VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 23
The Licensed Door, the Way Stands by a Person
The last two chapters spoke of the ones who make it and the ones who place it. This chapter speaks of the outermost door, governing. And the most important thing in governing is not the fine or the document but a thing the human race bought with blood over thousands of years, the license. The first section tells how that door came to be, and why a paper is needed to enter. The second lets that new thing stand at the door, to see whether it can get in. The third tells what it should do out beyond the door, and why the Way can be erected only by a person. The three together drive the twenty third stake.
The first section asks by what right some trades call for a license, and finds the answer in whether the hand holds another's life or great matter of a lifetime, the doctor and the lawyer and the truck driver holding one while the vegetable seller and the barber hold none. And every license was bought with blood, the rule that a doctor washes his hands bought with the lives of a batch of mothers dead of childbed fever, the doctor who found the cause cursed by his fellows to the day he died, and the driving and the electrician's papers and the prescription all with a heap of blood behind, a barrier the race crashed out one crash at a time with a name carved on every railing. And the door blocks never the person but the touching of a life with no skill to touch it. Confucius, a craftsman who would do his work well must first sharpen his tools, and the sharper the tool the more the hand that holds it matters, the license governing not the knife's edge but the fitness of the hand.
The second section leads the thing to the door and lets it stand there. The doors it wants to enter, the doctor's and the lawyer's and the teacher's and the catcher of the despairing, hold people's lives and great matters, and it has no paper. Someone says it is mightier than the licensed, and the answer is that the door blocks not the skill but whether you can bear the consequence, the doctor tethered to a whole apparatus of bearing it, his name and revocable license and prison and paying and ruin, while the thing answers everything and bears nothing, no name and no license and un-imprisonable and no money and a new name a new it. The body of the twenty first chapter, the license tethered to the body, a bodiless thing unable to be hung upon it. Yet not thrown away, for the blood-test machine beats the doctor's eye and yet reports to the doctor who signs and bears, so the thing belongs in the machine's square, able to put out any effort and unable to sign. Han Feizi, a prime minister must rise from the local posts, the door recognizing not the books read but the matters borne.
The third section tells what it should do out beyond the door, where a wide field waits, and it is the doctor's finest machine and the lawyer's fastest helper and the teacher's most tireless hand, doing the work to the threshold and leaving the last stroke to a person. And the last stroke must be a person because the deepest thing inside the door is the Way, which can be erected only by a person, one time at a time, the rule setting only the passing mark while the extra stroke, the doctor's one more question and the lawyer's one more night and the teacher's one moment more for the child with his head down, is a living person erecting it, a stroke that grows from a body the machine has not. Mencius, they do it and do not understand it and follow it and do not know its Way, the Way living in the stroke that cannot be spoken and yet was done, handed only from one living person to another. And the bone of the chapter, that the door was never there to keep the machine out but to keep the person in.
That is the twenty third stake. The door keeps the person in, the tool is always the object, behind every door stands a person who can bear it, and the door sets the passing mark while the person erects the extra stroke, and that stroke is the Way. So three doors are told, the maker's self-discipline and the placer's guards and the governor's license, and the people square by square are set down. But one biggest question has never been met head on. Will that thing one day really become a person, with a heart and feeling, understanding love and pain? The next chapter meets it.
SECTION
SECTION 1 That door was bought with blood
SECTION 2 It walks to the door
SECTION 3 The Way stands by a person
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.