VOLUME V, CHAPTER 1
What Law Is. Natural Law, Wei, and Whom the Law Serves
This chapter is the head of the whole volume, and the deepest layer of foundation under the whole house of law. Part One, three chapters and ten layers, speaks only of what law is. There is no earlier chapter for this one to pick up from. What it picks up is the sentence the volume guide dug down to at the very bottom: the law is not fairness dropped from heaven, it is a tool grown out of the ground. It is in no hurry to speak of how to use the law. It takes three steps back first, and asks the plainest question there is: what is the law, really, and what is sitting on top of it. What these three sections set up is not a set of moves with the law. It is the eyes for looking at the law. Get the eyes true, and the power, the rules, the interests and the human nature the thirteen chapters after this one take up will not blur.
The first section, What Law Is, The Ancestors Wrote It Down Twenty-Five Hundred Years Ago. This section starts from Laozi's line, the more laws and edicts are posted, the more thieves there are, and sets firm the highest position in the whole book, and it will never hand that highest place to the law itself. The more law is made, the finer and the stricter, the more thieves there are, the exact reverse of today's common sense. The highest thing is not the law. It is natural law, the inner grain of how all things run, the private appetite and the rotation deep in human nature. Laozi also says, heaven's net is vast, and though its mesh is wide, nothing slips through. A man-made net of law, however tightly woven, still leaks. Heaven's net is loose, yet nothing slips through it. However high and however sacred a man-made law is set up, once it veers off natural law, it may hold things down by force for a while, but in the end natural law pulls it back to where it started, without mercy. A lawmaker who cannot see heaven's net will in the end be swallowed by the harsh laws he set up with his own hands. Shang Yang was just that, torn apart between chariots under the law of collective guilt he had made himself. This section sets two layers. The highest place belongs to natural law. Man-made law can veer off from natural law for a while, and natural law will in the end pull it back to true.
The second section, Wei Is Neutral, What Is Made by Human Hands Is Wei. This section does one thing. It wipes the character wei clean and hands it back the meaning Xunzi gave it. In everyday speech wei usually means fake, but when Xunzi says what is man-made is wei, he means what is made by human hands and set up by human hearts. He says human nature runs to the bad, and whatever good is in a person is wei, that is, the good is exactly the thing a person builds with his own hands. More than three hundred years later, Xu Shen, in the Shuowen Jiezi, glossed wei as deceit, and the first meaning of the character slid down into deceit. A tree is grown by nature, a table is made by people. A river is natural, a canal is dug by people. The articles of law are man-made. To say the law is wei is not to call it false. It is to see it as a man-made tool, never a god beyond question. The moment the law is set up on the altar, the ones standing behind the altar are still people. Since it is man-made, it must carry the limits, the bias and the private interest of the ones who make it and enforce it, and it must be imperfect. Since it is man-made, whatever is made badly can be made over. Just because it is wei stacked on wei, the law must be used with great restraint. Laozi says governing a great state is like frying a small fish, and you cannot keep turning a small fish in the pan. This section sets the third layer.
The third section, Whom the Law Serves. This section asks the question that cuts closest to the heart: whom is the law actually made for. It first brings out Guan Zhong, in the way of governing a state, one must first enrich the people. A prosperous people is the end, and the law is only a tool trailing behind. It sets two sentences side by side, the one declared officially on the surface, the law serves the people, and the one ordinary people carry in their hearts, the law is a tool for the strong to constrain the weak, and it sets firm the layer the whole book keeps coming back to. At the start of the Han, Xiao He drew up the three-item code, and the simpler the law, the more room the people had to breathe. After Emperor Wu, the service of the law quietly shifted from the people to the imperial treasury. Whom the law actually serves is never settled by the bright signboard in black and white. It is settled by the position of the ones holding the law, the people who make it, enforce it and interpret it. When the ones holding the law stand on the side of those with excess, the law quietly turns into an iron rake that takes from those who do not have enough to offer to those who have excess. This is decided by position, not by conscience. This section sets the fourth layer.
These three sections build from the first layer up to the fourth. Walk through this chapter and the reader will have gathered a set of tools for looking at the law: natural law, wei, and the fact that whom the law serves is constantly in motion. Every section from here on measures with these tools. The next chapter takes up three old sayings that mainstream jurisprudence looks down on and ordinary people say every day, and the first of them is that the law is nothing beyond human feeling. The stance of this chapter is fixed from the start too: it lays out positions, draws no conclusion, and leaves the judgment to the reader.
Contents
Section One. What Law Is. The Ancestors Wrote It Down Twenty-Five Hundred Years Ago.
Section Two. Wei Is Neutral. What Is Made by Human Hands Is Wei.
Section Three. Whom the Law Serves.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
Section One. What Law Is. The Ancestors Wrote It Down Twenty-Five Hundred Years Ago.