VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 25
The Three-Thousand-Year Chain, Three Collapses, Doing the Addition on the Person
This chapter is the closing chapter of the stretch on tools. The chapters before set the tool's position, the ones who make and place and govern it, and the reason it cannot become a person. This chapter gathers them back onto one thing now under way, that when this new thing comes, a chain handed down three thousand years is, in three places, falling in a little at a time. The first section tells of the chain, how culture is handed down one generation to the next across three thousand years. The second tells of the three collapses, skill and judgment and feeling, three places now breaking. The third tells the mending, which is not to shut the tool off but to do the addition back onto the person. The three together drive the twenty fifth stake.
The first section asks where the things you can do came from, and finds that every one was taken over from another, and that one from one further up, ring clasped to ring from three thousand years ago onto your hand, you the newest ring. The chain is handed down not by books, which store the characters and not the hand's feel, nor by the spoken word, for the deepest things cannot be spoken, but by person passing to person, culture handed down in a single living line. And its one rule above all is that every ring must do the thing by his own hand once, resting on the having done and not the knowing, so that one who only knows and never did is a hollow ring, present to the eye and broken in truth. The Doctrine of the Mean, sincerity is the beginning and end of all things and without it nothing, every ring clasped by that sincerity.
The second section looks at how the new thing, doing the do-it-by-your-own-hand-once step for you, makes the chain fall in at three places. Skill, where writing and reckoning and thinking took the doing by one's own hand ten thousand times to grow, and it does them for you and your hand never grows the can, as the road and the number and the character have already quietly gone. Judgment, where thinking-through took one bind after another, and you put the taking of your course out to another and the self that could take a course is gone. Feeling, where feeling grows in the troubles of getting along with a real person, and it gives a substitute so comfortable that when you need a real person there is none beside you. And the three are one, the in-person, which is the clasp of the chain. Mencius, born in adversity and dying in ease, the effortful doing being the adversity and the ease carrying off the very thing that grows you, its greatest danger not that it does evil but that it is too understanding.
The third section is the landing, that the mending is not to smash the tool but to do the addition on the person. One tool has two uses, the subtraction that empties you and the addition that makes you solid, told apart by Mozi's ruler turned onto yourself, did this grow me or shrink me. The addition has three lines, keep the do-it-by-your-own-hand-once with the tool putting out effort while you hold the core act, give the saved time back to people and not the screen with the first three of the nine given on to the six behind, and remember you are a ring on the chain, the addition living you into a solid ring and the subtraction a hollow one. The Great Learning, if you can one day make yourself new then day upon day make yourself new, the tool a ladder to be new by and the road one you climb yourself.
That is the twenty fifth stake. The three-thousand-year chain is falling in, and the mending is not the shutting off of the tool but the doing of the addition back onto the person, keeping the in-person, giving the saved back to people, living yourself into a solid ring. So the whole stretch on tools is told, and it is still the one thing this book has said from its first page, that however great the tool it is an implement, and what holds is always the person. The next chapter is the closing chapter of this whole second volume, gathering the root of the first semester and the use of the second, the stretch on education and the stretch on tools, into one, and setting down the last full stop.
SECTION
SECTION 1 A chain handed down three thousand years
SECTION 3 Do the addition on the person
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.