VOLUME IV, PART 1
Enfeoffment: Where Positions Come From
The words political institution sound big, sound frightening, as if only political scientists and professors and heads of state are allowed to speak of them. This Part does one thing from beginning to end. It takes those words apart, all the way down to the plainest ground, and sets up a sentence that may change how you see the whole of politics: political institutions are institutions of enfeoffment.
The word enfeoffment has been insulted for a long time. Say it, and the mind reaches for backward, rotten, dark. Go back to its root and it is neutral, even solemn. Its oldest meaning is to mound earth and plant a tree along the boundary of a piece of land, mark out a range, and entrust that range to a person. In the old bronze script the character shows soil at the bottom, a tree on top, and a hand setting the tree onto the mound. The many mound the earth. The many plant the tree. The many recognize the boundary. And the one who is enfeoffed is lifted up, set in place, by all of them together. So from its very first day the direction of enfeoffment runs from below to above, from outside to inside. It is not one person reaching out to seize from the many. It is the many entrusting to one. That single sentence is the floor of the entire volume: a position is not seized, it is lifted into place, layer by layer, by the group.
Set that starting point firmly and much that looks complicated turns simple. Why can a man who declares himself king not hold the throne for even a second? Because he has gone around the entrusting of the many. Why does a grand coronation fail to save an emperor who has already lost the people? Because a ceremony only confirms acceptance, it cannot create it. Both fall straight out of the one sentence, that enfeoffment runs from below.
This Part has four chapters, walking deeper step by step. Chapter One sets the frame. It starts from a name given to a three-year-old child, walks into a pride of lions on the grass, and shows that a position is lifted up, second by second, by the group. It sets down five life-level laws: a position must exist, a position must be accepted, acceptance is dynamic, when acceptance drains away the position vanishes, and a new position necessarily arises. Then it comes back to the human world for the two oldest kinds of enfeoffment, of land and of office. Chapter Two completes the six shapes of enfeoffment, adding voter, military, dynastic, and party enfeoffment to land and office, then walks all six past those five laws to show that not one of them escapes, one ruler laid against them all, and says at last what the word enfeoffment truly means.
Chapter Three and Chapter Four together take up the lifespan of enfeoffment, answering a puzzle every reader of history feels. Why does a dynasty turn over every two or three centuries while the words of Confucius are still read after two thousand years? The answer splits enfeoffment into two kinds. The enfeoffment of power decays within a few hundred years, behind which lie four unavoidable problems: ability cannot pass down a bloodline, power magnifies private wants, a web of interests always forms, and the one in the position drifts ever further from the group. The enfeoffment of faith and culture can last thousands of years, because the classics come loose from the living body that carries them. Yet both kinds turn in a cycle, only on different scales. And once faith turns around and takes up worldly power, those four problems arrive at once. At the end, nine words from Laozi, that governing a great state is like cooking a small fish, gather the whole Part into the three things a person in a position can actually do: know that you are only passing through, hold the will of the people, and stir little.
Through this Part you will meet one sentence again and again, in a thousand different forms, one skeleton beneath them all. No kind of enfeoffment is advanced, and no kind is backward. Read on with one question in hand. When you finish enfeoffment, you will find we have spoken only of the position itself, and not yet of who fills it. That is exactly what the next Part, the examination system, sets out to answer.
Chapters in this Part
Chapter One. Enfeoffment is the political institution
Chapter Two. The other shapes of enfeoffment
Chapter Three. The lifespan of enfeoffment, part one
Chapter Four. The lifespan of enfeoffment, part two
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.