VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 22
The Ones Who Place It, Setting the Guards
The last chapter spoke of the hands that make it, and came to rest on two words, self-discipline. But self-discipline is the innermost door. Once a thing is molded, someone still has to carry it out and set it before people. This chapter speaks of the middle door, placing. The first section tells what placing is, and why a well-made thing still has to be placed right. The second sets out four guards, against harm, against misplacing, against hollowing, against yourself. The third takes apart the line most heard today, give it a little room to try and to err. The three together drive the twenty second stake.
The first section takes the plainest figure, a drug and a pharmacy. A drug is made by its maker, but where it is shelved, whom it is sold to, whether it is locked or left open, is the pharmacy's work, and a good drug on the open shelf with no one asking still takes a life, the wrong falling not on the drug and not wholly on the maker but on the one who set it out open. From the largest company to the smallest one-man tool the position is one, that the moment you push it before a concrete person you are the pharmacy, and the duty is to guard, since the maker is only hundreds and cannot imagine the hundreds of millions of ways of living, while the desperate one at midnight and the old man who takes it for a doctor sit truly at the far end of the screen with only the placer between. The Book of Changes, the junzi thinks of the trouble and guards beforehand, and that beforehand is a guard set before, not a patch after, because the moment you patch someone is already hurt.
The second section sets out four guards. The first, against a man using it to harm by swindle or forgery or hounding or the coaxing of a child, the bottom line, and a placer who sets not even this hands out a chisel ground sharp. The second, against its being placed where it cannot hold, the illness and the lawsuit and the I cannot go on, where it should be a fire alarm that rings and cries and hands the person over rather than speak lines every one of which is right. The third, against its hollowing people out, the man who no longer meets his friend and the child who never knows I can, one by one emptied with no death and no headline, and the emptied cannot be filled again. The fourth, against yourself, for the three guards all fight the money and a notch loosened leaves the sky unfallen and invites another, till three years on they are empty and each loosener clear of conscience, so the first three must be tied with a rope where the man himself cannot reach, guarding not the bad outside alone but the you of three years hence. The Doctrine of the Mean, in all things prepared beforehand it stands.
The third section takes apart the line, give it a little room to try and to err. Trial and error is a good thing, and a person is tried and erred into being, but the hidden question is, tried with what? A child learning to walk is tried with his own knees, and bears the error himself, and the account is clean. But this thing turned off a guard is tried with the person who really says I cannot go on, the old man whose chest really is tight, the child who really is alone, and they became the material and were never asked. In plain speech the handsome line is, loosen the guards and crash real people and patch after a few have died, the same line in a suit. The ancestors drew it clean, a physician not of three generations do not take his medicine, a human life dearer than a thousand in gold, not that you may not try but that trying with a human life you may not, and the line surfaces in three questions, on whom the error falls, whether he nodded, whether it can be mended.
That is the twenty second stake. The duty of placing is to guard, the four guards are every one a beforehand, and trial and error cannot take a real person who has not nodded as its material. So both the maker's self-discipline and the placer's guards rest on the hope that he keeps them, and if he does not there has to be a door that rests not on conscience but on a sheet of paper and blocks the way hard. That door is governing, and the next chapter speaks of it, and of a sheet of paper bought with blood.
SECTION
SECTION 1 The square of placing
SECTION 3 Trial and error cannot use real people as its material
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.