VOLUME III, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 4, SECTION 3
Provide the People a Holding, Settle Matter First and Then Speak of Teaching
In the last two sections Mencius set down the order of holding and heart, and turned the scholar’s exception upside down. But Mencius is not speaking this long passage from off to the side, as a cold description. He is sitting across from a ruler, writing him a prescription. This section spreads that prescription out.
Where the prescription is written
Mencius finishes saying no steady holding and no steady heart, and then he turns his body and speaks to the ruler. He does not stop at the observing. He swings the talk over and brings it down onto the concrete things to be done. How to divide the fields among the people, how to set a tax that does not scrape the ground bare, so that a household can plant a few mu, keep a family of old and young, afford the weddings and the funerals.
This passage has a name, providing the people a holding. To provide is to set it up for them. The holding is that settled base. The ruler’s first piece of work is to set up the people’s base for them.
Set this order against Guanzi’s line from the last chapter. First make the people rich, and rich they are easy to govern. Here in Mencius it is the same position, only he has pushed it from a line of observing into a run of things a government ought to go and do.
What is written on the prescription
Mencius says it very concretely, concrete down to the count of mu. A homestead of five mu, he says, plant it around with mulberry, raise the silkworms, weave the silk, and then the fifty-year-olds in the house have silk to wear.
He carries on down. Chickens, pigs, dogs, the breeding stock, do not miss their season for littering, and the seventy-year-olds have meat to eat. A field of a hundred mu, do not drag the people off to labor service in the busy season, and a household of several will not go hungry.
Mark the tone of this prescription. Mencius does not say let the people grow rich. He does not say let the people live a fine life. What he says is, the fifty-year-old has silk to wear, the seventy-year-old has meat to eat, the household does not go hungry.
This is the ancestors’ measure. He does not paint you a great pie. He only says, let the old be warm, let the old have meat, let a household not starve. This is a very low line. And it is exactly this very low line that, across twenty three centuries, dynasty after dynasty failed to reach.
Do not miss the season, the four words that show the most skill
One line comes back again and again in this prescription. Do not cross the farming season. Do not rob the people of the busy days of the year.
Think a moment about what a ruler most loves to do. Build palaces, raise walls, wage war. Every one of these takes people. Where do the people come from. Dragged off the ground.
In a year, the whole of it hangs on a few dozen days, the days of sowing, the days of reaping. Pull the people off in those few dozen days and the whole year’s harvest is gone. The palace goes up and the field goes to weeds.
So this move of Mencius’s, plain as it looks, turns the blade toward the ruler himself. Would you have the people hold a steady holding, then you must first hold your own hand, and not move them in those few dozen days.
This is the position this volume speaks of. The ruler, before the people, is in the master’s position. But to sit steady, he has to take a constraint. And what is that constraint. It is the farming season. It is the turning of the year, it is heaven, it is the rule that in those few dozen days he may not move a person. The one who takes the constraint is the slave. Before the farming season, the ruler too must bow his head. He does not bow, and the harvest bows instead. And once the harvest bows, his own seat cannot be kept.
And only then does teaching come
The holding settled, only then does Mencius speak of the next step. Tend the teaching of the schools with care, he says, and drive home in them the sense of filial and brotherly duty.
The schools, the places of learning. To tend with care is to run them in earnest. Set the schools up in earnest, and the sense of honoring parents and elder brothers, tell it to them over and over.
Mark where this line sits. It sits behind the homestead of five mu, the field of a hundred mu. Mencius is not against teaching. Mencius weighs teaching very heavily. He only sets it in second place.
Settle matter first, then speak of teaching. This order runs from Guanzi’s enrich them and then teach them, to Confucius saying enrich them, teach them, down to Mencius here, one line handed on unbroken, and in two thousand years and more it did not change.
A child with an empty belly, talk filial duty to him in the schoolroom, and all he hears is the growl of his own stomach. This is not that he will not learn, it is that he cannot take it in. To have him take it in, first let him eat his fill. This line, the ones who run education today had better hear as well.
This prescription has been checked by history many times over
This is no empty reasoning. Across twenty three centuries, the dynasties that took this line in bought themselves a stretch of peace with it.
Those first several decades of the early Han, resting the people and letting them recover, light corvee and light taxes, no churning the people up, and after several decades the grain in the stores was heaped until it rotted and the cords stringing the coins rotted through. That grew of itself, after the holding was settled.
And running it the other way. To first scrape the people’s holding clean and then turn around and demand their loyalty and their filial devotion, most such regimes did not hold for long. The harder the scraping, the faster the fall.
So this order of holding and heart is not only a piece of reasoning. It is a rule checked over and over by two thousand years of dynasties rising and falling.
Turn the prescription into today’s shape
Then what is providing the people a holding, brought down to today.
Not dividing fields. Most people today do not work the ground. But that board is still there, only in a changed shape. A wage that can keep a family, a place a person can afford to live in, a cover so one grave illness does not drag the whole household down, a school a child can afford to attend.
Go back to the man with the thirty year loan. Does he have a holding. There is a house under his name, and on paper he is an owner. But the greater part of that house is still in the bank’s hand, and a large piece of his wage for the next thirty years is drawn off, on its own, first. The room left in his hand is very thin.
By Mencius’s reading, is this a steady holding. The steady in steady holding means settled, means to be counted on. A holding he can keep only by not daring to fall ill for thirty years, not daring to quit for a single day, where is the settled in that.
What Mencius asked the ruler to do back then was to lay that board under the people’s feet. What has to be asked today is the same one line. This board, is it laid, or is it not.
What this chapter set up, and the turn to the next chapter
This chapter is walked through, and the fourth meaning stands steady.
The first section, with no steady holding there is no steady heart. What holds morals up is a board of matter. The second section, the scholar, that exception, has a holding under him too. The position that matter comes first has no exception, and to read a difference of position as a difference of character is wei’s most used move. The third section, providing the people a holding. Mencius does not stop at the observing, he pushes the talk up to the ruler, settle matter first and then speak of teaching, and this order the rise and fall of two thousand years checked over and over.
Guanzi and Mencius together set the one same line under this volume. Settle people first, and the rest can be spoken of after.
Then, once a person is settled, where does he go. Why does a person want to earn a little more, why does he want to climb, why does he run for the market before the sky is light. There is an ancestor who looked this thing through with a pair of very cold eyes. He does not curse people as greedy. He only says, this is human temperament, no one need learn it, everyone wants it.
The next chapter, let Sima Qian take the stage.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.