VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 21, SECTION 3
Self-Discipline, the Innermost Door
The end of the last section left a question. Who is to guard those four gates? The ones above, inspecting? The law? This lesson answers it. And the answer is two words. Two very old words, so old that today they sound like a lecture. But walk this whole chapter through, and you will know that they are the last door of all.
Set out the frame of the thing first. A thing, from the moment it is made to the moment it falls into a person's hand, passes through three doors. The outermost is the door of governing. It is the rules the state sets down, the you-may-not, the penalty when something goes wrong. This door is the hardest of the three, and it is also the slowest. It is forever waiting for something to go wrong before it knows where to put up its barrier. And by the time it has the barrier up, a person has already been hurt. The middle door is the door of placing. It is the ones who set the thing down in front of people. They decide where to place it, whom to sell it to, whether to let a child use it, when a line of warning should be made to pop up. That door the next chapter speaks of. And the innermost door is the door of making. It is the one seated at the wheel, his hand on the clay. And this innermost door has only one lock. Its name is self-discipline. Why is it the innermost? Because it is the earliest. It is already there before the clay has even gone onto the wheel. The two outer doors are both later ones. Governing chases along after the thing has gone wrong. Placing sets the thing down after it is already made. Only self-discipline is before all of it happens. The last chapter said, the Way comes before the implement. Self-discipline is that before.
Self-discipline sounds an empty thing. Land it. Confucius said a line, and you have been hearing it since the first chapter of the first semester. Do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself. Land it on a person who is writing code, question by question. Would you yourself want, at three in the morning, to take a telephone call, and the voice on the other end to be your son's, crying that he has hit someone and needs you to send money at once? You would not. Then the thing you have in your hands to make, can it mimic a person's voice, mimic it past a mother's own ear? And if it can, did you leave a lock in it? Would you yourself want your daughter, at fourteen, clutching her phone all day long, every second of the very moment she means to set it down reckoned out in advance, and then pushed something that scratches her just where she itches, four hours a day, her eyes ruined, her sleep gone? You would not. Then the feature you have in your hands to make, is it not doing exactly this thing? Would you yourself want your father, at seventy, unwell, to put his question to the thing, and it to reason so well and so soothingly that he sets his mind at rest and does not go to the hospital, and three months on it is too late? You would not. Then the thing you have in your hands to make, when a person asks it about an illness, does it stop at once, and push him to a real person? Do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself. Twenty five centuries. It needs no law, and no committee, and no long sheet of guidelines. It needs only a person, before he presses that key, to pause half a second, and ask himself one line. This thing, would I dare let my own child use it? And if he would not dare, then he does not make it, to give to another's child.
Now an honest hard thing has to be said. These eight characters, every person understands. And the ones who make the thing are, each one of them, clever people, who have read for many years, and understand them better than anyone. So why can they not do it? This book does not curse people. Through nine chapters of torment it never once cursed a bad person. And here it is the same. Set the position out, and look at it. A person, thirty two years old, working in a company. He has a loan on a house. He has a daughter of two. His parents are back in the old home, and their health is beginning to fail. And his review for the year is written out plain. The users are to grow to such a number. The time they stay is to grow to such a length. He is to be so many steps ahead of the rival. Fall short, and the bonus at year's end is gone. Fall short again, and the position is gone too. And now, in a meeting, someone puts forward a feature. This feature can make the users stay forty minutes longer a day. And his heart gives a thud. Because he knows where those forty minutes come from. They come out of the sleep of a fourteen-year-old. He wants to say, no. And he opens his mouth, and does not. In this second, do not curse him. The second chapter of the first semester said it. It is not that the person is bad. It is the position doing the work. He is not a bad man. He is an ordinary man, with a loan and a daughter and aging parents, seated in a place that presses him to say yes. And this, exactly, is the hardest thing about self-discipline. Self-discipline is never spoken of in the easy hour. Self-discipline is, in that second, in the second when you might lose everything, still being able to get out those two words. No. Those two words are dear. So dear that some people cannot get them out in a whole lifetime.
And yet this book has one more line to say. There is always someone who can get them out. At every turn in history, there has been someone who could. There are those who make false medicine, and there is always the one who will not, in a whole lifetime, adulterate a single dose. There are those who cut the corners on a building, and there is always the one who buries a pillar three feet deeper, and no one ever knows, and on the day of the earthquake, that building stands. There are those who mold the sand-mixed clay, and there is always the potter who throws it back into the heap, and would rather fail to hand the batch over on time. Are these many? They are not many. But they have always been there. The twelfth chapter said that culture is handed down in a single line, one living generation dyeing the next by its own hand. So think a moment. That man who would not, in a whole lifetime, adulterate the medicine, the child in his house watched him, for eighteen years. And when that child is grown, what kind of person will he be? That engineer who could get out the word no, his daughter is two, and understands nothing. But when she is sixteen, she will come to know that her father once, in a meeting room, for the sake of a fourteen-year-old he had never once laid eyes on, said no. That one no is wei. It is a thing a person made. And it will be steeped into a child. And it will be handed down. Working upon the nature and raising the wrought. Line by line, and generation by generation.
So what can we do, we who do not make the thing? Three small things. The first. Hand him the ruler. The last chapter had Mozi's ruler. What benefits people is done, what does not is stopped. That engineer seated in the meeting room has many rulers at his hand. Whether the users are many, whether the money comes in, whether he is faster than the rival. Only Mozi's, he does not have. And this book does just this. It lays that one ruler back on the table. Before him, and before his boss, and before the ones who govern. The second. When you use it, you are also casting a vote. Whether a thing can go on living is decided by how many people use it. Every time you open it, you are telling the ones who made it, this is right, keep on. And every time you close it, and go and knock on your own father's door, you are casting a vote too. The third, and the most important. You yourself are also a potter. You may never in your life write a single line of code. But you are molding a person. Your child. And you mold him with the nine things of the nineteenth chapter. Time, energy, attention, relationships, trust, health, skill, reputation, feeling. Every single day, you are seated at the wheel. And that clay is alive. And the moment you mold it in is the very moment Xunzi spoke of.
That closes the twenty first chapter. Pull it together. Wei is not the wei of hypocrisy. A person and the act of doing is wei, and the humanly made is wei, and Xunzi said, what is done by human effort is wei. The hoe is wei, the manners wei, the hard bedrock wei, and that new thing is wei. Working upon the nature and raising the wrought, for a person is wrought into being. But wei is double-edged, its good or bad in the hands. And the ones who make it are Xunzi's potter, and the implement is born of the craftsman's wei, and a cup that scalds is wrong in the two seconds the sand-clay went on the wheel, and the one who uses it can only trust. So four gates before the molding, culture and the rice bowl and who says what goes and the rules, and responsibility begins from the moment the hand moves, not from the moment something goes wrong. And who is to guard those gates? Three doors, the outermost governing, the middle placing, the innermost making, and the innermost has one lock, self-discipline. Confucius, do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself, and would you dare give it to your own child, 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 where he is pressed 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, and it is steeped into a child, and handed down. That is the twenty first stake this chapter drives. 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, after the thing is molded? A thing is molded, and someone still has to carry it out and set it down before people. Where to place it, whom to sell it to, whether to let a child touch it, when to pop a line of warning. This square is the middle door. It is easier to govern than self-discipline. And it is looser than self-discipline. The next chapter speaks of the ones who place it. See you in the next chapter.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.