VOLUME III, SEMESTER 3, CHAPTER 35
It has lived all along in your days
Start with a pot lid, lifted late at night. The family has eaten and the table is cleared, but under the lid there is still a bowl of rice and a dish, a cover set over the top, and it is still warm. That day you did nothing for the house, you were out about your own business and came home late, and by the six rules of the front half not one reason weighs out for your deserving it. Yet the rice is warm, because it was left not by what you put out but by what you need. Hold that bowl, because the whole chapter grows from it. The last chapter set the ground floor, distribution by need is the fruit and capacity the root, and now the term mirrors the front half, counting the by need out corner by corner as it once counted the by labor, beginning from the nearest place of all.
Section one walks near the bowl of rice and looks under it. It is the purest, nearest sample of distribution by need, happening in thousands of houses every day and never called by the great word. And under it there is not one line of account. The one who left it does not reckon how much she busied for you or when you will pay it back, does not look for a bowl carried back in return, and that is the most root difference from the by labor, which is an account of this much out and that much given, neither owing the other. A house that reckoned every bowl into an account would be a cold inn, and it is exactly the absence of the account that makes it a house and makes it warm, the word the kind from the front half seen most truly here. From this the section sets the watching that governs the whole chapter, that distribution by need lives first not in a great state but in the smallest, nearest, warmest places, growing from the little tenderness between man and man, and that the error of the two pictures was to pull it up by the root from these small warm homes and puff it into a machine over all strangers, where the heart that keeps no account is easily lost, so that the nearer and the more tender the truer and more alive, and the more puffed and abstract and pushed onto strangers the more it must be watched for turning cold and being wormed into. Mencius sets the main line, treat my old as old and reach it to the old of others, and the guide reads its order, the own first and the reaching after, tenderness thickest near and thinning and spreading outward ring by ring, grown out and pushed out and not roofed down from the sky, so that whoever leaps the order to cover all men at one step breaks loose the disorders of the last chapter.
Section two pushes out the house door and counts three things. A street lamp that shines on every man beneath it, the taxpayer and the newcomer with no tax paid and the man cast on the street alike, asking not the standing, a thing anyone can use without keeping another from using, like the roads and the clean air and the shot against plague, distribution by need laid on the ground of a city and walked over daily without a glance up. An emergency room where a man carried in at midnight is saved first because his need at that instant is one breath and the account must wait, set beside the chair factory where four million is divided clean by labor, the two rules living at once in one city and used on one man who earns by labor by day and is saved by need by night. And a public school open to all children that gives the poor bright child of chapter thirty one a desk and a teacher and books by need, which is the very thing that smashes the dark lock of the chance and lets his labor flow again, so that here the by need of the back half and the by labor of the front half take hands. These three go further than the bowl of rice, pushing the by need from blood kin onto strangers, leaning no longer on the love of kin but on the rules of public keeping that all set up together, which reaches thousands unknown to one another but, having left the natural tenderness of kin for cold rules, is the more apt to be wormed into, a trouble held for chapter thirty eight. Laozi sets the height, the sage is ever good at saving men so no man is cast off, the measure of a society being not how high it lifts its strongest but whether it reaches a hand to the weakest and most easily cast off.
Section three changes the eyes and follows a man newly moved to a wholly strange society through his first year, because a newcomer sees clearest, the things natives have looked at till they no longer mark them all fresh and glaring to him. He sees first a great room full of books anyone may enter and read for free, and dares not believe a good thing need not be traded for money, and by such a room read his way to standing in a strange place, stirred by what natives have gone numb to, that so solid a thing as the by need is truly laid for every man including a penniless stranger. He sees second, with his own eyes, a companion taken by sudden sickness saved first with no money or standing asked, and is touched as the native cannot be because to him it is no matter of course but a thing warm to the bone, Laozi’s no man is cast off landed on one concrete stranger. And looking to the end he understands the great thing, that the two glaring pictures he brought in his head are not true, that the society he entered was never the pure money only by labor only kind but has always used both rules, so that he earns by labor by day and could be saved by need by night and owning nothing could still enter the room that costs no money, the whole thesis of the term borne out living on one man from another land. Confucius closes it, within the four seas all are brothers, the root by which the by need reaches the furthest stranger, taking a man at the ends of the earth as one of one’s own.
Here is the method, and here is what you carry out. The method is to count instead of to argue, laying the plain nearest cases side by side until the pattern speaks, and then to borrow a stranger’s eyes to see past the numbness that familiarity breeds, so the ordinary shows itself as extraordinary. What you carry out is two things you can check against your own life. First, a new sight for what was always in front of you, the warm bowl, the lit street, the open bed, the free school, so you stop mistaking these for nothing and see them as distribution by need laid into your days. Second, the shape of how the by need travels, thickest and truest near and among kin where it keeps no account, and further out onto strangers only by public rules that all raise together, growing more precious and more fragile the further it goes from natural tenderness. The chapter has counted the by need by place, from a bowl of rice to a strange land, and the next chapter changes the way of counting, not by place but by relation, from two men to a house to the neighbor to an enterprise, to see how the by need grows up layer by layer in the ties between man and man.
SECTIONS
Section 1, That bowl of rice your mother left for you
Section 2, A street lamp, an emergency room, a public school
Section 3, A man who moves to a strange land, the things he sees in the first year
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.