VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 26
How to Live Alongside the Nine Things, That Half Second, Originally Not a Single Thing and a Great Love Left in the Human World
This chapter is the closing chapter of the whole second volume, the Cultural Institution. The first semester spoke of the root, the second of the use, the stretch on education of how culture is handed down, the stretch on tools of how a person is held in the face of the new thing. Here it all has to be drawn in together. The first section comes back to the nine things, and how a person is to live alongside them. The second speaks of that half second, of how what a person truly decides in his one life is one half second after another. The third draws the whole volume in onto eight characters, originally not a single thing, a great love left in the human world. The three together drive the twenty sixth stake, and the last stake of this whole volume.
The first section brings the nine things out one last time, time and energy and attention and relationships and trust and health and skill and reputation and feeling, the whole capital of a life, and finds that every one is limited, so that how they are portioned is a matter of the first weight. And the new thing wants most to take the first three, time and energy and attention, its food, and the first three hollowed the six behind run to waste. How to live alongside them comes to one word, portion, portioning the limited good things out to the living people and matters that are worthy and can catch them and not by the armful to what only wants you hollowed. Confucius, coarse rice and water and joy in the middle of it, and wealth and honor got wrong a floating cloud, a balance in the heart that knows the capital from the cloud.
The second section shrinks the portioning down to one half second. A person's life is mostly pushed along by a force larger than he is, and what is truly his to decide is one half second after another, whether to flare at the foot stepped on, whether to lift the head to the child, whether to nod on the thing that wrongs the conscience, and these dozens of chapters speak all of this. The half second is too short to think in, and what it leans on is not the reasoning but the body long ago raised into what it is, the store laid up over a life and drawn out in that moment. So the new thing can do all in your stead but this half second, which happens in the innermost of the body where no tool is present, the last and hardest ground of a person. Mencius, a man who of a sudden sees a child about to fall into a well feels the start of alarm and pang of pity, that heart welling up of itself in the half second of the sudden seeing.
The third section draws the whole volume onto eight characters. Originally not a single thing, that a person comes bare and goes bare and can carry away neither money nor name nor thing, the coldest and most clear-eyed bottom line. And a great love left in the human world, that the one thing which can be left is the true feeling and warmth spent on people, the teacher's one line kept a lifetime and the mother's way at the stove grown onto her child, the thing coming to nothing and the love not, going down the three-thousand-year chain. And the two are one line, the inside and outside of one thing, the originally not a single thing being exactly what makes the great love so dear. Confucius drew a life's learning onto one word, reciprocity, what you do not want for yourself do not do to others, which comes down into every half second.
That is the twenty sixth stake, and the last of the volume. A person's one life is his taking of the limited nine things, and in one half second after another, choosing to love, the thing coming to nothing and the love staying in the human world. And here the whole volume is told, the first semester of the root and the second of the use, education and tools together saying one thing, that culture grows on the person and is handed down and held by people, and that however great the tool the one who holds and decides and leaves love behind is always a limited person still willing, in that half second, to lean toward the good. The credit goes to the ancestors, the mistakes to Tiger Lyon. The next lesson speaks of the Economic Institution.
SECTION
SECTION 1 The nine things, how to live alongside them
SECTION 3 Originally not a single thing, a great love left in the human world
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.