VOLUME III, SEMESTER 4, CHAPTER 43
Coexistence: All Things Grow Together and Do Not Harm One Another
Four death-warrants, in black and white, with heat enough. Slavery sentenced by law, no country owning it on paper. Capital cursed a hundred years, a new book every decade saying this time it will not pull through. Labor called cold, a machine that reckons numbers. Need laughed at as a keeper of idlers. That is where this chapter starts. The first three chapters told what each of the four does on its own. From here the lens turns to what stands between them, and the first tie is the plainest and hardest: two thousand years gone, why has not one come up short, why has none swallowed another, why can none have the say alone? This chapter answers in three sections, and at the last takes apart the layer of the word coexistence most easily heard crooked.
The first section lays out the four verdicts and finds not one of the four has walked. The reason is one: each faces a real matter. That thought of saving effort is in the human heart, so that wall is always something someone will raise. Risk must always be carried, and pulling out the name does not pull out the matter, only moves it from one man’s ledger to a government office, a sheet of plan, the risk not shrunk a cent. Do nothing and there is nothing is what people are, and Sima Qian wrote long ago that to grow rich is in a person’s nature, wanted by all without being taught. And a life’s two ends plus the gaps, near half the days, cannot lean on one’s own strength. It borrows the Doctrine of the Mean for the chapter’s whole root: all things grow together and do not harm one another, the ways run side by side and do not run against one another.
The second section answers the second question: since all four stay, can one be let to have the say? First it divides keeping the house from standing alone: keeping the house is this stretch is mine; standing alone is all stretches are mine, and keeping the house has a bound while standing alone has none. Then it looks at four ways of standing alone and four ways of falling. Force standing alone, the hands move and the heart is gone, and at the last a heap no one will have. Capital standing alone, every matter asked only is it worth it, and the first to drop are that half not worth it, the very parents and children of the one reckoning. Labor standing alone, the man who can work no longer becomes one eating idle bread. Need standing alone, the first year all say good and the third year the pot is empty. The four ways of falling share one place: none is cut short by a rival; each is pushed back by the matter it cannot measure and yet would measure by force.
The third section takes apart the layer most easily heard crooked: since all four are wanted and none can stand alone, is it not best to take a middle value? No. Splitting the difference is everywhere: the wage sheet not pulled open for fear of hurting the peace, the floor holding only half for fear men lean on it, the return given a grudging little, so all four are there and all four only half, and the willing and the needing are chilled at once. Its root is taking four matters for four points on one line. But a hungry belly wants rice and a hurt foot wants binding, and you cannot split the difference into half a bowl and half a foot. Growing together is each growing whole, the pine a pine and the bamboo a bamboo, roots crossed apart below. It borrows Yanzi’s broth—water and fire and salt and plum all to the full and only then a broth; take water to blend water and who will drink it?—and Confucius: the gentleman harmonizes and does not merely agree.
Here is the method, and here is what you carry out. The method is the one this book keeps: set the position, pass no judgment, and do not curse down what cannot be pulled out, but adjust the few places that truly should be adjusted. What you carry out is the skeleton of coexistence: not one thrown out because the four matters are all real, not one standing alone because past the bound the matter pushes back, and the four each whole because a middle value is four matters none done. Coexistence is not standing side by side without a fight; it is each at its own position grown to the shape it should have. But coexistence is still only being on the same ground. The next chapter asks whether there is any tie between them at all, and answers: pull one out, and the other three all sicken.
SECTIONS
One, Not One Has Been Thrown Out
Three, Growing Together Is Not Blending, Not Splitting the Difference
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.