VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 21
The Hands That Make It, Wei in Our Own Day
The last chapter laid three stones, and from this one it goes square by square down onto the people. The first square is the ones who make the thing. This chapter brings in Xunzi, and clears the name of a word wronged for two thousand years. The first section takes up wei, that a person plus the act of doing is wei, the humanly made, with nothing of the false in it. The second follows Xunzi up to the potter's wheel, to see at which moment the wrong happens. The third takes up the innermost door, self-discipline. The three together drive the twenty first stake.
The first section clears the word. Today wei means hypocrisy and forgery, a curse. But Xunzi built it from a person and the act of doing, so it means the humanly made, the thing not fallen from the sky nor grown from the ground but made by people. A hoe is wei, a house, a character, a set of manners, the whole hard bedrock of the first semester, and this new thing too. Working upon the nature and raising the wrought is how a coarse-born creature is stood up into a person, so wei is the wellspring of every good thing, the human being pulling itself from the mud. But wei is double-edged, saying only that a thing is humanly made and leaving its good or bad to the hands, ritual wei and the crushing empty form wei, upbringing wei and handed-down torment wei. So the makers are Xunzi's potter, and the implement is born of the craftsman's wei, and what it is like is read off the hands, all settled at the molding.
The second section follows Xunzi to the wheel. The potter kneads the clay and the vessel is born of his wei, and a lump of clay becomes only what the hands make it. A cup that scalds a man is wrong not in the moment it split but in the two seconds the potter set on the wheel a clay he knew was full of sand, and a car that fails to stop is wrong not in the rainy night but in the second an engineer said all right to cutting the brake's margin, a second no one saw, while the one who uses it can only trust. So four gates must be passed before the molding, the gate of culture and how it changes a person's days, the gate of the rice bowl and whom it leaves without work, the gate of who says what goes and whose voice it shrinks, and the gate of the rules and where it steps over a line, all four before the clay goes on the wheel. And responsibility begins from the moment the hand moves, not from the moment something goes wrong, for the implement is born of the craftsman's wei, and the first to be asked is that hand, not the last.
The third section takes up the innermost door. A thing passes three doors, the outermost governing that chases the accident, the middle placing that sets it down, and the innermost making, whose one lock is self-discipline, the earliest and the before. Confucius, do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself, landed on a coder as, would you dare let your own child use this, and if not do not make it for another's. But those two words are dear, and an ordinary man with a loan and a daughter and aging parents is seated in a place that presses him to say yes, and it is not the person that is bad but the position doing the work. And yet some can get out the no, and that no is wei too, steeped into a watching child and handed down. And we who do not make it can hand the maker Mozi's ruler, and cast a vote each time we open or close the thing, and remember that we too are potters molding a child with the nine things.
That is the twenty first stake. That thing is wei, a thing that people made, and the maker's responsibility begins from the moment the hand moves, and the one lock on the innermost door is self-discipline. So once the thing is molded, someone still has to carry it out and set it before people, where to place it and whom to sell it to and whether to let a child touch it, which is the middle door, easier to govern than self-discipline and looser than it. The next chapter speaks of the ones who place it.
SECTION
SECTION 1 Wei, not the wei of hypocrisy
SECTION 2 The moment the potter shapes the clay
SECTION 3 Self-discipline, the innermost door
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.