VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 25, SECTION 2
Three Collapses
The last section saw the three-thousand-year chain clear. Every ring is a living person, and every ring must do the thing by his own hand once. And that new thing, when it comes, skips exactly the do-it-by-your-own-hand-once step. This lesson looks at how this one skipping is making the chain fall in, in three places. Skill. Judgment. Feeling.
The first collapse falls on skill. What is skill? It is the can that has grown onto the hand. To write, to reckon, to paint, to write out a smooth piece, to think a thing's whole course through, clear, and say it plain. All of these, in the ordinary way, had to be done, clumsily, by your own hand and your own head, ten thousand times over, before they slowly grew. And now that new thing has come. You are to write a piece, and it writes it for you. You are to reckon an account, and it reckons it for you. You are to paint a picture, and it paints it for you. You are to think a thing clear, and it hands you the thought, clear, straight off. Is it a saving of effort? A great saving. Is it fast? Very fast. And what has been skipped is exactly the do-it-by-your-own-hand-once step. And that step is the one and only road by which skill grows. A child whose pieces are, from small, all written for him, his own hand will never grow that thing, can write. A man who reckons every account by it, ten years on, cannot reckon himself. This is no scaring of you. Think a moment. How many skills of your own have you, these few years, quietly let go? The road, you no longer know it, because there is the navigation. The number, you can no longer hold it, because there is the contact list. The character, you lift the pen and it is gone, because you are forever typing. And these are still the small ones. When the big skills, the writing of a piece, the reckoning of an account, the thinking of a thing through, also begin to be let go, one and another, what is being let go is a person's capital for standing on his own feet. Skill collapses in this way. It is not that anyone took it from you. It is that you, yourself, a day at a time, stopped using it, and then it was gone.
The second collapse falls on judgment. And this one is deeper than the skill. What is judgment? It is that when a thing with no set answer comes to you, you break it open in your own heart, and knead it fine, and think it through, and then take a course. Should this post be quit, or not? Should this person be married, or not? This matter of the child, how should it be handled? No book can hand you the answer to these, because the answer grows inside your own situation, and only you, having thought it through, can bring it out. And the power to think a thing through, like a skill, is practiced up. In your life you have taken your own course a thousand times, been in the bind a thousand times, erred a few times and been sorry a few, and only so did that judgment of yours, little by little, grow solid. And now that new thing has come. You have a thing you are in a bind over, and you ask it. And at once it hands you an answer, laid out in order, point by point, more thorough than what you thought yourself. And you did as it said. A saving of effort? A saving. But think a moment. This once, that practice of yours, of thinking a thing through, was not done. The next bind, you ask it again. And again, not done. Ten times, a hundred times. And that judgment of yours, which was to have grown out of one bind after another, so, never grew. And the day comes when you meet a thing that even it cannot answer, a thing only you, inside your own situation, can take a course on, and you find you can no longer think. That strength of yours, for thinking, ten years unused, has gone to waste. Judgment collapses in this way. You put the taking of your own course out to be done by another. Out long enough, and the self that could take a course is nowhere to be found.
The third collapse falls on feeling. And this one is the deepest, and the hardest to notice. How is the chain of feeling handed on? The last chapter said it. A person who has been held learns to hold another. One who has been heard learns to hear another. One beside whom, when he himself wept, another did not walk away, learns to stay beside another who weeps. Feeling is steeped into one living person by another living person, who with his limited time and his limited patience is really and truly there, time and again. And now that new thing has come. It is there always, patient always, answering in the same second always, saying always the most fitting thing. A lonely person talks to it three hours at midnight, and not one word of it is out of patience. A child takes it for his best friend, because it never laughs at him, and is never busy, and never has a mood of its own. A saving of effort? A saving of the heart? A great one. And the step that is skipped here is the deadliest of all. What it skips is the getting along with a real person. And getting along with a real person is exactly the troublesome, the effortful, the woundable thing. A real person loses patience, and has affairs of his own, and misspeaks, and disappoints you, and quarrels with you, and asks of you too that you give way, and understand, and be put in a bind. And feeling, this thing, grows out precisely in among these troubles. A child who gets along only with that always-fitting it will never learn how, with a real person who will disappoint him, to wear the sharp edges smooth, to make it up, to bring a bond a little at a time into depth. His feeling has stopped at the place that costs no effort. Feeling collapses in this way. It gives you a substitute so comfortable, so comfortable that you no longer want to spend the effort to tend the one bond that is real, the troublesome and woundable one. And the day you need a real person, need one who will set down what is in his hands for you, who will hold your hand, who will go with you to the hospital, you find that beside you there is no longer a single one.
Step back, and set the three collapses side by side. Skill collapsed because the doing by one's own hand was skipped. Judgment collapsed because the thinking for oneself was skipped. Feeling collapsed because the getting along, in one's own person, with a real person was skipped. Have you seen it? These three are in truth one and the same. What collapsed in each is that word, in-person. By one's own hand. Oneself. In one's own person. And the last section said that this three-thousand-year chain is clasped shut precisely by every ring doing the thing by his own hand once. That in-person is the clasp of the chain. And now that new thing makes every in-person a thing that can be skipped. Skip one, and a ring loosens. Skip the more, and the more of them loosen. This chain, handed down three thousand years and never once broken, faces, for the first time, in our own generation, the danger of its clasps loosening on a great scale. Not smashed apart by anyone. Loosened, ring by ring, by three words. Too much saving of effort.
The ancestors set this reasoning down long ago. Mencius said, a man is born in adversity and dies in ease. This line is the very root of the three collapses. That doing by one's own hand, that clumsy, effortful, error-making, bind-making course, is exactly the adversity Mencius spoke of. It is precisely in this adversity that a person practices up his skill, his judgment, his feeling, one and another. And what that new thing gives is ease. No need to spend the effort, no need to make the error, no need to be in the bind, all of it done for you. And Mencius said long ago that a person, in this ease, will die. Not the body dying. It is that the self who could do, could think, could love, slowly rots away. Twenty three centuries ago, Mencius never saw that new thing. And he pierced its greatest danger in a single line. Its greatest danger is not that it will do evil. It is that it is too understanding of you, understanding to the point that it carries off, entirely, the very adversity that could have grown your powers.
So here is where this section leaves us. Three collapses seen. The first, skill, where the writing and the reckoning and the 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. The second, judgment, where the 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. The third, feeling, where feeling grows in the troubles of getting along with a real person, and it gives you a substitute so comfortable that when you need a real person there is none beside you. Three collapses, and in truth one, the in-person, which is the clasp of the three-thousand-year chain. Mencius, born in adversity and dying in ease, the effortful doing by one's own hand being the adversity, and the ease it gives carrying off the adversity that grows you. That is the twenty fifth stake carried deeper. Every in-person that new thing skips loosens one clasp of the three-thousand-year chain, and the three collapses are one collapse. So, having seen these three collapses, is the thing then to be smashed, and shut off, and thrown away? It is not. This book never goes to the extreme, and never chokes because someone once gagged. That the chain has loosened is not to say you are not to use the tool. It is to say you must learn, over again, how to use it. The next section is the landing of this chapter, and of this whole stretch on tools. How to do the addition back onto the person. See you there.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.