VOLUME III, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 7
The Age That Had No Reason Yet
Start at the edge of the grassland again, with a cub that did nothing. A pride brings down a buffalo, and the cub, which slept in the grass nest through the whole hunt and could not chase its own shadow, eats along with the rest, and no lion blocks it to ask what it did today. That cub is where this chapter begins, because the whole of what the chapter has to show is buried in that one mouthful given without an account. The first six chapters set the ancestors’ root steady. From here the volume turns and walks back, to the age before that line, it is only right, had ever been spoken, to see how people divided their things when there was no reason yet.
The chapter comes in three sections.
The first section watches the animals divide, and says up front that it is not claiming the animal is better than the human, only looking clearly at the way of dividing. The pride feeds the cub, the wolf heaves its meal up for the cubs and for the packmates who stayed home, the vampire bat feeds blood back to a starving one it shares no kinship with, and the ground of it all is need, not merit, which is distribution by need, older than the human and thought up by no one. Yet the same bat also keeps accounts, giving back first to the one who once helped it, which is the rough beginning of distribution by labor, so that on one bat by need and by labor turn at once, the four institutions in play before ever a human appeared. None of it rests on institution or morals or a line of reasoning, it turns of itself, because in a harsh nature sharing pays better than swallowing alone. Laozi said this into the way of heaven, which takes down from what has too much and fills up what has too little, and added that the way of man runs the reverse, taking from the too little to serve the too much, so that mankind’s starting point is not a selfish wilderness but a floor of sharing.
The second section reads Confucius’s hundred-odd characters on the great Way in its walking, spoken in the past voice, a memory and not a pie. All under heaven held in common means the things of the world belong to no one person and no one family, and that common is the public, every particular living person, not the office and not the state, which is the source of this volume’s law that what is not earned by labor belongs to the public. The old with their ending, the young with their growing, the widowed and orphaned and crippled and sick all with their keep, a list of people who cannot work and get no share by labor and yet must all have their place, is distribution by need written down two thousand five hundred years ago. And the deepest turn, that Yu the Great’s notion to lead the water and Li Bing’s notion to set the fish-mouth at exactly that spot cannot be explained even by the men themselves, so the person fits it a source, heaven, a dream, a river chart, which is itself wei, but a clean wei that owns a merit no one can carry and no one deserves to swallow alone. Dujiangyan watered the Chengdu plain for two thousand three hundred years and Li Bing’s heirs collect no rent on it, because what is not earned by labor belongs to the public, which is what the foot of every page of this book is doing, giving out the share whose source cannot be told and owning the share a person did.
The third section hangs three more pictures beside Confucius’s, Mencius’s well-field where private rings public and public holds up private, a memory of the crossing from sharing toward holding, Laozi’s small state with few people who need not use the labor-saving machines because the growth of technology and the growth of wei run in step, and Zhuangzi’s age of the fullest virtue with its long list of far-off clan names. Set the four side by side and three things come clear, that all four take that state as fact and not ideal, that all four grieve its loss rather than celebrate progress, and that all four point the cause of the loss at the rise of wei. The shaking thing is that four men of two warring schools, who stood against one another on almost everything, felt out from four directions the one same memory. Later scholars named this primitive communism, which the volume keeps for speaking with research abroad while marking that the name makes an old Chinese insight look like a nineteenth-century European discovery, and while noting that the name lays a later political concept over a real past that carried on from the animal state and was no lost golden age.
That is the method this chapter hands you. When someone tells you man is a selfish beast civilized into sharing, set it back on the grassland and watch it fail, because sharing is older than the human and the selfishness was the thing added later. What you carry away is the volume’s turned-over starting point, that mankind set out from a floor of sharing and that enslavement is not the start but what was made after the start, and the law that what no one hand earned and no one hand can carry belongs, not to a private person, but to all under heaven.
SECTIONS:
SECTION 1. The Pride, the Pack, the Vampire Bat, They Divide Without Reasoning
SECTION 2. The Great Way in Its Walking, All Under Heaven Held in Common
SECTION 3. A Small State With Few People, the Age of the Fullest Virtue, That Shared Memory
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
SECTION 1. The Pride, the Pack, the Vampire Bat, They Divide Without Reasoning