VOLUME V, CHAPTER 12, SECTION 3
The Position of the Taken, a House Full of Gold and Jade That None Can Keep
The last section named the two conditions that put a nation into the taker's position. This section turns to the other end, the nation taken from, and asks the matching question. What puts a nation into the position of the one taken from. And it finds the deepest answer named by Laozi twenty-five hundred years ago, in a line about a house so full of treasure that no one can keep it. The position of the taken is not simply weakness. It is, very often, wealth without the strength to hold it.
Start with the lazy answer, so as to leave it behind. It is easy to think a nation is taken from because it is weak, small, poor, backward. But look at the actual record of takings between nations and a stranger pattern shows. The nations most taken from are often not the poorest but the richest, the ones holding something worth taking, resources, fertile ground, a trove of goods, a store of wealth, and lacking the strength to defend it. A nation with nothing worth taking is often left alone, not out of mercy but because there is nothing there to draw the taker. A nation full of the scarce thing and short of the force to hold it is exactly the one the taker's position reaches for. So the position of the taken is not plain poverty. It is, very often, the possession of wealth without the power to keep it.
Laozi named this precisely, around 500 BC. A house full of gold and jade, none can keep. When a hall is filled with gold and jade, no one can hold it long. Laozi was speaking of a person and his hoard, and the line reaches all the way up to nations. A nation that fills its house with the scarce thing, and does not have the strength to guard the door, cannot keep what it holds, because the fullness itself draws the taker, and the drawing meets no wall. This is the deepest description of the taken's position. It is not the empty house that is taken from. It is the full house with a weak door. The wealth that looks like safety is, without the strength to hold it, exactly the thing that marks the house for taking. Laozi saw that the fullness and the danger come together, that to hold much without the power to keep it is not security but exposure.
Han Fei set the same truth from the side of the contention, in the line this volume carries. When goods are few, men fight. Between nations, where the goods are the scarce thing and there is no law over the fighting, the nation holding much amid others holding little is the nation the fighting converges on. The fullness of its house, against the shortfall of its neighbors, is the very condition that draws the taking. So the taken's position is produced by the same root as the taker's, output and scarcity, seen from the other side. The taker is short and armed and reaches. The taken is full and unarmed and is reached for. The two positions are the two ends of one struggle over the scarce thing, and the same scarcity that pushes the taker to reach marks the taken as the thing reached for.
Now the layer that matters most, and it is not despair. To name the taken's position is not to tell a wealthy, weakly-defended nation that its fate is sealed. It is to name, precisely, the three things such a nation might do, which the next chapter opens in full and which are only set here as the shape of the answer. A nation full of the scarce thing and short of the strength to hold it has, at bottom, three responses. It can accept, yielding what is taken and living with the taking. It can resist, fighting to hold what it has with the strength it can muster. Or it can grow strong, building the force to guard its own door so that the fullness is no longer an invitation. These are the three responses of the taken, and they echo, at the scale of nations, the three roads of the weak inside a nation, accept, resist, and the deeper work of changing one's own position. The deepest of the three is to grow strong, because it alone changes the position itself, turning the full house with the weak door into a full house that can keep what it holds.
Here the discipline holds once more. To name the taken's position, and its three responses, is to point at no nation and say, you are the taken, you are the full house with the weak door. The volume names the structure and assigns no nation to the role. Which nation stands in the taken's position, in which case, at which depth, the reader judges, holding the one measure to every nation alike. And the volume holds, as before, that the position runs both ways. A nation taken from in one age may, having grown strong, stand in another position in the next, and the full house that could not keep its treasure may become the house that can, or even, in time and by the same root, the house that reaches for another's. The positions of taker and taken are not moral castes fixed to nations. They are positions produced by the meeting of output and force, and they turn as output and force turn.
There is a last, quiet layer in Laozi's line that the volume will not pass by. Laozi did not offer his line as a strategy for guarding treasure better. He offered it, in its own place, as a caution against the piling up of treasure at all, against the fullness that cannot be kept and the striving after it. Carried to nations, this holds a thought the volume sets down without insisting on it, that the endless piling of the scarce thing, without the strength or the wisdom to hold it, is itself a kind of exposure, and that a nation's security may lie not only in the strength of its door but in the measure of its wanting. This is not a counsel of poverty, and not the whole of the answer, since a nation must hold enough to live and to defend. It is a reminder, from twenty-five hundred years ago, that the fullness a nation chases as safety can be the very thing that marks it, and that the root of the taking, on both ends, is the scarce thing and the wanting of it.
So this section sets a thirty-seventh layer, and this chapter closes here. What puts a nation into the position of the taken is very often not poverty but wealth without the strength to hold it, a house full of gold and jade that none can keep, as Laozi named it twenty-five hundred years ago, and as Han Fei's when goods are few men fight names from the side of the contention. The taken's position has three responses, to accept, to resist, to grow strong, of which growing strong is the deepest because it alone changes the position. The volume names the position and assigns no nation to it, holds that taker and taken run both ways across history, and sets down Laozi's quieter caution, that the endless piling of the scarce thing without the strength or wisdom to hold it is itself exposure. The next chapter walks the deepest of the five depths, the occupying of a position, sets it beside the colonization everyone knows, follows the treaty that stamps the taking lawful, and turns to the responses of the taken. Let the reader carry this position of the taken into the chapter that follows.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.