VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 18, SECTION 2
Dispelling Doubt, the Layer, and How Far It Reaches
The last section measured the first layer, teaching the craft. It does the work better than a person, but it talks too fully, and crosses the step that should have been left. This lesson measures the second layer, dispelling doubt. The knots in the heart, can it untie them? This layer is harder to measure. Because doubt is not of one kind.
Sort the doubt first. The first kind is the doubt of knowledge. How is this character read? Where does this formula come from? In which year did this piece of history happen? What does this old line mean? This is the shallowest layer. The second kind is the doubt of the way in. I know every step of this problem is right, and I do not know where to lay my hand first. I know I must write this essay, and I do not know how to break it open. Deeper, but still a layer with a path you can speak. The third kind is the doubt of people. I have fallen out with the boy at my desk, and I do not know whether I should be the one to bend first. My father scolded me yesterday, and I know it was for my good, and my heart cannot get past it. My closest friend has suddenly stopped speaking to me, and I do not know what I did wrong. The fourth kind is the hard place in the heart. My grandfather is gone, and I do not know what to do. I do not want to study this field, and my mother wore herself out for years, and I cannot get the words out. What am I even alive for. Four kinds of doubt, at four depths. Measure it, one kind at a time.
The first two, there is little to say. It does them superbly. The doubt of knowledge, it is the finest answerer of questions in the world, having read more than any teacher alive, and you may ask it a single character and it will tell you its shape on the oracle bones, its gloss in the old dictionary, the one poem that once used it. The doubt of the way in, it is strong here too, for a problem you cannot start it gives you three ways in and the merit and the trouble of each, and an essay you cannot break open it gives you five angles, and you pick one and it builds you the frame. These two layers it not only unties, it unties more clearly and more patiently and with less scorn for your slowness than most teachers do. That line again. Acknowledge the merit openly. But doubt has two more kinds below.
Look at a scene. A boy of sixteen, turned down by the one he liked. That night he sat in his room and the sky had fallen. He cannot tell his parents, for his mother would say, so young, what are you thinking about, get your studies done first. He cannot tell his classmates, for by tomorrow the whole class would know. He opens the thing. He types a long passage, and tells it the whole of it, start to finish. And it answers, and answers superbly. It says, you must be hurting right now, and this feeling is entirely normal. It says, being turned down does not mean you are not good enough, only that the two of you did not fit. It says, time will wear this smooth, so take good care of yourself. It says, if you would like, you can talk to me more. Look at those lines. Which of them is wrong? Not one. Every line is right, every line is safe, every line is the most correct thing that could be said in this world. And this boy, having read them, did the stone in his heart come down off it? It did not. What it gave was reasoning. And what this boy wanted was not reasoning. What he wanted was a person sitting beside him, saying nothing at all, a hand laid on his shoulder. What he wanted was a person who, having heard him out, was quiet a long time, and then said, when I was sixteen, I went through this too. What he wanted was a person who had once, at the same age, sat in the same kind of night, and whose sky had also fallen. And it has no sixteen. It has no that summer, no that person, no heart that ever raced, no palms that ever sweated, no being turned down. So it cannot give that line. It can give only reasoning. And reasoning is the most useless thing in the world.
Go one layer deeper. A child's grandfather is gone. The grandfather raised him for ten years, carried him on his back, taught him to write his characters, took him to watch the ants haul their loads, saved him the last piece of meat. And now the grandfather is not there. The child asks, why do people die? Where do they go after? Will I really never see him again? How does it answer? It answers well. It will lay out how each school of thought has seen death, some saying it is a return to nature, some that the soul does not perish, and it will tell you the stages of grief, and tell you that everything you feel just now is normal. A fine piece of writing. But what did this child want? He wanted that afternoon, his father crouched at the grave, saying nothing, pulling the weeds out one by one. And when the weeds were pulled, sitting there, smoking a cigarette, and then standing, and slapping the dirt off his knees, and looking back at the child, and saying, come on, let us go home and eat. The scene of the first section of the fifteenth chapter. In that moment, what did the child steep? He steeped this. That people go. And that the living, when the weeds are pulled, still go home and eat. No one ever spoke that line to him. And he remembered it a whole life. This is the fourth doubt. It is not untied. It is steeped through, by the way a person is. And it has no way of being. No dirt on the knees, no cigarette, no backward glance. This door it cannot so much as get inside.
The ancestors set the dispelling of doubt down more exactly than anyone. Confucius said four words. Not roused, do not spark him. Not struggling for the word, do not draw it out. To be roused is to be pent, a person who wants to see a thing through and cannot, pent to the point of nearly bursting. To struggle for the word is to be blocked, the thing at the very mouth and yet it will not come out, scratching at the ear in the strain of it. Confucius said, until the student is pent to that point, I do not spark him, and until he is blocked to that point, I do not draw him out. See it. The true dispelling of doubt, the first thing in it, is not to give the answer. It is to wait. To wait for him to pent himself. Pent to the edge of bursting, and then you spark him once. And that spark goes in. But if you do not wait, if in the very second his brow first furrows you set the answer down in front of him, that answer does not land. It passes across his eyes once, and it is gone. Now, that thing. Can it wait? It cannot. The moment it is asked, it answers, in three seconds. It never says, sit with it a while yourself first. It has never so much as heard of being pent. Because it itself has never once been pent. It has never known the taste of lying awake at three in the morning over a thing that will not come clear, turning it over and over on the bed. It has never known the taste of the word stuck at the mouth, the knuckles gone white with it. A thing that has never once been pent, how would it know at which second to let the held breath go?
And so a thing comes clear. People suppose the dispelling of doubt is the giving of an answer. It is not. The dispelling of doubt is the giving of a witness. A person who cannot get past a hard place in his heart, what he truly needs is not someone to tell him how the hard place is to be got past. What he needs is a person standing on the far side of it, turning back, and saying, I came through too. That line, only the one who has come through can say. One who has not crossed, however right his words, has no weight in them. And it has not crossed one hard place. It has not lost a love, not seen anyone off, not been wronged, not lain awake at midnight doubting whether its whole life had been for nothing. So it can speak every reasoning there is about hard places, and the one line, I came through too, it cannot say.
So here is where this section leaves us. The second layer measured, dispelling doubt. 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, a merit to acknowledge. But at the third it begins to slip, for the boy of sixteen turned down gets lines that are every one right, and what he wanted was someone 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 is gone gets every school's view of death, and what he remembers a lifetime is his father slapping the dirt off his knees and looking back and saying, come home and eat, and it has no dirt on the knees and no backward glance. And Confucius, twenty five centuries ago, set the first fire of dispelling doubt, not roused do not spark, not struggling do not draw out, for the true dispelling waits for a person to pent himself, and it answers on the asking, in three seconds, and has never been pent. The dispelling of doubt is not an answer, it is a witness, a person on the far side saying I came through too, and only the one who crossed can say it, and it has crossed nothing. That is the second part of the eighteenth stake. Dispelling doubt, it unties knowledge and the way in, and cannot untie people and the hard place in the heart, because the true dispelling is not the answer but a person who also came through. So the third layer? Transmitting the Way, the one Han Yu set first. Can it transmit? The answer you have already guessed. But why this cannot, and what the thing is that it lacks, that has a name of one word. The next section sets that word out. See you there.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.