VOLUME III, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 8
Shang, Zhou, Qin, Han, and the Position Stood Up
Start with a single character cut into bone. A sun on top, and under it three people bent at the waist, a crowd laboring in a blazing sun. That character is zhong, and it is where this chapter begins, because the whole of what the chapter has to show is already in it, a scene taken straight from the eye and cut into the bone with no reasoning added. The last chapter saw that mankind’s starting point is sharing. This chapter walks into the first building mankind raised after leaving the starting point, and follows one position through three ages, from the underground of the Shang, into the ritual order of the Zhou, onto the market of the Han.
The chapter comes in three sections.
The first section takes up four oracle-bone characters. Zhong, the crowd bent under the sun, a mass held directly by the Shang king and driven off by the thousand to open ground. Chen, a head hung low, submission itself. Qie, a woman with a mark set on her head. Both chen and qie pointed straight at the slave in the Shang, and both are still spoken today, chen the word a great officer later used of himself before his king, qie the word a woman later used of herself before her husband, the meaning walking and changing until it looked like a piece of courtesy, while the shape of the bowed head never changed by one stroke, which is the volume’s line that wei changes its skin and never its bone. And qiang, the western people taken captive, used as slaves and as human offerings, a few to several hundred spent at a single sacrifice, the buried-in bones at the royal tombs of Yin mostly slaves. Walk up close to that tomb passage and what lies there is not a concept but a person with a name no one wrote down, and set beside the room at the semester’s opening where two locks still bit each into the other, here not one lock is left and the person is turned wholly into a thing, the barest form of enslavement, the line it is only right come down to the ground and the pit it smashed. And the deepest turn, that writing is wei’s most fearsome tool, since a line passed mouth to mouth fades in three generations but a line cut into bone passes on in its very shape, so that once chen and qie and qiang were cut, three positions were nailed dead into the bone, and Laozi wanting the people back at their knotted cords saw this with great exactness.
The second section walks one step down, toward the refined. The Zhou did what the Shang had not, it wrote a register, the five bond-classes ranked by origin, and set an officer, the manager of the condemned, whose article sent the men into the bond of crime and the women to the pounding of grain, calm and orderly and not one character fierce, taking a person’s whole life and filing it into a drawer. This is wei’s first evolution, holding through law where the Shang held through will, so that the line no longer leans on a king’s temper but has become an institution, and an institution does not tire and turns on its own. And the refined is exactly the layer hardest to recognize, the Shang king pointing at the Qiang an ugly scene anyone can read, the manager opening his register a scene that looks like office work and order and civilization, so that wei the more refined is the harder to see, ugly but honest when bare, decent and doing the same one thing when dressed. The volume does not say the Zhou was worse, it was far more civilized and that is progress, only that progress and refinement are often the one thing and that layer is where wei hides. And the other end is held, for wei is double edged, the same hand that wrote the five bond-classes wrote not crossing the farming season, the opened granary in a lean year, the keep of the widowed and orphaned, the whole frame of a civilization the Duke of Zhou shaped and Confucius followed, so the volume curses the Rites of Zhou not at all but sets both faces before the eye at once. And the move is still run today, a handsomely printed contract whose article seventeen says the borrower shall repay before the fifth of each month in the one same tone, the man of the first chapter who signed his thirty year mortgage in high spirits now a borrower because the law says so, three thousand years off and the position not moved one fen.
The third section walks the last step, the Han writing the person into the market. Sima Qian, telling the roads to wealth, writes a thousand fingers of bondservants, counting not the people but the fingers, a hundred people set in the column beside the raising of horses and the tilling of fields, and this is not his cruelty but his method, setting the thing in its plain shape beside the horse so that it strikes a chill, not cursing so that a person cannot but look. The Juyan Han strips carry contracts of sale with price and age and sex and origin entered in the register, a strong young male slave at fifteen to twenty thousand cash, several times an ox, about a house, the three things recorded being the three things recorded for livestock. The frame of the chapter is the three ages in a row, holding directly, holding through law, holding through the market, violence then administration then buying and selling, the two most ordinary words under heaven wrapping the most extraordinary thing until it looks like business and the natural order and an everyday event, which is wei’s most fearsome move, to make a thing feel ordinary so a person stops looking. Property that can be moved along is the fiercest phrase, bought, sold, pledged, handed down, and pledged above all, a person set in another’s hand for a sum while he stands where he stood and belongs now to a debt, the thread that runs to the thirty year mortgage where what is pledged is thirty years of a life. And walk up close to the clerk writing that contract in his neat hand, blowing the ink dry and filing it, hating no one, not a thought in him, the third document of his morning, and the section stands its line up, that position walked to its end needs no bad man, only a crowd of ordinary people each doing his duty.
That is the method this chapter hands you. When a thing that turns a person into property comes dressed as a register or a printed contract or an ordinary sale, do not let the decency of the surface tell you the position underneath has changed. What you carry away is the frame of the three holdings and the one hard line beneath them, that every skin wei changes leaves it one degree less like holding and one degree harder to see, and that at the end of the road there is no villain to point to, only ordinary people each doing his duty, which is why the position has to be read at the level of position and not of the hand that files the page.
SECTIONS:
SECTION 1. The Few Characters on the Oracle Bone
SECTION 2. The Rites of Zhou Write It Into Law
SECTION 3. The Market of the Han, the Person Becomes Property That Can Be Moved Along
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.