VOLUME III, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 4
Steady Holding and Steady Heart, the Order Mencius Set
Start with a farmer breaking into the next village’s grain store in a famine year, carrying off one sack of rice. In his whole life he never stole so much as a needle, he worked the ground for thirty years, he once carried found money back to the one who lost it. Then last autumn a drought pulled the board out from under his feet, and the youngest of his three children has not truly eaten in three days. Stand far off and you slap two words on him, bad element, thief, and you are done. Walk in close and you see a man whose ground went out from under him. That is where this chapter begins, and it begins there because the whole of what Mencius has to teach is bound up in that one board. Guanzi set the order of matter and mind in the last chapter. Mencius speaks the same order, only harder and finer. With no steady holding, he says, there will be no steady heart.
The chapter comes in three sections.
The first section takes the line apart. For the great majority of people, the steadiness of morals is held up by the steadiness of matter, and at every great famine the holding breaks and the heart caves in almost at once, not because the person’s character went bad in one night but because the board underfoot was pulled away. The direction runs one way only, the holding decides the heart, and get the arrow backward and the ruler goes off to manage hearts, to admonish and to praise the chaste and the filial, and never lays a finger on the board. Then Mencius does a careful thing. He marks an exception, the scholar, who can hold a steady heart with no steady holding, and by marking it he keeps his claim from hardening into the grand and false line that all minds are decided by matter. This is a divided view, fine enough to mark even its own exception.
The second section lifts that exception all the way open, because it is the spot wei most loves to hide in. The scholar looks unbound by matter, and the reading of it is gratifying, a dignity that grew into the word pure and became the brightest garment a man of letters wore. But the scholar does not go without matter, he depends on another kind of matter, a stipend, a clan’s rent, an academy’s keep, a board that goes by the names rank and family learning and cultivation, and once the name changes the board goes invisible. The histories check it. When a dynasty falls the men of letters drift and scatter with it, and the ones who keep their honor are always the few. The danger is that the exception, read crooked, turns the arrow around and makes poor a matter of character rather than position, so that the board pulled out from under a man is never mended, and this move is still run today, the man who cannot repay called undisciplined, the child who tests badly called lazy. And yet honor is real, so the volume steadies the other end. A man who knows another’s board is under him and still holds what he should not drop is the truly rare one. Only put the order right, own the board first, then speak of backbone.
The third section spreads out the prescription, because Mencius is not observing from the side, he is sitting across from a ruler. Provide the people a holding, he says, and he says it down to the count of mu, a homestead of five mu planted with mulberry so the fifty-year-old wears silk, breeding stock not robbed of its season so the seventy-year-old eats meat, a hundred mu of field left unmolested in the busy days so a household does not starve. The tone is low on purpose, not a great pie but old people warm and fed and a household not starving, a line so low that dynasty after dynasty failed to reach it. The four words do not cross the farming season turn the blade toward the ruler himself, who must hold his own hand and not drag the people off to build his walls in the few dozen days the whole year hangs on, which is to say the ruler too must bow before the season, the one who takes the constraint. Only after the holding is settled does teaching come, the schools tended, filial and brotherly duty driven home, matter first and teaching second, and the early Han rested its people and heaped its granaries until the grain rotted, while the regimes that scraped first and demanded loyalty after mostly fell, and fell faster the harder they scraped.
That is the method this chapter hands you. Before you read a person’s heart, go and look at the board under his feet, and before you read a difference in people as a difference of character, ask whether it is only a difference of position. What you carry away is a single hard question to put to any arrangement, the same one Mencius put to the ruler and the same one to put to the man with the thirty year loan whose house is mostly the bank’s and whose wage is drawn off first. This board, the one a person’s whole steadiness stands on, is it laid under his feet, or is it not.
SECTIONS:
SECTION 1. With No Steady Holding There Is No Steady Heart, the Board That Holds Morals Up
SECTION 2. The Scholar, That Exception, Has a Holding Under Him Too
SECTION 3. Provide the People a Holding, Settle Matter First and Then Speak of Teaching
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
SECTION 1. With No Steady Holding There Is No Steady Heart, the Board That Holds Morals Up