VOLUME IV, CHAPTER 3
The Lifespan of Enfeoffment, Part One
The last two chapters set out all six kinds of enfeoffment and said the word itself through. Starting with this chapter we ask a deeper question. Does enfeoffment have a lifespan? Why does one enfeoffment collapse in a few centuries and another last thousands of years? The same position, lifted up by the group, so why does a dynasty turn over every two or three centuries while the words of Confucius are still read every day after more than two thousand years? Three sections dig all the way down. The first splits enfeoffment into two kinds, the enfeoffment of power and the enfeoffment of faith and culture, and sets up two paradoxes: every enfeoffment is inside a cycle, only on different scales. The second explains why the enfeoffment of power decays every two or three centuries. It is four problems that cannot be dodged: ability cannot pass down a bloodline, power magnifies private wants, a web of interests necessarily forms, and the person in the position and the group grow ever further apart. The third crosses to the other side and explains why the enfeoffment of faith and culture can last thousands of years. It is the four advantages of the classics, plus the three carriers of transmission, the classic, the rite, and the community.
Section One starts from two pictures of world history. One is dynasties. China's dynasties turn over on an average of two or three centuries, Rome ran its course in five hundred years, the Soviet Union collapsed in seventy. The other is faith and culture. Buddhism is still here after more than twenty-five hundred years. The root difference between the two kinds comes down to one thing: whether the position needs a living person, continuously, to make concrete decisions. The enfeoffment of power must have one. The enfeoffment of faith and culture does not. Confucius died, his words became the Analects, and the content itself became the thing enfeoffed. Then the section sets up two paradoxes. The dynasties changed dozens of times, yet the enfeoffment that is the office of emperor ran on from Xia to Qing for about four thousand years. That is the first. The office of pope is two thousand years old and has passed through more than two hundred popes, each holding only a short term. That is the second. Nor are the two kinds an absolute division. It depends on which side dominates. What dominates for the Kong family of Qufu is cultural transmission, and it has endured over twenty-five hundred years. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was dominated by the enfeoffment of power, so it collapsed in seventy years.
Section Two answers why the enfeoffment of power falls precisely in the band of two or three centuries. The great majority of major political bodies hold a stable span of two or three centuries. This is not chance, it is a regularity. The regularity comes from four problems. The first, ability cannot pass down a bloodline. The Han went from the ability of Liu Bang all the way down, until by Huan and Ling it was past saving. The second, power magnifies private wants. Power is an amplifier. The Emperor Wu of Han, Emperor Xuanzong of Tang, and the Wanli emperor of Ming were not bad in their early years. The position slowly changed them. The third, a web of interests necessarily forms around the position. Zhu Yuanzhang cutting down the founding officials and the Yongzheng emperor cleaning up the officialdom had only a short-term effect. The fourth, the person in the position and the group grow ever further apart. By the middle and late stages of a dynasty, the emperor believes all under heaven is at peace while the people are already seething with resentment. Stack the four, count each generation as twenty or thirty years, and by the eighth to tenth generation the crisis bursts. That is where two or three centuries comes from.
Section Three crosses to the other side and lays the four problems against the classics one at a time. The classics do not age. Confucius taught, do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself, and read today it is still that line, because the classic has come loose from the body as carrier. But the living people who carry the classic age, and the pope changed, Catholicism did not collapse. The classics are not greedy. The medieval Church sold indulgences, and it was the living carriers who grew greedy. Whenever the corruption passes a point, there comes a movement of returning to the classic itself. The web around the classics is looser, the believers scattered across different places and different ages. The classics cannot be cut off from their readers. The Sixth Patriarch of Chan could not read, understood the Diamond Sutra directly through another's recitation, and opened the Southern school. Add the classic, the rite, and the community, holding it up together. It has its costs too. It is slow, and it cannot govern directly. But it can be pressed down, it cannot be wiped out. Inside, it is cycling too, only by inner renewal, with no break.
One word runs through this chapter: the cycle. The cycle of enfeoffment is not a tragedy, it is a law. What a person in a position can do is not to escape the cycle, but to make it turn more steadily, run longer, and cost the group less. What this chapter sets firm is that every enfeoffment is inside some cycle, only on a different scale. But the sharpest question remains. What if the enfeoffment of faith and culture turns around and takes up worldly power? The next chapter picks up from here and walks on into the deepest ground.
Chapter contents
Section One. Two kinds of enfeoffment, two paradoxes
Section Two. Why the enfeoffment of power runs a cycle of centuries
Section Three. Why the classics can last thousands of years
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.