VOLUME III, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 19, SECTION 3
Gold and Jade Filling the Hall, No One Can Keep It, the Move of the Lord of Tao
At the end of the last section half a line was left. Laozi said gold and jade filling the hall, no one is able to keep it, and this is only the first half, and the second half is the one that gives a way out. And twenty-five hundred years ago there truly was a person who lived this half line into a whole life: he first helped one ruler destroy another state, and on the very day the work was done, he turned and left, and after he left he did business three times, made a great fortune three times, and scattered it three times. This section asks him out.
One. The second half of Laozi’s line
Set Laozi’s whole line up here first.
Gold and jade filling the hall, no one is able to keep it. Rich and honored and grown proud, one hands oneself the blame. The work done, the person withdraws, this is the way of Heaven, runs the line in Laozi, the ninth chapter of the Daodejing. The first half the last section spoke: gold and jade heaped through the house, and not one person can keep it. The middle line: grown rich and honored and then proud is to hand oneself one’s own disaster. And the most crucial is the last six characters: the work done, the person withdraws, this is the way of Heaven. The thing accomplished, the person then draws back, and this is the way Heaven walks.
Notice, Laozi does not say do no work, nor say do not be rich, he says: once it is done, draw back. Those five chains of the last sections, what locked that person was never that he did work, it was that he could not stop. The way out Laozi gives rests on that one character, withdraw.
Two. That person is named Fan Li
Ask a person out, he is named Fan Li. In that time the state of Yue had been beaten by the state of Wu, and King Goujian of Yue had lost almost everything, and Fan Li stayed with him and endured more than twenty years, and at the last Yue turned and destroyed Wu. On the day Wu was destroyed, Fan Li stood at the highest place of his life: the merit greatest, the position highest, the ruler trusting him most.
Think a moment: another person, at this point, what would he do? He would want the fief, want the rank, want to seat this wealth and honor firm, seat it a whole life, and pass it to sons and grandsons. What Fan Li did was to gather his things and leave. He left his colleague a line, its sense being: this ruler, you may share hardship with him, you may not share ease with him. See it clear: he was not unable to win, nor beaten and fleeing, he walked away at the highest place, of his own will. The work done, the person withdraws, those six characters of Laozi, he walked through by himself.
Three. What he did after he left
The story to here is still only half. What truly matters is what he did after leaving. He changed his name, went elsewhere, and took up doing business. Sima Qian, in the Records of the Grand Historian, gave him a line of great weight.
In nineteen years he three times reached a thousand in gold, and twice scattered it among his poor friends and his distant kin, runs the line in the Records of the Grand Historian, in the Account of the Money-Makers. In nineteen years, three times he earned up a fortune as great as a thousand in gold. Notice the character three. Three times, which is to say he scattered it twice: earned it, gave it out to those poor friends, gave it to those distant brothers, and scattered clean, began again from the start, earned it again, scattered it again. Later people gave him a name, the Lord of Tao, and the ones who do business have kept him in honor for more than two thousand years. Those five chains of the last section, one by one, he untied.
Four. Which chains he untied
Look at them one against one. The first, the market chain, the money cannot stop, and stopped it rots, yet once he scattered, whether that sum rotted or not had nothing more to do with him, he began from the start with empty hands, and the empty-handed have nothing that can rot. The second and the third, technology and team: what he did was farming and sericulture, was the carrying of trade, was the raising of stock, one thing finished and he changed to another, and he never welded himself onto a single thing. The fourth, debt: beginning from the start, what he did was small trade, leaning on no borrowing, and so owing none, and those two characters on time could not knock at his door. The fifth, the family: he left sons and grandsons not that houseful of gold and jade, and what did he leave? He left that way of walking, of starting three times from empty hands. See it clear: it is not that he did no work, he worked nineteen years and did it three rounds, and what he untied was not the doing, it was the keeping.
Five. Yet this is not a shape all should study
Speaking to here, the words must be set clear, and set very slow. This section is not out to study Fan Li and scatter one’s holdings away. This volume from beginning to end does one thing only: it sets out positions. Fan Li’s road is his position, he held one thing heavier than gold and jade: it was his life, his ease of self, he knew where sitting on further would seat him, and so he rose.
And that person of sixty still chasing customers, he too has his position: behind him are the rice bowls of several hundred people, a factory he built up from two machines, a child who has not yet grown that frame of sinew and bone. Walk close and look down into what is under him, and what is seen? A person welded onto that chair, because the moment he rises, the month’s end of those several hundred hangs in the air. Here Fan Li is not praised, and that person is not laughed at, only the two positions are set side by side, for a person to look at for himself.
Six. The meaning this chapter sets
This chapter is walked through, so set the meaning down. That freest person, walked close and looked at, has five chains locked on him: the market, he cannot stop, technology, he cannot block, the team, he cannot do without, and it is his own raising, debt, those two characters on time will not shift by a day, the family, the thing he gathered cannot be kept, cannot be handed out, and so he cannot draw back. On the five chains, not one bad person.
The last layer of meaning nailed down last semester is today, in this chapter, made good: the one who takes the constraint is the slave, the one who lays the constraint is the master, the slaveholder is a slave too, the higher the position, the more the constraints, and the way out is not in the rising, it is in the clear seeing. Read those last characters once more: the way out is not in the rising, it is in the clear seeing. Fan Li is that clear-seeing person, he did not walk to a higher place, he walked away.
Seven. What this section set, crossing to the next chapter
This chapter looked at the five chains under the capitalist position. But has one thing been noticed: among these five chains, there is one that has not truly been seen clear yet, the first, the market. Only it was said he cannot stop, only it was said stopped it rots, but it has never been asked, this thing the market, what in the end is it? By what does it lock that person? By what can it, in a single night, carry a whole trade away?
This semester spoke of it once: it is one procedure in this institution, the last one. The next chapter takes this procedure and lifts it out on its own, to look at it well. It goes back to 1975, back to a city in America called Rochester. That year, in the company that had ruled the world’s light-sensitive industry for a hundred years, a young engineer made a thing, carried it up for those above to see, and those above, having looked, pressed it down.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.