VOLUME III, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 8, SECTION 1
The Few Characters on the Oracle Bone
The last chapter saw clearly that mankind’s starting point is sharing. This chapter walks into the first building mankind raised after leaving the starting point. The earliest look of that building is cut on bone. In the oracle-bone script of the Shang, a few characters are kept, and taken up one at a time, that position stands bare before you.
First, the character zhong
The oracle-bone character zhong is written as a sun above, and under it three people.
Draw the character once in your mind. Up top a sun, below it three people, bent at the waist. What it draws is a crowd of people laboring under a blazing sun.
Zhong is a great mass of laborers held directly by the house of the Shang king, driven off to open new ground, to raise public works. There is an oracle-bone record where the Shang king orders the zhong to go and till in a certain place, and the scale runs to several thousand at a stroke.
Mark how honest the making of this character is. It argues no reasoning, it only draws what the eye saw. Under the sun, a crowd bent at the waist. The one who made the character took the scene in his hands and cut it straight into the bone.
Next, two characters, chen and qie
Chen, in the oracle-bone script, is the shape of a person with the head bowed low. What it draws is submission, that head hung down.
Qie is a woman with a mark set on her head.
Both these characters, in the Shang, point straight at the slave. The male is called chen, the female is called qie.
Hold this layer in mind. These two characters are still in use today. Chen, later on, became the word a great officer used of himself before his king. Qie, later on, became the word a woman used of herself before her husband. The meaning of the characters walked and changed as it walked, changed to look ever more decent, ever more like a piece of courtesy.
But the root of the characters stays buried in that Shang position. The shape of the person with the bowed head is still there, and not one stroke of it has changed.
Mark this move, for it is the thing this volume keeps its eye on. Wei changes its skin, and never its bone. What it changes is the name.
The third character, the ugliest, qiang
The house of the Shang king warred for long years with the Qiang people to the west. The Qiang taken captive were used in great numbers as slaves, and in great numbers as human offerings.
A human offering is a living person given up at a sacrifice.
The oracle bones carry records of the use of Qiang, and the count spent at a single sacrifice runs from a few to several hundred.
Here stop a moment, and get the words plain. This volume does not swing its brush. But this one stroke has to be written down as it was. Not written clear, and you cannot see how bare that position is. This is the record of history, it is not the book swinging its brush.
The slave of the Shang was not counted a person. They were the property of the Shang king and the nobles, to be driven, to be bought and sold, to be put to death. At a great sacrifice, or a royal funeral, they were used as the goods buried with the dead. At the royal tombs of Yin, near Anyang in Henan, the excavated tomb passages hold a great many bones of the buried-in. Most of them were slaves.
Walk up close to that tomb passage and look
Walk in a little closer, and look into that tomb passage.
What lies there is not a concept. It is a person. He had a name, though no one wrote it down. He ate something that morning, he knew the woman who used to comb his hair, he may have had a child. When he was led to that place, he knew what was going to happen.
This volume speaks of position, it does not speak of feeling. But to walk in close and look, to look down into what is under him, this is the brushwork of the volume. See this one thing clear, and only then do you know where the skin-changed slaves of the ten-odd chapters to come were changed over from.
Set that tomb passage side by side with the room at the opening of this semester. In that room, the master’s life was still held in the cook’s hand, two locks biting each into the other. In this tomb passage, not one lock is left. The person has been turned wholly into a thing.
This is the barest of all the forms of the institution of enslavement. This is that line, it is only right that I take more, come down to the ground for the first time, and the pit it smashed open where it landed.
How this pit was dug, one step at a time
Think back to the second chapter of this semester.
On the grassland, the lion ate one more mouthful, and it said nothing. The thing happened, and being done, it was over.
The person ate one more mouthful, and added a line. It is only right.
That line was spoken, was taken up, and then handed down one generation after another. Handed down to the Shang, it no longer needed arguing. It had grown into a whole set of a thing. These people are Qiang, the Qiang are not us, the Qiang can be used.
See this step clear. From it is only right that I take more, to these people are born to be used, lie who knows how many generations of people. But that line, not one length of it broke.
When the first line was spoken, it was still soft. It was one person beside a heap of meat, finding himself a way of putting it. By the time it grew to the Shang, it was already hard, hard as that piece of oracle bone.
The character, wei’s most fearsome tool
Now the layer that matters most in this section.
Go back to Laozi’s line, let the people go back to knotting cords and using them. Laozi would have people return to the age of keeping records by knotted cord, and use no writing.
Down the ages there have been those who laughed at Laozi, called him benighted, called him an enemy of progress. But set in the position of this chapter, Laozi saw with great exactness.
Ask this. That line it is only right that I take more, how is it to be handed to a son.
Passed mouth to mouth, it warps, it fades. Three generations on, people forget.
But cut into bone, written onto the bamboo strip, it will not fade. It will pass on, character by character, in its very shape. Chen is chen, qie is qie, qiang is qiang. Once the character is cut, that position is fixed, fixed into a thing that looks right by heaven and earth.
Writing is wei. It is that layer made by man. It made the poem, it made the history, it made this book. It also made the three characters chen, qie, qiang, and nailed three positions dead into the bone.
One same hand. One same skill.
What this section set up, and the turn to the next
This section took up four characters.
Zhong, a crowd bent at the waist under the sun. Chen, a head hung low. Qie, a woman with a mark set on her. Qiang, a people taken captive, driven, and given up on the altar.
Out of these four characters, three things stand up.
The first. This is the barest look of that position. The person is turned wholly into a thing, and not one lock is left.
The second. Wei changes its skin, and never its bone. The two characters chen and qie grew ever more decent afterward, and yet the shape of the person with the bowed head has not changed by one stroke. Over the ten-odd chapters to come, this move is to be seen many times.
The third. Writing is wei’s most fearsome tool. It lets that line it is only right go without arguing over again. Once cut, it is handed on.
Then, what comes next. Something crueler. No. The next step walks toward the more refined. This position no longer leans on the will of one king to hold it up. It gets written into law. The law says he is a slave, and he is a slave. The law says he goes to pound the rice, and he goes to pound the rice.
The next section, the Rites of Zhou write it into law.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.