VOLUME V, CHAPTER 3
Law Inside the Web, and How a Person Lives Within It
The last two chapters dug what law is all the way from its highest position down to its deepest foundation, and set seven layers. But an honest admission is due here. Speaking only of the law, you can never finish speaking of the law. This chapter does two things. First it sets law back into the large net it belongs to, then it asks how a person actually lives inside that net, and along the way it closes Part One. The chapters before took law apart as one thing to look at. This chapter puts it back into the whole it sits in.
The first section is about how the four institutions hold one another up. Culture, economy, politics and law each have their own division of labor and depend on one another, with no rank of high or low. This section starts from a family: does the child go to college? Does the family value reading, can it afford the cost, how many places does the college entrance exam hand out, does household registration allow taking the exam across provincial lines? Break any one layer and the matter cannot go through. The four institutions are not four drawers. They are four knots in one net. Law is not a branch snapped off a tree to be studied alone. It is the last of the four stations. Culture sits upstream and sets the undertone, economy is the next station and supplies the foundation, and politics coordinates resources. What is spoken of here is the order of position, not a chain of cause and effect. The Great Learning says everything has a root and a branch. Guan Zhong says one must first enrich the people. The Book of Changes says one yin and one yang, this is called the Way. Laozi says the Way gives birth to the One, the One gives birth to the Two, the Two give birth to the Three, and the Three give birth to the ten thousand things. Montesquieu, Marx and Weber each reached the same layer. Among the four stations there is only division of labor, no high or low, and law has never been a thing standing alone. This sets the eighth layer.
The second section is about rights being in nature, not in the law. This section first asks, before law appeared, did people have rights? In an age without a single written statute, a person still did not want to be killed without cause, still guarded that mouthful of food, that patch of ground to sleep on. Law does not create rights. It has only two relations to them. One is to confirm, writing down and guarding the share a person already has. The other is to violate, taking that share away and pressing it down. A person works hard and grows a field of grain. Law writing that property is protected is confirming. Law changing one day to say all grain is confiscated is violating. Whose the grain truly is has never changed. Law is the gatekeeper of rights, not the one who issues them. Laozi says heaven's way takes from what has too much and adds to what has too little. Mencius says the people are the most valuable, the altars of the state come next, and the ruler is the least important. Locke says natural rights exist prior to government. The Declaration of Independence says all men are created equal. See this layer clearly, and when a law claims to grant a right, a person can tell whether it is confirming, or borrowing the name of granting to shave down and seize. This sets the ninth layer.
The third section is about living law, living with clear eyes inside the net of law. This section starts from a plain truth: knowing all this, the mortgage still has to be paid and the traffic ticket still has to be paid. What it sets up is neither using the law to grab more nor dodging the law on luck. It is a third position. It leans on three plain tools, each deeper than the last. Confucius says, what you would not want done to yourself, do not do to others, and that is the floor. Laozi says, know the male, keep to the female, and that is the posture: seeing through a loophole in the law and not using it. Wang Yangming says knowing and doing are one, and that is the landing: knowing the law is imperfect, a person does not use it to harm people when he holds power. Sign a contract and see a pit in the clauses. You can pretend not to see it and pull it out the day you fall out, or you can point it out on the spot and make the clause even. The second is just what the posture looks like landing inside the net of law. Holding these three tools may not bring any advantage, and may even mean taking a loss, but you hold them not to win, but so as not to become the kind of person you hate most. This is your own cultivation, not something the law grants. This sets the tenth layer, and gathers Part One's ten layers into one complete net.
These three sections done, building from the eighth layer to the tenth, Part One closes here, and the foundation of what law is has been laid in full. Sima Qian's line, to probe the meeting of heaven and man, to see through the changes of past and present, and to form one school of words of his own, fits just right to close this Part. Walk through this chapter and the reader holds both the whole net for looking at the law and a compass for standing steady inside it. Everything Part Two goes on to say about how law runs rests on this foundation. The next chapter is Chapter Four, the first of Part Two. It first sets the deepest link in how law runs, strong and weak, and then looks at public legal education and lawyers, what ordinary people run into first. The stance of this chapter still has not changed: it lays out positions, draws no conclusion, and leaves the judgment to the reader.
Contents
Section One. Four Institutions That Hold One Another Up. Culture, Economy, Politics, Law.
Section Two. Rights Are in Nature, Not in the Law.
Section Three. The Living Law. How a Person Lives Inside the Web in a World Where No One Is Perfect.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
Section One. Four Institutions That Hold One Another Up. Culture, Economy, Politics, Law.