VOLUME III, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 2, SECTION 1
The Lion Takes One More Bite and Gives No Reason
The last chapter set up a whole map, four institutions running alongside one another. This chapter digs down to the root of the volume, digs down to one word, wei. But to see wei clearly you first have to see clearly what a place without wei looks like. So this section sets the human being aside for a while and goes to look at animals. It looks at how a pride of lions divides one buffalo.
First, watch the pride divide one buffalo
On the grassland, a pride of lions has brought down a buffalo. What comes next, many people think they already know. The male eats first, the females after, the cubs last.
That is true. But sink your eyes down a little further and see the whole of it. The first thing. The whole pride gets fed. Not one lion can drag a whole buffalo back to its own den and swallow it alone. It is too big. One lion cannot haul it, cannot finish it. The second thing. This buffalo was brought down by the whole pride pulling together in the first place. No one of them did it alone. And if this time one of them swallowed the whole thing, next time, who would go out with it again.
So the way the pride divides the kill is not one of them showing a kind heart. It is the plain physics and arithmetic of the thing itself, forcing the outcome. Wolves do the same. African wild dogs do the same. Orcas do the same.
Now look at three stranger things
The first. The wolf that brings its meal back up. A wolf goes out and hunts, comes back to the den, and heaves up the half digested meat in its stomach to feed the cubs. That is not strange. What is strange is that it also heaves it up for the grown packmates that stayed behind and did not go out. Ravens, crows, penguins, birds that live in groups, do something like it.
The second. The chimpanzee that calls. A chimpanzee in the forest finds a tree hung full of fruit, and it calls. That call is one particular kind of call, and it brings the other members of the band over to eat together. Think a moment about what it could have done instead. Stay silent, eat its own fill. It is fully able to. And it does not. Bonobos, capuchins, several kinds of macaque, all have this on record.
The third. The vampire bat that gives back. This is a classic case in the study of animal altruism. A vampire bat burns through its fuel fast. A whole night with no blood found, two or three days of fasting is the limit, and if it still finds none it will starve. A bat from the same roost will bring blood back up for the starving one, even a bat it shares not one drop of kinship with. And here is the point that matters most. It remembers who helped it. Next time, when it is the one who fed well and the neighbor is the one going hungry, it will give back first to the one who once helped it.
Put the four together and three things come clear
The first. Sharing is common across the animal world, not the exception. It shows up in mammals, in birds, in primates, even among insects like bees and ants. It is not some special skill cultivated by one high species alone.
The second. Sharing needs no morality and no institution to hold it up. No lion ever called a meeting to settle how the meat should be split. No wolf ever signed an agreement laying down who owes a regurgitation. No bat ever spoke a word of reasoning. These behaviors are down at the level of instinct, down at the level of the nerve circuit, down at the level of what evolution has built.
The third. Sharing makes good sense in biology. Evolutionary biology offers several accounts. Kin selection, where the help goes to relatives who carry the same genes. Reciprocal altruism, you help me and I help you. Group selection, where a group that knows how to share outlives a group that only knows how to swallow alone. Not one of these mechanisms needs goodness as its premise. They only tell you one thing. In a harsh nature, sharing pays better than swallowing alone.
But there is a fourth thing, and this is the real subject
Go back to the buffalo.
The male eats first. It takes one more bite, it takes many more bites even. It carries off the best piece. This is a fact. This thing happened.
Now hear this next line clearly. The male added no reason to it.
It did not say, because I am strong, it is only right that I eat first. It did not say, I am the king of this pride, I deserve it. It did not say, my merit is greater than the rest. It said nothing at all. It simply ate first, and then the thing was over.
The females did not ask it, by what right. The females do not feel wronged, and do not feel a grade lower. They wait, they wait for the male to finish, and they eat. That is just how the thing happened, and then it passed.
To take one more bite is a fact. To be only right in taking one more bite is another thing entirely. In the animal world there is only the first. There is not the second.
Zhuangzi drew this very picture long ago
This picture the ancestors saw plainly. Zhuangzi, in the piece called Horses’ Hooves, tells what the finest age was like. In the age of the fullest virtue, he says, people dwelt together with the birds and the beasts, and ranked alongside all things.
Take those words apart. Dwelt together with the birds and beasts, that is living among them, not living over them. Ranked alongside all things, and that word alongside is the one that matters, it is side by side, it is on the level, it is not sitting on top of anyone’s head.
What Zhuangzi drew here is exactly the state where the human being had not yet lifted itself out of the animal world and set itself apart. In that time the human took more too, fought for food too, ran strong or weak too. But the human had not yet learned one thing. To add a reason to taking more.
Then what lifted the human out of the animal world and set it apart. Not tools. Not fire. Not language. Wei.
This section ends by setting one plain line
Hold this line hard. It is the ground of the whole volume.
Among the animals, the strong taking more is a fact. The fact happens, and it is over, and it leaves nothing behind.
A fact does not turn itself into an institution. A lion that ate more today does not thereby get to eat more tomorrow, and still less do its children, and its children’s children, get to eat more from now on. There is no such thing in the pride. Every day’s order has to be won again with force. Grow old, grow weak, and another one takes the first bite. The position can trade at any time.
So in the animal world there is no dynasty, no inheritance, no nobility. They have strong and weak. They do not have noble and base.
Humans do. How did humans come to have it.
What this section set up, and the turn to the next
This section crouched at the edge of the grassland and watched one buffalo get divided to the end, watched the wolf bring meat back up for its own, watched the bat remember who once helped it.
Out of these, two things stand up.
The first. Taking by need is not an ideal that some person thought up. It is a thing already there inside life itself. Sharing pays better than swallowing alone, and that is an account nature worked out on its own. Mankind did not set out from a selfish wilderness. Mankind set out from a floor of sharing.
The second, and this is the real threshold of the chapter. The strong one among the animals only took more as a matter of fact. He added no reason to it.
And the human, after taking more, adds a line. It is only right.
That one line, only right, is a thing the animal world does not have. It looks weightless, and it is a step that shakes heaven and earth. The whole history of human institutions begins from this one line.
The next section walks right up to that step, and watches this line get spoken out loud.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.