VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 22, SECTION 1
The Square of Placing
The last chapter followed Xunzi up to the potter's wheel, and saw one thing clearly. Everything is settled in the moment of the molding, and the innermost door has but one lock, self-discipline. But after the thing is molded? A bowl is molded, and fired, and it still has to have someone 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. This square is the middle door. This lesson lays it out clear.
Take the plainest figure first. Medicine. A dose of medicine is made by the one who makes it. What it is made of, how large a dose, whether it will harm the liver, whether it can be taken alongside another drug, all of this is settled in the moment of the making, and that is the layer the last chapter spoke of. But once this dose is made, the matter is not over. It has to be carried out, and set down before people. Set down where? On the counter of the pharmacy. On which shelf of the counter? On the open shelf where a hand can reach it, or locked in a cabinet where it takes a written prescription to get it out? Sold to whom? Who is there to ask, how old are you, do you have any other illness, what are you taking now? None of this is the drug-maker's work. It is the pharmacy's. However good a drug is, placed in the wrong spot, it still takes a life. A heart medicine, a good drug in itself, has saved thousands upon thousands. But put it out on the open shelf, with no one asking and no one minding, and let a sixteen-year-old in a low mood buy two bottles at once, and this good drug becomes a thing that kills. And when it goes wrong, can you curse the drug? You cannot. The drug lay there, and said nothing. Can you curse only the maker? Not wholly. What he made was a good drug. The wrong is on the one who put it out on the open shelf, and asked nothing, and minded nothing. This square is called placing.
So who is in this square? The large ones are the companies that hundreds of millions use, who make the thing into an application and lay it into every phone, into the pocket of every child. The small ones are one person, who rents another's machine, wraps a shell around it, makes some small tool, and hangs it up online for money. These two are millions of times apart in scale, and their position is exactly one. The moment you push the thing out in front of a concrete person, you are in this square, and you are that pharmacy. And the duty of this square is two words. Set the guards. Someone will say, but I did not make it, I only took what another had already made and wrapped a shell on it, what responsibility is mine? And the pharmacy did not make the drug either. It only set the drug on a shelf. And yet if a child took two bottles of a killing drug off its open shelf, do you say the pharmacy bears no responsibility? It bears it, and heavily. Because between that child and that drug, one person and one only was standing. It.
Now someone will press further. What if the one who made it is already self-disciplined? What if he passed, every one, those four gates of the last chapter? Then what is there to guard against? Here is a very solid thing to say. However careful the one who made a thing, he is still only some dozens of people, some hundreds. He sits in an office, and however thoroughly he thinks, the scenes he is able to think of are a limited number. But once the thing is placed out, what it faces is hundreds of millions of people. And hundreds of millions of people are hundreds of millions of ways of living. Some take it to look a thing up, some to write an email, some to teach a child a problem, some to turn a passage of a foreign tongue, and these the maker did think of. But there are some he could not think of. A person on the most desperate of nights, taking it for the last one left who will speak with him. A swindler, taking it for a pen that can mimic any voice there is. A boy of fourteen, taking it for the one friend who will not laugh at him. An old man of seventy, taking it for a doctor. A person just let go from his work, taking it for a fortune-teller. Those few hundred who made it never once met these people. And these people sit, truly and really, at the far end of the screen. And who stands between them and the thing? The one who placed it. He alone.
The ancestors said this in the fewest words, and the hardest. The junzi thinks of the trouble, and guards against it beforehand. Mark the order of that line. First think of the trouble, then guard beforehand. To think of the trouble is to think out, one by one, the worst that could come. To guard beforehand is to have the floodgate set in place before that bad thing has happened. And mark, above all, that word, beforehand. Beforehand is when the thing has not yet happened. The most important thing about these words is this. They are not a guarding that waits for the accident. A great many who place things today go the other way. Place it out first, see what goes wrong, and patch it after the thing goes wrong, and they call this moving fast and improving. But the Book of Changes, two thousand years and more ago, said one word. Beforehand. Think first, guard first. Not place first, and patch after. Because in the very moment you are patching, someone has already been hurt, and however fast the patch, that someone does not come back. And this hexagram, the one called Already Across, speaks of exactly the time when the thing is done and all is running smooth. And it is precisely at the smoothest that the ancestors put in a word of warning. Think of the trouble, and set the guard. Do not think of it while things are smooth, and by the time they have turned rough, it is too late.
So here is where this section leaves us. The middle door, set up. A drug, made is one thing and placed is another, and a good drug on the open shelf with no one asking still takes a life, and the wrong is not the drug, and not wholly the maker, but the one who set it out open. This square is placing, and 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 of the square is to set the guards. And why guard even a well-made thing, because the maker is only hundreds and cannot think of the hundreds of millions of ways of living, and those he never met, the desperate one at midnight and the old man who takes it for a doctor and the child who takes it for his one friend, sit truly at the far end of the screen, and only the placer stands between them and the thing. The Book of Changes, the junzi thinks of the trouble and guards beforehand, and mark that beforehand, not a patch after but a guard before, because the moment you patch someone is already hurt. That is the start of the twenty second stake. The duty of placing is to guard, and first to think of the trouble and then to guard beforehand, not to place it out first and patch after it goes wrong. So what is there to guard against, and how many guards? The next section sets out four guards, one by one. And each is harder than the last. And the last of them is the hardest, and the deadliest. See you there.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.