VOLUME V, CHAPTER 1, SECTION 2

VOLUME V, CHAPTER 1, SECTION 2

Wei Is Neutral. What Is Made by Human Hands Is Wei

The last section carried the character Wei out as a tool, and called it the handiest ruler there is for seeing through the law. But that ruler has gathered a thick coat of dust over two thousand years. This section does one thing and nothing else. It wipes the character clean and returns it to the shape it had when Xunzi first wrote it down.

Start with something strange. The way the character is used today is nearly the reverse of what it first meant. In the Chinese world Wei has hardened into a bad word. Hypocrisy, disguise, forgery, the false gentleman, pseudo-science. A reader sees it and the first thing that rises is fake, deceiving, not real. That reaction is not the reader's fault. It is what two thousand years of usage ground the character down into. But when Xunzi wrote his three words, what is made by human effort is Wei, false was not in his mind at all. To see this a person has to go back to Xunzi's own sentence and look at what he was actually saying.

The full line in Xunzi runs like this. Human nature is bad, and what is good in a person is Wei. Xunzi says a person is born carrying a love of gain and a will to fight, and that this is inborn. Yet a person also has good in him, and that good is not inborn. It is Wei, it is made, made a little at a time through the teaching of elders and the guidance of rite and duty. So the Wei here is the made of human effort, not the false of a lie. Put into plain speech today, the line means roughly this. A person is not born good. Good is taught and cultivated after birth. Xunzi is not saying good is fake. He is saying, exactly the other way, that good is the thing a person makes with his own hands and should treasure most. In his hand Wei carries great weight.

Notice this carefully, because it is where the character is at its most remarkable. For Xunzi, rite and duty are Wei, culture is Wei, and the good a person cultivates after birth is Wei too. Wei is not some dirty thing to keep clear of. It is the very stretch by which a person rises above the beast. How did a character that once carried a load this honorable come to fall into an insult. That is what the next part traces.

Around AD 100, Xu Shen, in his dictionary of characters, explained Wei this way. Wei, it means to deceive. He set the character's first meaning as deceive, and that is already a derived meaning, an extension. Xu Shen stood more than three hundred years downstream of Xunzi. But the shape of the character does not lie. A person radical beside the element for made, its root meaning is simply what a person does. The honorable character in Xunzi's hand, carrying rite and culture, over three hundred years, by Xu Shen's brush, had its very first meaning slide down to deceive.

Why it slid toward deceive is not hard to trace. What people make gets set beside what nature makes. A paper flower made by hand loses to a real blossom on the branch. A smile put on by hand may hide something else behind it. Compare enough times and a person forms an impression, that whatever is made by hands is somehow less real than what is born, and one step further, the made becomes the put-on, the fake. This kind of drift is not rare in the Chinese language. Take the two characters for enfeoffment, which first meant to grant a fief and set up a domain, and were later worn into a curse meaning backward and hidebound, long since cut loose from the original sense. Wei walked the same road. It was not born dirty. It was ground dirty by two thousand years of tongues. See the wear and you will not be cowed by the surface of a single character.

The most important line in wiping the character clean is this. The made is not the same as the fake. Wei is the human-made, and it carries no praise and no blame. It only sets the natural and the made apart. The last section used the tree and the table, the river and the canal, and this one will not repeat them. It adds only the one line that matters most. A made thing is not a false thing. A table is made by hands, and it truly holds things up. A canal is dug by hands, and boats truly sail on it. A law is set up by hands, and it truly binds conduct and settles disputes. Made speaks of where a thing came from, not of it being false. To hear the human-made as the false is the pit that two thousand years of prejudice dug in front of this character. Step over that pit and a person can see the law's true position. The law is Wei. It is carved by hands. It was not handed down by Heaven.

That sounds ordinary, and it is the floor the whole volume stands on. Only once a person sees that the law is made can he go on to ask, made by whom, made why, made for whom. And only then can he say the other thing, that if it was made badly, it can be made over. So long as a thing is still taken as handed down from Heaven, not one of these questions can even be spoken aloud.

Why nail this layer down so hard. Because there is always someone who wants the law described as though it fell from the sky. Natural law, divine law, the universally binding, the fundamental law too sacred to touch, all of these push the law toward the not-made. Pushed to the limit, the law is enshrined as a god, made unquestionable, unremakeable. But the moment the law is set on the altar, the trouble begins. Who is standing behind the altar. Still people. A certain group who write the law, who interpret the law, who profit by this law. To call the thing they set up sacred and untouchable is to enshrine themselves along with it, so that to move a single clause becomes a desecration. Much of the time the sacredness of the law is a shield held up to fend off questioning on behalf of one group. This is not to say everyone who speaks of the law with gravity is scheming. That the law commands respect is a good thing in itself. But once gravity turns into you may not ask, and respect turns into you must kneel, it is worth a glance at who exactly is standing behind that shield. Xunzi's three words lift the shield away. The law is Wei. It is a made thing. A made thing can be set up and can be changed, and what can be changed is not final, and what is not final should not be enshrined as a god. That stroke lifts the law gently down from the altar and sets it back in its own place, a tool in human hands.

Someone will worry at once. Lift the law down from the altar and does it still have the weight to hold people. The worry runs backward. A made thing can carry weight all the same. A table holds a load, a canal carries boats, a law binds conduct, and none of them do it by way of the lie that they are not made. They do it by their real working. Weight comes not from the empty word sacred but from the solid fact of whether the thing works well and whether it shields people. Whether a law stands is measured by its content, its enforcement, and whether the human heart is convinced. To return the law to Wei is not to drain it of weight. It is to move its weight off an empty word and onto a solid fact.

Here is the line that matters most. To measure whether a law is just, there is only one ruler. Does it shield people. The law's original task is to stop the strong from seizing from the weak, to stop the powerful from bullying the powerless, to keep the little each person is born with from being taken away. Hold to that task and the law stands straight. Turn it over, and become instead the tool by which the strong press the weak and the powerful seize from the powerless, and then however tidy its clauses, however grand its sign, it has already drifted off the position it should hold. Take that ruler to every law from here on and measure. The same law, used to shield people or used to seize from them, can leave its clauses unchanged and land in wholly opposite places. A law against theft, shielding what each person holds, is shielding people. But turn the same force of enforcement to guarding tightly the share of those who already hold a great deal, and blocking the road by which the shortchanged come to claim their own, and it becomes seizing from people. The ruler does not read the sign. It reads only where the thing lands. This ruler is where the tormenting no one of the fourth volume comes to rest in the law, and several sections ahead lean on it.

But a made thing cannot shake off one hard problem. It leans on people everywhere, and people cannot be leaned on. The one who writes the law is a person. The one who enforces it is a person. The one who judges is a person. The one bound by it is a person. Every person carries his own want, bias, and limit, and this brings out the deepest layer in the character Wei. The law is a made tool, and a tool does not move itself. A hammer waits for a hand to lift it, and a law waits for a person to enforce it, and the person who enforces it is one more layer of Wei. So the whole of law, from writing to enforcing to judging to keeping, is Wei stacked upon Wei. Let the person at any layer lean, and the whole leans with him. A law written on paper as strict and faceless still has to pass, on its way down onto a living person, through whom the writer favored, then through whom the enforcer is soft on and whom he is hard on, then through how the judge reads it, light sentence or heavy. A dead clause, walking from the page onto a live person, crosses several layers of live people, and each layer can tip it a little. By the time it lands, it is no longer the clean law that stood on the page.

That is the true face of Wei stacked upon Wei. However handsome a law, dropped into the hands of layer after layer of imperfect people, running crooked is nearly certain. Saying this is not to leave a person disheartened with the law. It is to keep him from taking the law as a god that never errs, so that when it does run crooked, he can recognize it, and can still change it.

So does a person still want law. Laozi and Confucius each answered with one word, restraint. Twenty-five hundred years ago Laozi answered this. Governing a great state is like cooking a small fish. Put it in the pan and you cannot keep turning it, for the more you turn it the more it breaks. This is not saying do without law. It is saying use law with restraint, so that the small tilt of Wei lands on the common people as little as it can. Confucius meant the same. In hearing lawsuits, he said, I am no different from anyone else, but what I truly want is a world where there are no lawsuits at all. Follow that layer one step further and you reach the highest position in this chapter. Since the law leans on people at every turn and can tip at every turn, its most ideal end is to be used less and less, everyone able to govern himself, seizing from no one, bullying no one, so that disputes grow fewer and the times the law must be moved grow fewer of themselves. This layer is the roof of the chapter. Here it is only touched. The sections ahead walk slowly toward it.

So this section sets a third layer. The law is Wei. It is a made thing, so it must be imperfect, and it must be used with restraint. Set this layer firmly and everything after it has its ground color. When you speak of the good the law does, remember it is Wei, and the good is relative. When you speak of the abuse of the law, remember it is Wei, and a made thing will be abused. When you speak of reforming the law, remember reform itself is Wei, and will bring its own new tilt.

There is no perfect law. There is no forever-correct law. There is no law that cannot be changed. This layer was not set by this book. Xunzi set it more than twenty-two hundred years ago. This arrangement only carries Wei back out of the prejudice of later ages and says it once more in the plain speech of today, so that when the sections ahead discuss the law, a person has a clean tool in his hand.

The next section opens a hotter question. Whom is the law actually written for. For the strong or for the weak, for those seated above or for the countless ordinary people below. This has always been the deepest dispute over the law, and the ancestors set it out long ago. Let the reader carry this set of tools, natural law, Wei, and a made thing that is never perfect, into the section that follows.

Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.