VOLUME III, SEMESTER 4, CHAPTER 46

Common Sharing: Take from the Too-Much and Make Up the Not-Enough

Turn the shop’s ledger to the very last page, spread every share out, and one grid is left with no name against it. The road at the gate, the power on the pole, the bridge across the river, the mortise and tenon in every chair, the twenty men who can read and reckon, and that channel watering two thousand three hundred years of field. That is where this chapter starts. The three commons before spoke of the tie between the four rules. This last speaks of another matter: the share no one can say whose it is, and to whom it belongs. This chapter answers in three sections, and closes the four commons.

The first section marks off the shares that can be known: the wage to the hands, the timber to the upstream, the interest to millions of passbooks, the last grid to the man who cannot sleep. To here the account looks spread flat. But lift the eye, and the road, the power, the bridge, the peace kept at night, the script and numbers and craft gathered across thousands of years—none of these he built or paid for, and pull them out and the same men and machine make not a tenth of the year’s yield. So this share is no odd remainder, it is the big share. The first semester asked in chapter seven why Great Yu thought to open a channel and not to dam, and cannot trace it, and what cannot be traced a person gives a source—to heaven, to a god—and that source itself is wei. The harvest Dujiangyan gave for two thousand three hundred years, whose gain of labor is it? Li Bing tilled not one mu. This share has a name: the gain not of labor.

The second section answers to whom it belongs, and sets the line: the gain not of labor belongs to the public. First it sets the words straight: the gain not of labor is no curse but a level fact; that share finds no laborer who can claim it, while the risk’s grid and the strength’s share do have owners. An ownerless thing has only three roads: whoever grabs it first, whoever can block others, or to the public. To the public is not charity, it is the thing returning to its owner, and the owner is the many, counted up to where there is not even a name. It borrows Laozi: the Way of heaven takes from the too-much and makes up the not-enough; the way of man is not so, it takes from the not-enough to serve the too-much. And it guards two ends: taking the owned for ownerless and sweeping it off, and calling the ownerless wholly one’s own earning—and both lines must be said together.

The third section walks the second half of the road: to the public is not gathered into a storehouse, it is landed down, and whether it truly went to the public is judged by where it lands. It lands in four places: the child’s schoolroom, the sickbed and the ambulance, the road and bridge and channel and power, and the old and young and the gap—that is just chapter forty-five’s list not shared by what is put in. The source ownerless and the destination not asking what is put in, the two ends matched. So common sharing is not sharing all things flat, it is putting that ownerless share back onto every person, the owned still to the owner. And this grid is the grain that wounds least, the best cushion on the bound, for it takes from no one, and swept into a private purse the two rules butt cheek to cheek.

Here is the method, and here is what you carry out. The method is to turn the account to the bottom and name what no one names, without moving one cent that has an owner. What you carry out is the last of the four commons, common sharing: the share that cannot be traced, give it out; the share a person did himself, own it; and those two lines are the six words at the foot of every page—the merit goes to the ancestors. The next chapter turns to the one thing all four commons rest on, that no one can stand alone to the end, and asks who guarantees it, and speaks of the check and balance.