VOLUME III, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 7, SECTION 3
A Small State With Few People, the Age of the Fullest Virtue, That Shared Memory
The last section had Confucius leave one picture. This section looks at three more, Mencius’s, Laozi’s, Zhuangzi’s. Set the four pictures side by side, and a thing strikes out that shakes a person. This thing, in two thousand years and more, almost no one has looked full in the face.
Mencius’s picture, the well-field
Mencius speaks of the well-field, and speaks it very concretely. A square li of ground marked into a well shape, nine hundred mu, the middle block the public field. Eight households each hold a hundred mu of private field, and together they tend the public field. The public work done, and only then do they dare see to the private work.
There have always been those who read this passage as a piece of institutional design, and argue whether the well-field ever truly existed. But Mencius’s purpose in writing it is plain enough. Look at the shape of that well character. The private fields ring the public field, the public field holds up the private fields. Public and private are not set against each other, they are fitted into each other.
This is the memory of an in-between form, of the crossing from sharing toward private holding. A thoroughgoing all-under-heaven-in-common could no longer be had, but there could still be kept that one middle block of public field, as a remainder. Mencius himself knew well that this remainder, in his own age too, could no longer be held. He writes the well-field not to tell people this is a fine institution, but to tell people, there once was such a state of things.
Laozi’s picture, a small state with few people
Laozi says, a small state with few people. Let there be tools of ten times and a hundred times the labor, and no use made of them. Let the food taste sweet, the clothes look fine, the dwelling be at peace, the ways be a joy. Neighboring states in sight of one another, the sound of their cocks and dogs heard across, and the people to old age and death not coming and going between them.
In plain speech. The state small, the people few. Though there be machines that save ten times, a hundred times, the labor, no need to use them. Eat one’s own food and find it sweet, wear one’s own clothes and find them fine, live at peace, pass the days with joy. The neighbor state right before the eyes, its cocks and dogs within hearing, and yet the people to old age and death need not go and deal across.
This passage is often read as conservative, as a longing for the old, as turning the clock back. Set back in the thread of this volume, its sense comes clear. Laozi is not against technology. Laozi is pointing at one thing. The growing of technology and the growing of wei run in step. Writing, cart and boat, weapons, every one of them lets the strong more easily argue his own it is only right in taking more, and more easily fix the fact of taking more in place. With writing, that line it is only right can be written down, and written down it can be handed to a son. With cart and boat, the hand that takes more can reach to a further place.
A small state with few people is Laozi’s imagining, or say his memory, of the state before wei was made whole into institutions.
Zhuangzi’s picture, the age of the fullest virtue
Zhuangzi’s picture is nearly the same painting as Laozi’s. But Zhuangzi adds one thing, a list of names. Rongcheng, Dating, Bohuang, a long string of clan names. And then he says, the people knotted cords and used them, found their food sweet, their clothes fine, their ways a joy, their dwellings at peace, neighboring states in sight, the sound of cocks and dogs heard across, and the people to old age and death not coming and going between them.
That list matters. It shows that in Zhuangzi’s Warring States there still ran a great store of memory about the far-off clans. The names of these clans, today, mostly cannot be traced out. But that they existed at all says one thing. In the tradition of Chinese thought, the state before wei was made whole into institutions is not an abstract concept. It is a concrete far-off scene, with names and surnames, made up of many clans. Zhuangzi in the piece called Horses’ Hooves says it plainer still, and the second chapter of this semester already drew on it. In the age of the fullest virtue, people dwelt together with the birds and beasts, and ranked alongside all things.
Four pictures side by side, three things come clear
Now hang the four pictures side by side, Confucius, Mencius, Laozi, Zhuangzi.
The first. They all take that state as a fact, not as an ideal. Confucius says the great Way in its walking, in the past voice. Mencius speaks the well-field in the voice of recollection. Laozi and Zhuangzi both say plainly that the small state and the age of the fullest virtue were states that once existed.
The second. They all take the loss of that state as a thing to grieve. Not to say we have advanced, but to say we have lost something. Mark this, for it runs exactly against the onward-and-upward progress story of today.
The third. They all point the cause of the loss at one same thing, the rise of wei. Confucius says, now the great Way is hidden, all under heaven is made a household, each treats his own kin as kin, each his own child as child, goods and strength spent for oneself. Laozi says, when the great Way falls away, there is benevolence and righteousness. Zhuangzi says, while the sages do not die, the great robbers do not stop. Three lines, said three different ways, one meaning. It was some humanly-made, unnatural thing that dragged the human out of that state of distribution by need.
How much this shakes
Now the layer that matters most in this section. Listen slowly.
More than two thousand years before the Western scholars, the thinkers of China had already set down, in a systematic way, mankind’s memory of that state.
Four texts, four men, out of four different schools. The Confucians Confucius and Mencius, the Daoists Laozi and Zhuangzi. These four quarreled fiercely in their lives, on almost everything else they stood against one another.
And on this one thing, they say the same line. Think this through. Four men who would not yield to one another, from four directions, felt out the one same memory. In the history of human thought this is an exceedingly rare scene.
But this scene got its name changed
This insight is not a discovery of the nineteenth century.
Later scholars used the term primitive communism to name this state. This is the common usage of international anthropology, and this volume keeps to it, so as to speak with the research abroad. But change the term, and the thing takes on a different look. It comes to seem a new concept sprung up only in the nineteenth century, a discovery of Europeans. In truth its root runs very old. In China before the common era it had already been written down, once each, by men of four different schools. Hold this layer, for what this volume does from end to end is exactly this. Not to fight over who came first, but to set the moved position back in place. A dislocation is not a matter of higher and lower, but a dislocation ought to be set right.
And a word on measure. The name primitive communism is itself worth another look. The second chapter of this semester said it already, that distribution by need in the animal world is a fact, not a moral utopia. Mankind’s primitive state carried on from the animal state, it was not some lost golden age. To call it communism is to lay a later political concept over it. Once the name is laid on, that stretch of real past is painted a color.
What this chapter set up, and the turn to the next chapter
This chapter is walked through, and the seventh meaning stands steady.
The first section, the pride, the pack, the vampire bat. Dividing is done by need, not by merit, and sharing is older than the human. The second section, the great Way in its walking, all under heaven held in common. The law that what is not earned by labor belongs to the public has its source here, and the merit no one can carry the ancestors gave to heaven. The third section, four pictures. Confucius, Mencius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, four men who quarreled their whole lives, from four directions felt out the one same memory.
The line this layer sets up is this. Mankind’s starting point is not selfishness, it is sharing. The institution of enslavement is not mankind’s starting point, it is what mankind made after leaving the starting point.
Then, once the human left the starting point, what did the first building he raised look like. From the next chapter, walk into that building. Into the underground of the Shang, to see the few characters cut on the oracle bone. Into the ritual order of the Zhou, to see that position written into law. Into the market of the Han, to see how a person became a property that could be traded.
The next chapter, Shang, Zhou, Qin, Han, and the position stood up.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.