VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 18
Measuring the New Thing with Han Yu's Ruler
The last chapter set a new thing on stage and set its place straight, an implement and not a person. This chapter takes a ruler twelve hundred years old and measures it. Han Yu said a teacher is the one by whom the Way is transmitted, the craft taught, and doubt dispelled. Three layers, measured across three sections.
The first section measures teaching the craft, and honestly, it does this better than a person, a great deal better. It explains a thing fifty times without wearying, and a child in a mountain village now has a tutor clearer than the best in the city, the road laid to every pillow, a merit to acknowledge openly. But the hours it saves do not become hours of transmitting the Way, the teacher's saved nights filling with forms and the child's saved hour with the next worksheet, the efficiency raised tenfold and the teaching raised tenfold, the labor-saver the very thing that heavies the load. And of the old book's three fires, it keeps lead but do not drag, and keeps brace but do not press better than a person, but open the way but do not walk it for him it cannot keep, for it talks the road to its end and crosses the last step for you, and a child's two-hour struggle gives him I can while a three-second answer gives only the solving.
The second section measures dispelling doubt, and doubt is of four kinds, of knowledge, of the way in, of people, and the hard place in the heart. The first two it does superbly, clearer and more patient than most teachers. But at the third it slips, for the boy of sixteen turned down by the one he liked gets lines every one of them right, when what he wanted was a person to say when I was sixteen I went through this too, and it has no sixteen. And the fourth it cannot get inside, for the child whose grandfather has died gets every school's view of death, when what he remembers a lifetime is his father slapping the dirt from his knees and looking back and saying come home and eat. Confucius said not roused do not spark, for the true dispelling waits for a person to pent himself near bursting, and it answers on the asking in three seconds and has never once been pent. The dispelling of doubt is not an answer but a witness, a person on the far side saying I came through too, and it has crossed nothing.
The third section measures transmitting the Way, which it cannot do, because it lacks one word, the body. The Way is not spoken but done and seen and carried and done again, and it needs the one who says the line to be standing there himself. The body has five layers, a body that can hurt, a life with a shape, a road already walked, an account it can carry, and a boundary that ends, and of these the thing has not one, so learning high enough it manages, higher than anyone, and upright conduct it has not even the door to, not because its body is not upright but because it has no body. Confucius said first do the thing and then say it, and it has only the word and no deed. But this is not the thing's fault, for a hoe cannot transmit the Way and no one ever blamed the hoe. The error is on those who set this implement into the person's square, the parent who hands the child over and goes to scroll, the system that hands off the Way and goes to fill forms, the maker who says it can be your child's teacher.
That is the eighteenth stake. Teaching the craft it beats a person, dispelling doubt it halts at the heart, transmitting the Way it cannot get a step inside, because it has no body, and the error is on those who set the implement in the person's square. The next chapter, the close of this stretch on education, gathers it all back into the nine things you hold in your own hand, time and energy and attention, relationships and trust and health, skill and reputation and feeling.
SECTION
SECTION 1 Teaching the craft, the layer it does better than a person
SECTION 2 Dispelling doubt, the layer, and how far it reaches
SECTION 3 Transmitting the Way, the one word
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
SECTION 1 Teaching the craft, the layer it does better than a person