VOLUME III, SEMESTER 4, AFTERWORD
Afterword: From a Breakfast to a Boundary
This volume started from a breakfast made by no single person. In Chapter 1, Section 1 of the first semester, a master opened his eyes, and breakfast was already prepared and laid on the table—he had never cooked a meal in his entire life. Whereas that person cooking for him held his three meals, his stomach, and his life—a pinch of something sprinkled into that pot, and he would be done for. That section did not speak of sympathy; it spoke of positions: two directions of restraint pulling in opposite ways, biting into each other.
Walking through four semesters, fifty-two chapters, and one hundred and fifty-six sections, this volume closes upon another scene: four items are each arranged in position, boundaries are drawn clearly line by line, yet in the end one final question remains that no one can answer—by whose pen is that boundary actually drawn?
From a breakfast made by no single person to a boundary where no one can answer who draws it. This is the journey walked across the four semesters of this volume.
1. This Journey Is Different from the First Three Journeys
What the first three semesters did was the exact same task, called deconstructing/separating (分). The first semester deconstructed servitude and restored it to a position: servant/slave and master are positions, not identities. The second semester deconstructed that mirror that had shone for over a hundred years and restored capital to a position: it is dead momentum, and what moves it is human beings. The third semester set up two scales one by one—one measuring contribution, and one measuring need.
What this semester did was another task, called combining/integrating (合). Four components were spread upon the table, with the grain of each component clearly seen, yet what they look like when combined together was not discussed in the first three semesters. Combining is harder than deconstructing. Deconstructing only requires seeing through a single item itself; once seen through, it counts. Combining requires seeing clearly what lies between them: who relies on whom to live, who pulls whom, who crosses whose boundary, and who pushes against whom to prevent growing too tall. Moreover, combining is most prone to two types of bias: one is mixing all four items into a single pot, taking a little of this and a little of that to formulate a recipe that looks stable yet actually accomplishes nothing; the other is casually arranging a ranking when gathering the diagram, placing one's preferred item at the very top.
What this semester guarded against from beginning to end were precisely these two things. The former is called diluting/compromising, and the latter is called ranking. Guarding against these two is the only way this diagram can be drawn successfully.
2. What This Semester Truly Wants to Leave Behind Is Not Conclusions
Having finished thirteen chapters, if one asks what this semester leaves behind for the reader, the answer is not thirteen conclusions. Conclusions become outdated. How thick that slot should be today, which few items should be written on that list not distributed according to contribution, and how long a term should be given to that wall—all of these must be recalculated year by year; handling today's affairs according to numbers from five years ago mostly leads to errors, and leads to errors while speaking with righteous justification.
What it truly wants to leave behind are a few methods of questioning that can be carried along, ready to be brought out and used when encountering any matter. The first question: Which matter is this? Is it a matter of measuring contribution, measuring need, measuring risk, or a matter of that wall? The second question: Which scale should be used to measure this matter? Once categorized, the scale follows naturally. The third question: Is this hand reaching over right now that specific scale? If not, it is crossing boundaries; and why that hand reaches across boundaries is mostly because its primary position was left empty. The fourth question: Does this item have an owner or no owner? That with an owner belongs to the owner, not a penny more allowed; that without an owner belongs to the public, not a penny allowed to be privately assigned. The fifth question: Are those three paths still open? Can people still speak out, can people still produce something else, and can people still choose not to buy?
Asking through these five questions places the position of a matter right in front of oneself; once the position is placed, where to exert effort is mostly seen as well. Readers need not remember every chapter of this semester; remembering these five questions is enough; when encountering affairs, bring them out and ask them once, and the rest will return on their own.
3. Three Things This Semester Did Not Do
What this semester did not do must also be stated clearly, because not doing them is itself the propriety of this volume. The first thing: It did not judge superior vs. inferior. The four scales have no ranking. It is not allowed to quietly promote distribution according to need to the highest, final, and best position, nor is it allowed to call capital a necessary evil or call servitude an inherent badness. Four scales, four positions, each measuring its own matter, and each guarding its own boundary. When gathering the diagram, it is easiest to casually arrange a ranking, which is why this rule was still guarded right up to the final chapter.
The second thing: It did not issue judgments. Across hundreds of thousands of words in four semesters, discussing servitude did not scold the master, discussing capital did not scold the boss, and discussing that wall did not point fingers at anyone's nose. Whenever discussing an item, lay out positions first, allowing the reader to see for themselves. This is not fear of speaking out; it is that this set of books holds one firm belief: issuing judgments saves people the effort of looking close, yet what is saved is precisely the most crucial part. Once a person receives a ready-made conclusion, he no longer walks up close to look.
The third thing: It did not depict the future. What this semester discussed from beginning to end was what has already happened and what is currently happening: the morning of a factory building, a person's single day and entire life, that clash two thousand one hundred years ago, that boulder holding up for over a hundred years and that machine that saw through it, and that company that manufactured film for a century. Where these four items will go in the future and whether they will one day grow into another form do not belong to the position of this volume. This diagram is a diagram of today; it guarantees nothing about tomorrow, nor does it draw blueprints for tomorrow. It does only one thing: letting the person reading it see clearly where he stands today, what he steps on beneath his feet, and what he still holds in hand.
4. A Word of Advice: This Is a Pot of Soup Still on the Fire
When inviting that passage by Yanzi in Chapter 51, a person was intentionally left by the side of the pot. He watched the fire, tasted the flavor, adding a little when bland, and diluting a little when heavy. This person was not optional: once he walked away, the fire grew too large, the water dried up, and that pot of soup quickly went bad.
The diagram drawn in this semester is the exact same way. Boundaries must be modified year by year, that slot must be contended for year by year, walls will grow back anew year by year, and the person filling walls today may also become the new builder of walls next year. This is not a flaw of this diagram; this is how it lives; a diagram that requires no further tuning is not a good diagram—it is a dead diagram.
Therefore, this semester dares not promise a single word of peace and stability. All it can give is allowing people to see clearly what flavor is in the pot at this moment, which flavor is heavy, and which flavor is light. As for whether to add or dilute, how much to add, and when to add, that is the business of the person standing by the side of the pot himself, which cannot be written into a book.
There is also one more line to leave here: what should truly be worried about has never been fierce arguments, but suddenly no longer arguing. Four scales each holding one end are originally supposed to make sound; having an argument matters little; if one day there is suddenly no sound at all, it is mostly not because all live in harmony, but because one end let go, or someone's mouth was held down.
5. The Two Ends Handed Over in This Volume
When this volume on economics reaches its end, both ends are handed over. Downward, it is handed over to that soil of culture. When digging to the deepest point in the third semester, it was stated that the foundation for executing distribution according to need is not mechanism, but virtue—and virtue belongs to culture; digging down from the end of how the four items combine in this semester reaches the exact same piece of soil. Culture is the root, economics is the foundation, and politics and law are the superstructure; how that soil grows, how it is nurtured, and how it shapes people generation by generation belong not to the position of this volume, but form the topic of Volume II, Cultural Systems.
Upward, it is handed over to that word Feng (封 / Conferment and Enclosure). The four items are arranged in position, and boundaries are drawn clearly, yet by whose pen that boundary is drawn, on what grounds he sits there, how to modify it if drawn wrong, whether it will grow after being drawn into a wall that no one is allowed to cross, and how to guarantee that what was conferred upon a single individual will eventually be returned to the public—these five questions cannot be answered by a single sentence from the position of economics, because all three matters it governs are calculated, not judged. Chapter 49 established that statement by Confucius: when not in that position, do not plan its governance; when a volume of book reaches the end of its own position, it should honestly hand over.
Therefore, this volume hands over these five questions in their original form to Volume IV, Political Systems, and also hands over matters after writing that boundary into black and white text to Volume V, Legal Systems. What is handed over is the portion of making final decisions, not the portion of caring. A person who has walked through these four semesters holds scales in hand when reading those two volumes in the future: he knows that the boundary should be drawn upon matters rather than upon individuals, knows that the person drawing the boundary should not go down onto the field, knows that there are two types of walls, and knows to whom that slot of unowned yield originally belonged.
6. A Closing Sentence
Across the four semesters of this volume, Guanzi, Sima Qian, Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi, Laozi, and Yanzi have been invited, the I Ching (Book of Changes), Book of Rites, and Doctrine of the Mean have been invited, and several Western gentlemen have also been invited. Whenever something was stated correctly, it was gathered sentence by sentence; whenever gathered, its origin was pointed out.
This is not polite modesty. Whenever there is a statement in this book that stands firm, it was mostly not thought out here; it was already spoken long ago by the ancestors, and here it was merely learned. Whereas if there are places here that are stated incorrectly, biasedly, or too absolute, that is not the ancestors' business—it is the business of the person picking up the conversation himself, unable to be pushed off in the slightest.
A breakfast made by no single person, a boundary where no one can answer who draws it. Having completed four semesters, this volume is put away here, handed upward to Volume IV.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.