VOLUME V, CHAPTER 6, SECTION 2
The Highest Reach of Confucius, Where Everyone Governs Himself
The last section set self-discipline as the highest law a person gives himself, the one position the outer structure cannot move. But that was still one person governing one person. This section carries it out from one person to a whole people. If not one person but everyone governs himself, then the quarrel need never arise, and the law need never be moved. This is the state Confucius called disputes never reaching the court, the highest condition the law can reach. But a true version of that state does not stand on good hearts alone. It needs three layers holding together at once.
Confucius set this reach down in the line quoted before, looked at here as the roof of the whole chapter. Around 500 BC, Confucius said, in hearing lawsuits I am no different from anyone else, but what I truly want is a world where there are no lawsuits at all. Note where the weight of the line falls. Confucius does not say he judges cases better than others. He says that judging cases well was never the point. The point is a world where the case need not be brought, where the wrong that starts the quarrel does not happen in the first place. A judge who hands down flawless verdicts all day is still working downstream, cleaning up wrongs already done. The state Confucius wants is upstream, where the wrong is never done, so there is nothing to clean. This is not a dream of no law. It is the highest use of law, that the law works so far upstream, through the cultivation of the people, that by the time you look downstream at the court, there is nothing there to try.
But here is where the reader must not go soft-headed. To say everyone governing himself yields no lawsuits sounds like a warm wish, the kind carved on a temple wall, and left there it is worth nothing. The real question is what a true no-lawsuits state actually stands on. It does not stand on telling everyone to be good. Preach cultivation to a starving man and you get no cultivation, you get a thief who has also heard a sermon. A true no-lawsuits state needs three layers biting together at once, and take away any one and it will not stand.
The first layer is everyone governing himself. This is the layer of the last section, carried from one person to the whole. Each person holds his own line, seizes from no one, bullies no one, and does the small right thing where no eye falls. This is the layer people usually think of when they hear no lawsuits, and thinking it the only layer is exactly the mistake. Because self-discipline cannot be commanded. You cannot order a people into watchfulness when alone. It grows only where the ground under it is right, and what makes the ground right is the other two layers.
The second layer is output greater than need. This is the layer people most often leave out, and it is the one that holds the other two up. Part Four of this volume digs it to the bottom, and here it need only be set in place. Most quarrels do not start in bad hearts. They start in things being too few. When there is not enough to go around, even good people are pushed to contend, because to yield is to go without, and to go without can mean not to live. Confucius' teacher-line knew this. Guan Zhong said first make the people rich, then speak of rites and of shame. A people driven to the wall cannot be cultivated into yielding, because yielding costs them their lives. But once output runs past need, once there is enough that no one has to take another's share to live, the ground of most quarrels simply dries up. Two men do not fight over water at a full river. They fight over the last bucket in a drought. So output greater than need is not a separate nice-to-have beside cultivation. It is the soil cultivation grows in. Preach self-discipline on barren ground and nothing takes. Lay down rich soil and self-discipline grows half of itself.
The third layer is no one tormenting anyone. Even with hearts governed and output ample, one thing can still break the peace, that those who hold power torment the ones below over nothing, bearing down on people who are minding their own honest lives, making trouble where there was none. This is the fourth volume's tormenting no one, brought here into the law. A people can be self-governed and well-fed, and if the ones with power still harass them, invent rules to trip them, press them for the pleasure or the profit of pressing, then quarrels are manufactured from above where none needed to exist. So the third layer asks restraint of exactly the ones the first two layers do not reach, the holders of power, who are least checked from outside. No one tormenting anyone means the strong hold their hand, the enforcer does not make work for himself out of the people's backs, the rule is not multiplied for the sake of the rule. Take this layer away and the other two cannot save the peace, because the trouble no longer starts among the people at all. It rains down on them.
See now why the three must bite together. Everyone governing himself, and output greater than need, and no one tormenting anyone. Self-discipline without enough to eat cannot hold, for hunger breaks the line. Enough to eat without self-discipline runs to waste and want, for appetite has no floor. And both together still shatter if power torments the people from above. Only the three at once make the no-lawsuits state real. This is why the warm wish carved on the wall stays a wish. People try to reach it by the first layer alone, by preaching goodness, and leave out the soil and leave out the restraint of power, and it never grows. Confucius' no lawsuits was never a call to preach harder. It was a call to get all three layers standing at once.
Turn the lens to the plainest test. Why do some communities pass generations with almost no one going to court, settling what little comes up among themselves, and others drown in suits. The lazy answer is that the first kind have better people. The truer answer is that the first kind, most often, has all three layers, neighbors who hold their own lines, enough to live on so no one is clawing for the last share, and no power overhead inventing trouble. Let any one of the three fail, let the harvest fail, or let a heavy hand come down from above, and the same good people are in court within a season. The people did not turn bad. A layer gave out.
So this section sets an eighteenth layer. The highest reach of the law is the state where disputes never reach the court, and that state stands on three layers holding at once, everyone governing himself, output greater than need, and no one tormenting anyone. It is not reached by preaching goodness alone. It is reached by laying down the soil that goodness grows in and holding back the power that would trample it. This is not an idle ideal. It is a plain account of why some groups need almost no law and others cannot get by without a courthouse on every corner. Confucius said what I want is a world with no lawsuits, Guan Zhong said first make the people rich, the fourth volume said torment no one, and the three lines are one structure. The next time a person hears that a place has little crime and few suits, he will not simply praise its people. He will look for whether the three layers are standing.
The next section is the law within the heart. The deepest law of all sits in no courtroom and in no code. It sits inside a person. It completes the third layer, no one tormenting anyone, by carrying it home to a place the outer law can never reach, that a person torment not only no one else, but not himself either. Let the reader carry these three layers into the section that follows.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.