VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 23, SECTION 1
That Door Was Bought with Blood
The last two chapters had the one who makes the thing keep his self-discipline, and the one who places it set his four guards. But both of those doors rest on one hope. That he keeps them. And if he does not? What if the potter, the very potter, sets the sand-mixed clay on the wheel? What if the pharmacy, the very pharmacy, sets the killing drug out on the open shelf? There has to be a door, then, that does not rest on a man's own conscience, but rests on a sheet of paper, on a rule, and stands hard in the way. This lesson speaks of the outermost door, the door of governing. And the most important thing in the governing of a thing is called the license.
Look first at a thing you are used to and have never once asked the why of. A doctor, to treat people, must first have a license. A lawyer, to plead a man's case, must first pass an examination and hold a certificate. A man who drives the big freight truck must have a special license. An electrician, before he climbs the pole, must first hold his papers. A man selling vegetables, perhaps, need not. But a man who runs a pharmacy and sells drugs, most certainly must. Have you ever asked, by what right? By what right can some things be done by anyone at all, while others may not be touched until you first hold a sheet of paper? Count over these trades that call for a license, and you will find they have one thing in common. In the hand of each of them is held another person's life, or another person's great matter of a lifetime. The doctor holds a life. The lawyer holds a man's innocence and his freedom. The one who drives the big truck holds the lives of all who are on the road that day. The electrician holds the life of a whole building. The pharmacy holds the life of the one who buys the drug. And the trades that call for no license, for the most part, hold none of these. The vegetable seller, you buy a wilted bunch, and at the worst you throw it out. The barber, he cuts it badly, and at the worst you wait for it to grow back. This is the logic of the door. Any trade that holds in its hand another's life, or another's great matter of a lifetime, to enter it, you must first get a paper.
And how did this paper come to be? Here is a heavy line. Every license was bought with blood. Take the doctor's paper. Today you go to see a doctor, and he washes his hands, and puts on gloves, and the needle he uses is used the once and thrown away, and all this you take as the plainest matter of course. But these rules did not fall out of the sky. A hundred years ago and more, the women in the childbed wards of the hospitals were dying, batch upon batch, of a thing called childbed fever. And later a doctor found the cause. The physicians who delivered the babies were coming straight from the dissection room and, without washing their hands, laying those hands on the mothers, and carrying the filth of the dead onto the living. He made the physicians wash their hands, and the dying dropped away at once. And do you know what came of him? He was cursed by his own fellows, who said he was slandering the physician's hand as a dirty thing. To the day of his death he could not make them all believe him. And on the hands of the physicians who would not wash were real lives, one life and another life. The rule you take for granted, that a doctor washes his hands, was bought with the lives of those mothers. Behind every license there is a heap of blood like this one. Driving calls for a license because in the early days too many died in the wrecks. The electrician holds his papers because too many were burned in the shocks and the fires. The drug is sold only against a prescription because too many were killed by the taking of drugs at random. See this layer clearly, and you understand what the door of the license truly is. It is not a thing some office dreamed up to torment people with. It is the human race, over some hundreds of years and lives past counting, crashing out a barrier, one crash at a time. And on every railing of it, a name is carved.
Now the most important line comes. This door blocks, never, the person. What it blocks is the thing of touching that life with no skill to touch it. A man with no doctor's license may not cut a person open. This is not to look down on the man. It is to say, the cutting open holds a life in the hand, and you have not been through that training, and you do not know what the knife will meet when it goes in, and so you may not touch it. And the day he passes and holds the license, he may touch it. The door blocks not him, the person. It blocks the thing, the touching of a life with no skill. Hold this layer fast. Because the next section will take this very door and measure that new thing against it. And in the measuring there is only the one question. The door it wants to go in at, the thing held inside that door, is it another's life, another's great matter of a lifetime? If it is, then this door treats it exactly the same as all the rest.
The ancestors said the root of this in the fewest words. A craftsman who would do his work well must first sharpen his tools. Everyone can recite it. But look a layer deeper. Confucius says the tool must be sharp. And is sharp, then, enough? The fastest knife there is, in the hand of a master carver, is a marvel of skill. And in the hand of one who never learned, whose hand is unsteady, it is a scene of blood. The sharper the tool, the more the hand that holds it matters. The door of the license governs not whether the knife is sharp. Sharpen it away, and the sharper the better. What it governs is this. The hand that holds this knife, is it fit? And this layer is the very thing this whole volume says over and over. The implement is the object, and the person is the subject. However fast the knife, it is still the object. Whether a life is lost turns on the hand that holds it, on that subject. And the license is the threshold the human race set for the subject. You would hold that knife that holds a life, then first prove that this hand of yours is steady.
So here is where this section leaves us. The outermost door, set up. The maker keeps his self-discipline, the placer sets his guards, but if they do not, there has to be a door that rests not on conscience but on a paper. That door is governing, and its most important thing is the license. By what right some things call for a license and some do not, by whether the hand holds another's life or great matter of a lifetime, the doctor holding a life and the lawyer innocence and freedom and the truck driver a road of lives all calling for one, the vegetable seller and the barber not. And every license was bought with blood, the hand-washing rule with the lives of a batch of mothers, and the driving and the electrician's papers and the prescription all with a heap of blood behind, a barrier crashed out over centuries and lives past counting, a name carved on every railing. And this 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 matters, the license governing not the knife's edge but the hand's fitness. That is the start of the twenty third stake. The outermost door is governing, and its core is the license, bought with blood, and it blocks the touching of a life with no skill. So, lead that new thing over to this door. The doors it wants to go in at, the door of treating illness, the door of pleading a case, the door of teaching a child, inside them is held the very life of a person, the great matter of a lifetime. Can it get in? Does it have that paper bought with blood? The next section lets it stand at the door. See you there.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.