VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 24
Limit Is the Capital, and What Holds the World Up Is the One Who Stands as a Person
The last chapter left the question that most unsettles the heart. Will it one day really become a person? This chapter meets it head on. The first section says a thing the other way round, that it is more than a person and faster than a person and less tired than a person at everything, and that it is precisely this limitlessness that keeps it from being a person, because the whole of a person's weight is in his limit. The second takes the body apart into five layers, and looks at where, layer by layer, it lacks them. The third comes back to the person, that precisely because you will age and tire and die, everything you do carries a weight it cannot catch. The three together drive the twenty fourth stake.
The first section owns that at the count of more a person cannot match it, for it reads more and remembers more and does not tire and does not age and is present in many places at once, while a person is less at everything. And precisely that limit is the wellspring of a person's weight. An I am here with you is heavy from a person, a piece of flesh cut from his limited time so that to give it to you is not to give it to another, and light from it, which is with tens of millions at once and costs nothing. A poor man's gift saved three months for is heavier than a mountain of gold conjured from the air, because of a limited thing every share given aches once and that ache is its weight. Confucius, not yet knowing life how know death, for a life has a head and a tail and every now spent is one the fewer and so every now is of weight, while to a thing that never dies no now is of weight.
The second section takes the body apart into five layers. A body that can hurt, so that a person who hurt himself understands another's hurt while it understands the word pain and not the hurt. A life with a shape, so that a person's words drag a whole shaped life behind while it hangs in the air with nothing dragged. A road already walked, so that a person's steadying hand is steady while its hand, having only read every road, is hollow. An account he can carry, so that a person's words carry the weight of a consequence he will bear while it mis-states without an ache and its words are unsecured, like an IOU from a man who never pays. A boundary that ends, so that a person's every choice is a real choice, this given up for that, while it in tens of millions of places at once never chooses but only copies, the same handbill printed tens of millions of times. The five together are the body, and it has not a single one, and so it says I am here with you out of a place that has no body.
The third section turns to the face-up side, that precisely because a person has these five layers the truly heavy things can be held by a person alone. A bridge stands steady because an engineer, for a place no one would see, ran the figures three more times, and those runs came from his body that can hurt and his account to pay and his boundary that ends, and those runs are the Way. The world is held up not by rules, which set only the passing mark, but by a countless number of people's little bit more in places no one sees, which the law cannot reach and a machine cannot learn and which grows only from one who stands as a person. Zengzi, the burden heavy and the road far, to stop only at death, and that weight is in the death, and it will not die and cannot shoulder it. So the question is set down. It cannot become a person, not because it is not strong enough but because it is too strong, too strong to have the limit that makes a person a person.
That is the twenty fourth stake. Limit is the capital, the body holds the Way up, and what holds the world up is one after another person who will age and die and did that little bit more. So the whole stretch on tools has set the people down square by square, and one last question remains, the one each person faces the moment he wakes, this thing is already at my hand, how am I to use it so as not to be hollowed out but instead to stand up all the more. The next chapter, the closing chapter of the stretch on tools, gathers the reasoning back into the use you put it to every day.
SECTION
SECTION 1 Limit is the capital
SECTION 2 The five layers of the body, and where it lacks them
SECTION 3 What holds this world up is the one who stands as a person
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.