", never once said "doing business is bad", never once scolded the child. She did one thing only: she changed the vat.

She knew it too well: what a child is steeped into does not depend on what you say, it depends on what he soaks in every day. Two thousand three hundred years ago, a mother, on her own two legs, walked the principle of this section three times over.

Six. The position this section sets, and the bridge to the next section

This section gave a name to something that never had one: steeping. A three-year-old child, never taught a single sentence of grammar, already speaks fluently. He has only soaked at home for three years. That is steeping. Steeping has five marks: unintended, repeated, from every side, straight into the body, very hard to turn back. The five layers of hard bedrock from the first semester, language, food, the reaction in how you meet people, the feel for time, the who-am-I in your heart, not one layer of them was taught in a classroom. All of them were steeped.

The ancestors saw through it long ago. Mozi said, dyed in blue, it turns blue. Xunzi said fleabane growing among hemp stands straight without being propped: a soft grass growing in the middle of straight things straightens by itself, because even if it wants to lean there is nowhere to lean. Yan Zhitui said smoke, soak, mold, dye, no intention of learning, and naturally comes to resemble them. And the mother of Mencius spoke not one grand principle. She did one thing only: moved house three times, and changed the vat. This is the first part of the fifteenth stake: a culture is handed down not by teaching alone. The truly deepest layer is a child who soaks beside you for eighteen years, you never teach him a word, and he learns it all.

Then if steeping is so powerful, why teach at all? Teaching and steeping, how do the two divide the work, and how do they join into one thing? The next section takes up teaching, and calls on the Great Learning, to see how the ancestors strung the two into one whole road. See you in the next section.

Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.

SECTION 2  The operation of teaching, and the path of the Great Learning