VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 25, SECTION 1
A Chain Handed Down Three Thousand Years
This chapter is the closing chapter of the stretch on tools. The chapters before it set the position of that new thing out clear. It is an implement, and an object. The ones who make it, and place it, and govern it, are all of them people. It cannot become a person, because it has no body. From this lesson on, these reasonings are gathered back onto a thing that is happening right now. And to see this thing clearly, you have first to see a chain. A chain that has been handed down three thousand years, and is being handed down still today.
Ask the plainest question first. The things you can do, where did they come from? You can speak. This your mother, your father, the people around you, fed to you one word at a time. You can write. This the teacher taught you, holding your hand, one stroke at a time. You can cook, having watched your mother at the stove. You can carry yourself as a person, having watched how your grandfather received a guest, how your father owned an error, how your mother bore a thing in silence, steeped in it year upon year. There is not one thing on you that you grew up out of nothing, alone. Everything you can do, you took over from another. And the one who taught you, the things he could do he took over from the one before him. And the one before him, from one further up still. A ring, and a ring clasped to it, count upward. Count up to your grandfather, and to your grandfather's grandfather, and to the one with no name, centuries ago, who was also teaching a child at the stove, and count to three thousand years back, to the one who first laid the seed of a fire, or a written character, or a line of do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself, into the hand of the next person. This chain, ring clasped to ring, comes down from three thousand years ago and clasps, at the last, onto your hand. You are the newest ring of the chain.
And by what is this chain handed down? Take it apart. It is not handed down by books. A book can store the characters, and cannot store the feel of that hand, cannot store the measure of that one stroke. However fine a recipe is written, you cook by it and still cannot cook your mother's taste. That taste is on your mother's hand, and not in the book. Nor is it handed down by the spoken word. The most important things of all are the things that cannot be spoken. How your father held steady before a hard thing, he himself cannot say plainly. You could only watch him hold steady for ten years, and slowly, on your own self, that steadiness grew. This chain is handed down by person passing to person. It is one living person, standing before another living person, day upon day, steeping into him what he can do, and what he is. The fifteenth chapter spoke of this word, steeping. The twelfth chapter of the first semester spoke of a line. Culture is handed down in a single living line. This is the meaning of it. On this chain, every ring is a living person. The character is a dead thing, the book is a dead thing, and only the person is alive. That the chain can go on being handed down is because every ring is a living person who, with the whole of his one life, takes in his own hands the ring the one before handed him, and hands it on into the hand of the next.
This chain has one rule above all the rest. Every ring must do the thing by his own hand, once. A child learning to tie his shoelace, though he watch another tie it a hundred times, still cannot. His own hand has to tie it, clumsily, once and once again, tie it wrong, tie it into a dead knot, undo it, until one day his hand, of itself, can. That can grew onto his hand. It is not remembered in his head. Learning to carry yourself as a person is the same. He has to go through it himself, be put in the bind himself, stand before a hard thing once himself, even stand and fail and go down once, and only then does he truly grow how to be a person onto his own self. This is the key of the whole chain. What it rests on is not the knowing. It is the having done. Every ring must do the thing by his own hand, once, and only then is that ring truly joined on. To know only what kind of person your grandfather was is of no use. You have to live yourself into such a person too, and only then has this chain, passing through you, reached to the next ring. A person who only knows and has never done is a hollow ring on the chain. It looks as though it is there, and in truth it is broken. What the ring before handed to him, at him did not truly grow into a body, and so it cannot pass on to the next ring.
The ancestors said this chain most clearly. Sincerity is the beginning and the end of all things, and without sincerity there is nothing. This word, sincerity, is the very life of the chain. What is sincerity? Sincerity is to really do the thing, and not to do it as a show. It is to have truly grown it out on yourself, and not to have it only on the lips. A person who has truly taken the thing of the generation before into his own body, and has truly lived it out, and hands it to the generation after, this is sincerity. Every ring of this chain is clasped shut by this word. A ring that is sincere is solid. A ring that is not sincere is hollow. And that without sincerity there is nothing is a warning. Any ring that is only putting on a show, only knowing on the lips with nothing on the body, that ring is empty, and the chain, there, is broken. This chain has been handed down three thousand years on the strength of every ring being still, roughly, sincere. Every generation, clumsy as it was, erring as it did, on the whole truly did the thing by its own hand once, and only then handed it down.
So here is where this section leaves us. A chain, seen clear. Every thing you can do you took over from another, and that one from one further up, ring clasped to ring from three thousand years ago onto your hand, and you the newest ring. Not handed down by books, which store the characters and not the hand's feel, nor by the spoken word, for the most important things cannot be spoken, but by person passing to person, one living person before another steeping in what he can do and what he is, culture handed down in a single living line. And the one rule above all, that every ring must do the thing by his own hand once, resting not on the knowing but on the having done, and one who knows and has never done 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, truly done once and then handed on. That is the start of the twenty fifth stake. Culture is a three-thousand-year chain, every ring a living person, and every ring must do the thing by his own hand once, resting on sincerity, on having done, and not on knowing. So, this chain, three thousand years handed down, every ring still roughly solid, today meets a thing it has never met before. That new thing comes, and it does the do-it-by-your-own-hand-once step for you. To skip a step looks like a good thing. And this chain is clasped shut precisely by that step. When that step is skipped, where, and how, does the chain break? The next section looks at three collapses now under way. See you there.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.