VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 25, SECTION 3
Do the Addition on the Person
The last two sections saw the three-thousand-year chain clear, and saw it falling in at three places. Skill, judgment, feeling. This lesson is the landing of this chapter, and of this whole stretch on tools. Having seen the collapse, what is to be done? Not to smash the tool. To learn one thing. To do the addition back onto the person.
One and the same thing has two uses. One is to take it and do subtraction on yourself. One is to take it and do addition on yourself. The difference is not in the tool. It is in the hand that uses it. Take the writing of a piece. The subtraction use. You are to write a thing, and you toss the title to it, and it writes it out, and you copy it, and you hand it in. You have saved the effort, and that can write of yours has gone down by one. The addition use. You write a draft yourself first, however clumsy it is, however slow. And when it is written, you let it look over where you have gone on too long, where you have not said it clear, and you look at what it says, and you revise it yourself. You have spent the effort, and that can write of yours has gone up by one, because you wrote it yourself, and learned, one more time over, how to revise it. The same tool, the same piece. One use, and you grow the emptier the more you use it. The other, and you grow the more solid the more you use it. This is the use of that ruler. The twentieth chapter had Mozi's line. What benefits people, do it. What does not, stop. Now turn that ruler round onto your own self. This one use of it, did it grow me, this person, or shrink me? Grew me, and it is addition. Shrank me, and it is subtraction.
The core of the addition is the one line. Whatever you use it to do, that do-it-by-your-own-hand-once step, you must, yourself, keep. The child's homework, you may let it lay out the way through, but that problem, the child's own pen has to work it out, one step at a time. A letter that is hard to write, you may let it counsel you, but that one most important line, you have to draw it up out of your own heart. A thing you are in a bind over, you may hear out how it lays the thing apart, but that last course, you have to take yourself, inside your own situation. A bond you would mend, it may tell you some ways to go about the talking, but that call, you have to make yourself, and that word, I am sorry, you have to say yourself, to the very face of that person. See the measure in it. The tool is off to the side, and it may put out any amount of effort. It lays out the way through, it counsels, it takes the thing apart, it offers the ways. And that core act, the do-it-by-your-own-hand-once, you hold fast in your own grip, and not one step of it do you put out to another. And so the tool becomes your helper, and not your stand-in. The twenty third chapter said it. It belongs in the machine's square. It puts out the effort, and it does not sign the name. Used on your own self it is the same. It puts out the effort, and that one stroke that grows your powers, you do yourself.
There is a second line to the addition. The time it saves you, do not fill it back to the tool. Give it back to people. That new thing does, truly, save you a great deal of time. The grading, the looking-up, the drafting, the sorting of materials, that once took nights on end, are done now in a little while. And where the saved time goes is the watershed between the addition and the subtraction. The path of subtraction. The saved time is filled straight back into the screen, to scroll more, to watch more, to let it keep you company in more talk. The saved time is fed back to the very thing that saved it. And the more you save, the emptier you go. The path of addition. The saved time is given back to people. The doctor's saved labor, one more look at the face of the patient. The teacher's saved labor, one more moment kept with the child whose head is down. The father's saved labor, twenty minutes more walking with the child down below. The saved time is fed back to the living people at your side. And the more you save, the thicker the line between you and people grows. The nineteenth chapter had the nine things. Time, energy, attention, relationships, trust, health, skill, reputation, feeling. What the tool saves you is exactly the first three. Time, energy, attention. Give these three on, to the six behind them, give them back to people, and that is the addition. Fill them back into the tool, and that is the subtraction. The one same saved store of time, two ways for it to go, two lives lived.
And at the very last, come back to the chain. Do not forget it. You yourself are one ring on that three-thousand-year chain. The ring before you handed skill, and judgment, and feeling, into your hand. The ring after you, your child, your student, any one who is watching you grow up, is waiting to take them over from your hand. And whether they can take them over turns on one thing. Whether that skill, that judgment, that feeling, is still on your own self, and still solid. If you live yourself into a hollow ring, everything leaned on the tool, and you yourself can do nothing, think nothing, love nothing, then this ring of yours is broken. What the ring before handed to you cannot get across, cannot pass on to the ring after. The three-thousand-year chain, at you, is not joined on. This is no crying of alarm. This is the word this whole stretch on tools has, at the last, to land on your own self. How the tool is to be used is, in the end, not a question of technique. It is the question of whether you would live yourself into a solid ring on the chain, or a hollow one. To do the addition is to live yourself into a solid ring. To do the subtraction is to live yourself into a hollow one.
The ancestors said this thing at once steadily and warmly. If you can, one day, make yourself new, then day upon day make yourself new, and new again. These words were carved on the washbasin of a king of the Shang. Every day as he washed his face, he lowered his head and there were these nine characters. What they say is this. A person is, by his own self, a day at a time, to renew himself, and grow upward. Look at this word, new. Leaning on whom? Leaning on his own self. It is he himself washing every day, holding himself to the mirror every day, reaching upward every day. There is no new that another makes new for you, and there is still less a one that a tool makes new for you. These nine characters are the oldest saying there is of that word, addition. To be new day upon day is, every single day, to grow this person of yours one measure past yesterday. And the tool, used rightly, is a good ladder to help you be new day upon day. Used wrongly, it takes the whole business of being new and does it for you, does it to the point that you yourself never grow again. A ladder is a good thing. But the road, you have to climb yourself.
So here is where this section leaves us, and the twenty fifth stake nailed shut. One same tool, two uses, the subtraction that empties you the more you use it and the addition that makes you the more solid, and the difference is in the hand. The addition has three lines. The first, keep the do-it-by-your-own-hand-once, the tool putting out any effort while that core act that grows your powers you hold in your own grip and put out to no one. The second, give the saved time back to people, not filling it back into the screen, the first three of the nine given on to the six behind them, given back to the living people at your side. The third, remember that you yourself are one ring on the three-thousand-year chain, the addition living you into a solid ring and the subtraction into a hollow one. The Great Learning, if you can one day make yourself new then day upon day make yourself new, the tool used rightly a ladder to be new by and used wrongly a doing of the newing for you, and the ladder good but the road one you climb yourself. That is the twenty fifth stake. The three-thousand-year chain is falling in, and the mending of it is not the shutting off of the tool, but the doing of the addition back onto the person, the keeping of that in-person, the giving of the saved back to people, the living of yourself into a solid ring on the chain.
So, this whole stretch on tools is told through. From the three stones, to the ones who make it and place it and govern it, to its not being able to become a person, to today's three collapses and how they are mended, all the way down, it is still the one thing this book has said since its first page. However great the tool, it is an implement. What holds is, always, the person. The next chapter is the closing chapter of this whole second volume, the Cultural Institution. It gathers the root of the first semester and the use of the second, the stretch on education and the stretch on tools, all into one, and sets down the last full stop. See you in the next chapter.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.