VOLUME III, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 17
The Worker Holds a Card
Start on a dais, more than twenty-three hundred years ago, with a ruler who has just been struck dumb. He has soldiers, grain, land, the power of life and death, and he is sitting there in silence watching a servant take apart an ox as though the blood and bone were a dance. For three chapters the book has stood on the account-book side, reckoning the gap and following where it flowed, and the running total has left an impression that the hundred workers in the workshop hold nothing but the cell they are apportioned. This chapter turns the eyes onto those workers and asks whether that is true, whether they really hold no card. Its answer is one word, laid out through three scenes and carried into the present, and the word is scarcity.
The first section is Cook Ding, from the Zhuangzi. The famous line is easy to misread, and the chapter says so plainly: most people read practice makes perfect and stop, and stopping at practiced reads the story shallow. Cook Ding himself drew the line, what I love is the Way, a step beyond craft, and the step is not more drilling but a different seeing. After three years he could no longer see a whole ox, he saw instead the seams born between sinew and bone, and because he goes by the seam and never touches sinew or bone, his knife is nineteen years old and several thousand oxen used and its edge is still like a fresh whetting, while a good cook changes his once a year and an ordinary one once a month. The chapter joins this to Li Bing from the chapter before, who also saw a seam, the river’s own, one taming water and one taking apart an ox setting the same position. Then it turns the eyes to the person it actually means to watch, the ruler, and the scene where standing and position come apart: in standing the ruler is above and the cook a servant below, and in that moment, in that hall, the ruler waits on the servant to begin and stands to say good, and the position has turned over, and the root of the turning is one word, scarce, carried straight from chapter fourteen, the few position that cannot be replaced.
The second section is Zi Qing the carpenter, and it is fiercer, because the ruler is waiting before the work even begins. Zi Qing made a bell-stand so fine that those who saw it were startled as at a ghost or spirit, and the Marquis of Lu summoned him and asked by what art, a ruler asking a carpenter, the position already turned over in the asking. And Zi Qing’s answer is the deep place: he fasts, and the one fasting is himself, not the ruler. Three days to forget prize and rank and stipend, five days to forget whether others call him skilled or clumsy, seven days to forget that he has four limbs and a body, and only then does he enter the mountain, look at the born nature of every tree, and seeing the tree that is already that stand, lay hand, with the Heaven in me I meet the Heaven in it. The chapter sets Cook Ding and Zi Qing side by side, neither coming at the thing head-on, both emptying themselves to let the grain show and then going along it, the same position Li Bing and Yu the Great set in taming water by parting and channeling rather than damming, one position set out three times. And again it turns to the man outside the door: in those seven days the ruler cannot rush him, for rushing scatters the heart, and cannot replace him, for there is only one, so in those seven days the position is in the hand of the carpenter, fasting.
The third section carries it into today and names the ringing name, the hired emperor. The chapter chews the contradiction: hired is the employed position, staff and not boss, no capital in, no debt borne, walks away when the company falls, and emperor is the highest position, and the two should not parse, yet everyone understands the phrase at once, which means a real thing sits beneath it. The real thing is the company that wants a person who can lead a team and make what others cannot, a handful in all the world, and so sets the salary past imagining, cuts him shares, hears his terms first, assembles the team he asks for, drops the direction he refuses, and sits the board through the night when he wants to leave. On the contract he is staff, and in the meeting room, who waits on whom. Cook Ding, Zi Qing, and the hired emperor share not money and not standing but one thing, they cannot find a second, scarce.
Then the chapter does the honest turn it always does, to the back of the card. Scarcity’s back is replaceable, and a position whose work another can pick up in three days speaks light, and this is stated as fact and not as cruelty: whether you hold a card is not read from your kindness or your toil, it reads one thing, how many others are left on the road you walk. And because the volume never coaxes any more than it curses, it points, without unfolding, to where scarcity comes from, three roads in the Zhuangzi. Cook Ding’s, to see the seam and go along the grain, less strain and longer wear. Zi Qing’s, to empty the self of reward and reputation and even the body, so the eyes can see the tree’s born nature. And the road they share, time, three years and nineteen years for one, seven days for the other, not one of the three a shortcut and not one begged from anyone.
What you carry out of this chapter is a correction and a compass. The correction is to scarcity itself, which chapter fourteen warned you not to confuse with high, and which this chapter now shows is also not luck and not a gift but a step walked out by a person, grown rather than begged. The compass is the question to put to your own position, not am I kind, not do I toil, but how many others are left on this road, because that number is the card, and the moment it grows small enough the position turns over, and the ruler waits at the door. The chapter closes by turning the eyes to the capitalist, who has looked firm for three sections with his money and his table-slapping, and points ahead to the next chapter, which opens his holdings to find that the money in his hand is not one thing but three layers, and the upper two live in the hand of the lowest.
SECTIONS
Section 1 The Cook Lord Wenhui Sent For
Section 2 Zi Qing Carves the Stand, and the Marquis of Lu Fasts to Wait for Him
Section 3 The Hired Emperor, Scarce Enough, the Position Turns Over
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.