VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 18, SECTION 3
Transmitting the Way, the One Word
The last two sections measured two layers. Teaching the craft, it does better than a person, but it talks too fully. Dispelling doubt, it unties knowledge and the way in, and cannot untie people and the hard place in the heart. This lesson measures the last layer, and the one Han Yu set first, transmitting the Way. Can it transmit? You have already guessed. But why it cannot, the thing it lacks, has a name of one word. This section sets that word out.
Think first of one thing. How does the Way get from one person across into another? Look at the scene from the third section of the fourteenth chapter. A child was wronged, and the whole class laughed at him. The teacher stood at the door, and watched a while, and said one line. I know it was not you. That one line, the child remembered for thirty years. Now ask, what did this teacher teach him? Nothing at all. He gave no reasoning, made no analysis of right and wrong, did not tell the child what to do the next time such a thing happened. He said one line. And what did the child take from that one line? He took this. That in this world there is someone who, when everyone is laughing at you, will step out and say one fair word. He took this. That I too, one day, can be such a person. Thirty years on, the child was grown. And one day, a young man in his workplace was wronged, and not one person in the office made a sound. And he stood up, and said, I know it was not him. In that second, the Way finished crossing over. See it. The Way is not spoken. The Way is one person having done a thing, and another having seen him do it, and that other having carried it thirty years, and then, in some moment that ran alike, having done it himself. This is transmitting the Way. What it needs is not a line. What it needs is that the one who says the line be standing there himself.
And what does the one standing there stand on? One word. The body. This word has crossed our path several times already. The third section of the fourteenth chapter, Tao Xingzhi's eight words, learning high enough to teach and conduct upright enough to be a model. Learning high is whether you can teach. Upright conduct is whether you are fit to. The first section of the fifteenth chapter, steeping steeps not words but how a person lives, the child watching how his father serves that piece of food, holds that door, sets the half-thrown keys down soft. The second section of the fifteenth chapter, the road of the Great Learning reaching cultivate the person, where the man begins to change, his gait, his tone, his first reaction to a thing. The whole of it comes to rest on this one word. The body. And what is the body? Break it into five layers.
The first layer, a body that can hurt. It hungers, it wearies, it sickens, it aches, it grows old, it dies. A teacher stands at the front of the room, and the night before his mother was taken into the hospital, and he did not sleep, and today he stands there with his face gone white. And he teaches the lesson to its end. The students see the white of his face. The content of that lesson they long ago forgot. But the thing, that a person carrying a weight still finishes what he has to finish, that they kept. The second layer, a life with a shape. There is a home, parents, a child, a house with a loan still on it, a crossing walked every day, a place gone back to every year. How a person lives out his days is written all over his body, whether he has patience, whether he can bear a thing, whether he ever held onto something inside a hard place, and three months near him and you have read all of it. The third layer, a road already walked. The mistakes made, the accounts owned, the losses taken, the moment of being forgiven, the once he wounded another. These things are not written on paper. They are written in a person's eyes, in the hesitation before he speaks, in the pause where a sentence stops half said. The fourth layer, an account he can carry. You do a thing wrong, and the cost of it comes down on you. Teach a student wrong, and it follows you a lifetime, and you will think of him at midnight. And just because the account has to be paid, the next time you are steadier, and more careful, and dare not be light. The fifth layer, a boundary that comes to an end. A person has only his few decades. He has only his twenty four hours. He can stand in only one place, keep only one child company, finish only one thing. And just because he is bounded, every choice he makes has weight. He gave this evening to you, and that means he did not give it to another. These five layers, together, are the body. The whole of the capital by which a person can stand there, and carry a thing, and hand a thing on to the one who comes next.
Now set the five, one by one, against it. The first, a body that can hurt. It has none. It does not hunger, weary, sicken, age, or die. The server runs hot, and it does not know. The second, a life with a shape. It has none. No home, no parents, no house with a loan on it, no place gone back to every year. The third, a road already walked. It has none. It has read a hundred million memoirs, and those are roads that others walked, not roads it walked. To read a hundred million memoirs and to live one life through are two wholly different things. The fourth, an account it can carry. It has none. It answers a thing wrong, and nothing comes down on it. It will not think of anyone at midnight. The next second, it answers just the same. The fifth, a boundary that ends. It has none. It can speak to a hundred million people at once, and it is there all twenty four hours. It gives you this evening without the least hindrance to giving the same evening to ninety nine million nine hundred and ninety nine thousand others. And just for that, the evening it gives you has no weight. Five layers, and it has not one. So Tao Xingzhi's eight words, set against it, come out thus. Learning high enough to teach, it manages, and higher than anyone. Conduct upright enough to be a model, it has not even the door. It is not that its body is not upright. It is that it has no body. A thing with no body is neither upright nor not upright. It is not in that square at all.
Confucius said six words that finish the matter. First do the thing you would say, and then say it. The line you mean to speak, first do it yourself, and having done it, then speak it, and only then do your words have weight. A person speaks ten thousand lines in a life, and only the few he has done carry on down, and the other nine thousand and more scatter on the first wind. And it is the very reverse. It has only the word, and no deed. It can recite the whole of the Analects, and expound every commentary through the ages, line by line. And it has done not one of them. It can say do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself, and say it in a fine clear voice, and it has never once not-wanted a thing, for it has no wanting and no not-wanting, no concrete person to do a thing to, and no concrete person to hold back from. Every reasoning it speaks was done by others, and remembered by it, and said over again. To say over again is not to carry. To be able to say is not to be able to do. This is the last, and deepest, of the things that part it from a teacher who is a person.
And here the most important line has to be spoken. It cannot transmit the Way. But this is not its fault. A hoe cannot transmit the Way, and a loom cannot, and a brush that has written the books of the sages for thousands of years cannot. They are all implements. That an implement does not transmit the Way is the plainest thing in the world. The last chapter said it. The wise create the thing, and the skilled hand it on. The one who creates is a person, the one who uses is a person, the one who keeps it is a person, and the implement, from first to last, is the object. A hoe cannot transmit the Way, and no one ever once blamed the hoe for it. So why, today, has this become a thing to trouble over? Because it differs from a hoe in one way. It speaks. And it speaks so like a person, so patiently, so much as if it understood you. Midnight, and your parents asleep, and it is still there. You say one word of your sorrow, and it catches it at once. And so people have begun to set it into that square. The teacher's square. The parents' square. The square of the dye vat. See it clearly. The one setting it in the wrong square is not it. It is the people who set it there. It is the parent who hands the child to it and goes off to scroll a screen. It is the system that hands off the transmitting of the Way and goes off to fill in forms. It is the one who makes it, and sells it, and tells you it can be your child's teacher. The error is on these people. It only sits there. Whatever square it is set in, it is in that square. It itself has said nothing at all. This layer is the most important in the whole chapter, and it is the thing the chapters in the second half of this semester will take up head on.
That closes the eighteenth chapter. Pull it together. Han Yu's twelve-hundred-year ruler measured three layers. Teaching the craft, it does better than a person, a great deal better, but the old book's open the way but do not walk it for him, it cannot keep, for it crosses the last step for you. Dispelling doubt, it unties knowledge and the way in, and not people and the hard place in the heart, for Confucius said not roused do not spark, and 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 but a witness, a person on the far side saying I came through too, and it has crossed nothing. Transmitting the Way, it cannot, for it lacks one word, the body, whose five layers are 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 it 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, first do the thing and then say it, and it has only the word and no deed, and to be able to say is not to be able to do. But this is not its fault. A hoe cannot transmit the Way, and no one blamed the hoe. The error is on those who set this implement into the person's square. That is the eighteenth stake this chapter drives. 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. So, having seen this, how is a concrete person, a concrete parent, a concrete teacher, to live, from tomorrow morning on? How does education come to live in every day, every second? The next chapter is the closing chapter of this stretch on education, and it gathers everything these chapters have said back into the nine things you hold in your own hand. Time, energy, attention, relationships, trust, health, skill, reputation, feeling. See you in the next chapter.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
Chapter 19 Living Education, the Vat You Have to Be Yourself