VOLUME III, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 4, SECTION 1
With No Steady Holding There Is No Steady Heart, the Board That Holds Morals Up
The last chapter had Guanzi set down the order of matter and mind. Full granaries and then propriety. This chapter brings Mencius on, and he speaks of the same order, only he speaks it harder, and he speaks it finer. He says, with no steady holding, there will be no steady heart. This section takes that line apart a layer at a time.
Mencius, the passage itself
Mencius, in the piece called Duke Wen of Teng, says this. A man who can keep a steady heart with no steady holding, only the scholar can do that. As for the common people, with no steady holding they will have no steady heart, and once the heart is not steady, there is nothing they will not do, no loosening, no swerving, no excess.
Take it a phrase at a time in plain speech. A steady holding is a settled base, a field, a house, a harvest a person can count on. A steady heart is a settled will, whether he can hold to the rules of being a decent person. Mencius says, to keep a steady heart while having no steady holding, that only the scholar can manage. As for the ordinary people, with no steady holding there is no steady heart, and once the heart comes loose, the loose things, the crooked things, the wasteful things, there is not one of them they will not do.
The passage is short, and it stacks several layers one on top of another. You have to take them apart one at a time to see how heavy it is.
The first layer, what holds morality up is a board of matter
The first thing Mencius says here is that for the great majority of people, the steadiness of morals is held up by the steadiness of matter. With no steady holding, do not look for a steady heart.
A man who cannot even get a meal, who has no next day’s grain to count on, talk to him of propriety and honor and shame, and the talk is wasted. This is not a cold thing to say, it is the plain fact.
Open the histories, and at every great famine, the holding breaks and the heart caves in almost at once. The farmer who kept most to himself and troubled no one turns into a drifter roaming the roads, turns to robbing at the risk of his life. This is not because his character went bad in one night. It is because the board that held his character up was pulled out from under him. A man stands on a board, and while the board is there he stands, and pull the board out and he falls. You cannot blame him for falling. You had better go and look at where the board went.
More than twenty three centuries ago Mencius had already seen through this catch. Set this layer against Guanzi’s line from the last chapter. Full granaries and then propriety. No steady holding and no steady heart. In different pieces, in different centuries, what the ancestors set out, over and over, is the one same order.
The second layer, the direction runs from matter to mind, not the reverse
The second thing is the direction of this dependence.
It is the steady holding that decides the steady heart, not the steady heart that decides the steady holding. Matter first, the will after.
Get this direction backward and the one who governs walks onto a cruel road. He will say, these people have bad characters, and that is why they are poor. So he goes to manage their hearts, to teach them, to admonish them, to set up rules of morals, to hang up plaques praising the chaste and the filial. And that board underfoot, he does not lay one finger on it.
Mencius set the arrow straight. First the holding is gone, and only then the heart. To save the heart, first save the holding.
The third layer, the scholar, the exception Mencius marks with great care
The third thing matters most. Mencius says the scholar is an exception.
The few who have been schooled, who have been through the training of culture, can still, when matter is unsteady, barely hold their will in place. Mark this. Mencius does not say the grand line that everyone’s mind is decided by matter. What he says is this. This thing sits differently on different people. The ordinary person is held fast by matter, the scholar is held a little more loosely.
This is a divided view, not a one-cut-fits-all universal claim. Mencius parts the positions very finely, fine enough to mark out even the exception for you.
Hold on to this, for it is where the ancestors show the most measure. A rule, the more absolutely it is stated, the more forceful it sounds, and the further it stands from a real person. Mencius would rather say it a shade less ringingly and leave the exception standing there.
But the exception has a board under it too
Then why can the scholar have a steady heart with no steady holding.
At first look this seems to hand the scholar a special dignity, as though the scholar were born a grade higher in morals, able not to be tied down by matter. But look from another side. The reason the scholar can hold is exactly that his steady heart was, from the start, fed by another kind of holding.
Not fields. The base of culture, a stipend, the standing to be kept in books and never sent to the ground. Which is to say, the scholar does not truly go without matter. He depends on another kind of matter. Only this kind of matter got wrapped in the two words self-cultivation, and so it looked lofty.
Once that layer is broken open, Mencius’s position that matter comes first stands the steadier for it. Even the scholar, who looks most detached, most above the smoke of the kitchen fires, has a holding laid under him. Cut the stipend, seize the base, and of ten, nine will fail to hold that steady heart all the same. Turn the histories, and when a dynasty comes down, the men of letters drift and scatter with it, selling their brushwork, selling their paintings, lodging under other people’s roofs, and the ones who can grit their teeth and keep their honor are always the few. Most of them, too, must first see to staying alive.
This is not to say the man of letters is any less than others. It is to say that even the man of letters stands on the same ground of matter. No one’s feet hang in the air.
Walk in close and look at the man who robbed for grain
Said this far, take your eyes off the reasoning and look at one man.
A famine year, and a farmer breaks into the next village’s grain store and carries off a sack of rice.
Stand far off and you give him four words. Bad element. Thief. And once given, it is done.
Walk in close, look down into what is under him. He has three children at home, and the youngest has not truly eaten in three days. 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. The board that held him up was pulled out last autumn by a drought.
He robbed. Was this thing wrong. Robbed is robbed, and what has to be dealt with still has to be dealt with, and on that the volume is not vague. But if the one who governs can only stand far off and slap on labels, then he can only ever go and catch thieves one by one. What Mencius asks of him is to move the eye down one inch, and look at the board.
What this section set up, and the turn to the next
This section set up three things.
The first. With no steady holding there is no steady heart. What holds a person’s morals up is a board of matter. Pull the board out and the person falls. This is not that he went bad, it is that the ground went out from under his feet.
The second. The direction cannot be reversed. It is the holding that decides the heart, not the heart that decides the holding. Get the arrow backward and the one who governs goes off to manage hearts and never touches the board.
The third. The exception Mencius left, the scholar, has a holding laid under him too. The position that matter comes first has, in truth, no exception. The scholar does not escape it either. He is only fed in a different way.
Then what is Mencius doing with this passage. He is not standing off to the side making a cold description. He is writing a prescription for a ruler. The moment he finishes this passage, he sets out a whole run of concrete things to be done.
The next section is about the other face of that exception. And the section after, about the prescription he wrote, providing the people a holding.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
SECTION 2. The Scholar, That Exception, Has a Holding Under Him Too