VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 17, SECTION 1
How One Tree Grows into a Forest
The last three chapters put the parts on the table. The school and its five layers of work, talent and teaching each by his material, the eight words of the teacher’s way, teaching and steeping, the five great minds of the West. Three chapters, and the parts are all laid out. This lesson fits them back onto one tree, and finds where education grows on it. Across three sections. The first draws the tree, seed and soil and the one who tends the soil. The second finds which square education stands in. The third takes up a new thing that has walked into this soil, and sets its place straight.
Go back to the first semester for a moment. Its last chapter drew a tree. The root was the hard bedrock of culture, hard to the point of being invisible. The trunk was the way of being a person handed down from Confucius and Xunzi and Mozi and Laozi. And torment, from the first nine chapters, was the worm-hole and the crooked branch that grew when the root was not strong and the trunk had taken sick. A clear tree. But there was one thing the first semester did not say. It drew one tree. And one tree, however well it grows, however deep its root and straight its trunk, has only one lifetime. Decades, a century, a few centuries. In time it withers, and falls, and rots back into the soil. And are the things on that tree gone then? No. Because a tree bears seed. The seed falls to the ground and grows a second tree, and the second bears seed and grows a third. One, two, ten, a stand of them. Centuries and millennia on, the first tree long rotted into soil, and the wood is still there, and grown larger and denser and deeper than the one tree ever was. That process has a name. It is education. The first semester was how one tree grows. The first stretch of the second is how that tree becomes a forest.
Walk it through slowly. To grow a second tree, three things are needed. The first is the seed. What is the seed? It is the thing a child is born already carrying. A pine seed falls to the ground and grows a pine. A willow seed falls and grows a willow. Raise a pine seed as a willow, water it every day and feed it every day and tend it as well as you can, and it will still never grow into a willow. This is the talent of the fourteenth chapter. That harsh line, that a person’s hard work may count for nothing against his talent, put here, turns plain. What you hold in your hand, is it a pine seed or a willow seed? Confucius, giving Zilu and Ranyou opposite answers, was looking at this. The old book on learning, nurturing the strength and remedying the failing, was looking at this. First know what seed you are holding. Mistake the seed, and all the effort after is wasted.
The second is the soil. What soil does the seed fall into? This is the steeping of the fifteenth chapter. A seed in rich soil shoots up in a year. A seed in a crack in the rock is still a thin reed after ten. It has no say in the matter. It can only grow into what the soil under it allows. Mozi, dyed in blue it comes out blue. Xunzi, the mugwort growing up in the hemp stands straight with no one to prop it. Mencius’s mother moving three times. All of it is about this soil. And the thing that matters most today is here too. The soil is still there. Only the soil has changed. It used to be the home. Today it is the screen.
The third is the one who tends the soil. A forest can grow from seed and soil alone. But what grows is a wild wood, the sparse sparse, the dense dense, the crooked crooked. To grow a good forest, someone has to come. Someone to clear away the stones and loosen the earth. Someone to prop a sapling when it bends. Someone to set a straight stake beside it, so it has something straight to reach toward. Someone to thin the stand where it grows too close, so the ones left get light. This is the teaching of the fifteenth chapter. The three fires of the old book on learning are all here. Lead him but do not drag him. Brace him but do not press him down. Open the way but do not walk it for him, which is to set the stake beside him and let him reach up it himself. And who is the one who tends? This is the teacher’s way of the fourteenth chapter, and the eight words click into place here. Learning high enough to teach, conduct upright enough to be a model. To teach a tree to grow straight, you have first to be a straight tree yourself. Xunzi, the mugwort in the hemp stands straight unpropped. The hemp is the teacher. The teacher need not shout be straight, day after day. He need only stand there, being straight. All around is straight, and the little bent weed, try as it might to lean, has nowhere left to lean.
And the school, then, where does it stand on this tree? The school is a nursery. A wild wood grows on its own. A nursery is fenced round by people. The wall is the nursery’s fence, keeping the saplings off from the livestock outside, which is the minding of the children and the keeping of them out of trouble. The beds laid out by year, the same year’s saplings set together, is the drawing Comenius made in 1632. The saplings crowded in and growing, vying for the light, breaking the wind for one another, is the grinding against other people. And at the turn of the year, the lifting and the grading of the saplings, this stronger batch sent here and that weaker batch held back a year, is the sifting. And the watering and feeding in between is the teaching. The five layers of work of the fourteenth chapter are all here. A nursery is a good thing. Without it, hundreds of millions of saplings would be left to live or die in the open. But hold onto one thing. A nursery is not a forest. It raises a sapling to a certain size, and then it has to move it out, into the real soil, to take the wind and the rain and to root itself. A tree that spends its whole life in the nursery never grows into timber. This is why the first section of the fourteenth chapter had to lay out those five layers. Not to curse the nursery, but to tell you the nursery only reaches so far. The soil beyond the nursery, the real soil that lets a tree root, is whose? It is yours.
Now set the five great minds of the West into this forest, and you see them clearer. Comenius saw the nursery. He designed the whole of it, and gave hundreds of millions of saplings a place to grow. But he forgot one thing. The saplings laid out in their even beds were, to begin with, different seeds. Rousseau saw the seed. He said, this seed has its own way of growing, do not force it. But then he said, the soil outside is dirty, wall the sapling off. And a sapling walled off never leaves the nursery. Dewey saw the soil. He said, do not keep the sapling in a shed, grow it in the real soil. But he pulled out the one who tends, and the sapling grew on the soil untended, and grew wild. Illich saw the wall. He said, this wall pens the saplings in, tear it down. But he did not ask who would keep the livestock off the saplings still too soft to stand. Foucault saw the watchtower at the nursery’s center. He said, look, someone is always up there watching. He saw it with great accuracy. But he did not say that the one in the tower is also breaking the wind for the saplings below. Five people, five spots, and every spot is real. But each saw one corner of the forest. What the ancestors saw was the whole forest, growing on down the generations. Seed, soil, the one who tends, the nursery, the lifting, the transplanting, the growing into timber, the bearing of seed, and the falling to ground again. One turn of the cycle, and thousands of years of it, round and round, down to today.
Confucius said five words. My Way is threaded through by one. From the fourteenth chapter to here is three chapters, and they held the school and talent and the teacher’s way and teaching and steeping and the five of the modern age, six or seven things by the look of it. But look back now. They are one thing. A seed, which is talent, falls on a soil, which is steeping. Someone comes to tend it, which is teaching. And that someone has himself first to be straight, which is the teacher’s way. And a nursery shelters it a while, which is the school. One thread. It is not that this book has the knack of stringing them together. They were one thread all along. This book only lays out again the positions the ancestors set down long ago. The credit is the ancestors’.
So here is where this section leaves us. Three chapters of parts, fitted back onto one tree. The first semester drew one tree, root of culture and trunk of the way of being a person. But one tree has one lifetime, and to live on it must bear seed and fall and grow a second, and that process is education, one tree becoming a forest. Three things grow the second. The seed, which is talent, and a pine seed will not grow a willow. The soil, which is steeping, and the child grows only what his soil allows. And the one who tends, which is teaching, and he must first be a straight tree himself, which is the teacher’s way. The school is a nursery, walls and beds and the lifting and grading, and it raises saplings but is not a forest, and the real soil beyond it is yours. The five great minds each saw a corner, and the ancestors saw the whole wood. Confucius, my Way is threaded through by one. That is the start of the seventeenth stake. Education is the whole process of one tree becoming a forest, seed and soil and tender threaded on one line. So where does this forest grow? What is it to the forests of economy and politics and law? Is education a great thing standing beside them? The next section puts education back on the first semester’s tree, and finds which square it stands in. See you there.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.