VOLUME V, CHAPTER 6, SECTION 3

VOLUME V, CHAPTER 6, SECTION 3

The Law Within the Heart. Torment Not Yourself

The last section carried self-discipline out to a whole people and set the three layers of the no-lawsuits state. This section walks to the deepest and the last. The deepest law of all sits in no courtroom, in no code, in no constitution. It sits inside a person. It completes the layer of no one tormenting anyone by carrying it home, that a person torment not only no one else, but not himself either. This is the last layer of Part Two, and the warmest thing the volume sets down before it turns heavy again.

Begin from where the last chapters left the reader. Part Two showed the outer law tilting toward the strong, the vested party keeping the present, the weak with roads that often work the structure's will. It is a heavy sight, and honestly seen it can leave a person not only angry at the world but hard on himself, measuring his own life against a standard and finding it short, telling himself he should have fought harder, earned more, lost less, bent less. This section speaks to exactly that. The layer of no one tormenting anyone was aimed outward, at the strong who bear down on the people. Turned inward, it has a second face the outer law never touches. Torment not yourself. Do not pick up a measure that was never yours and beat yourself with it.

The Chinese world set this layer down early, that the harshest judge a person ever meets is often himself. Around 300 BC, Zhuangzi wrote against the whip a person turns on his own back. He watched people wear their lives out chasing a name, a rank, a mark set by others, and drive themselves without rest to reach it, and called this a person offering himself up as a sacrifice to a standard outside him. Zhuangzi's cure was to see that many of the measures a person flogs himself with were never his own to begin with. They were handed to him by the age, the market, the crowd, the vested party's account of what a successful life looks like, and he took them up without ever asking whether they fit him. To torment yourself is to enforce, against your own life, a law you never wrote and never agreed to, on behalf of people who will never thank you for it. The deepest freedom, Zhuangzi saw, is to set that borrowed measure down.

This joins straight to the line that runs through the whole book, do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself. Confucius gave that as the one rule a person could carry his whole life. Here it turns and faces inward. You would not want another to torment you over nothing, to bear down on you for minding your own honest life, to measure you by a rule made for someone else and punish you for falling short. Then do not do it to yourself either. The measure that asks what you would not want done to yourself was always meant to shield people from the harm others do them. Its last and quietest use is to shield a person from the harm he does himself, in the dark, with a standard borrowed from a world that tilted against him from the start. A person who has been wronged by the outer structure, and then turns and flogs himself for not having beaten it, has let the structure win twice, once out there, and once inside his own chest.

Wang Yangming set the inmost seat of this law down in one phrase. Around 1500, Wang Yangming taught the extending of the knowing of good. He held that in every person there is a knowing of good and ill that needs no book and no teacher, a plain inner sense that this is right and that is wrong, and that the whole of cultivation is to clear away what clouds it and act on it. Lay this over the law and it reaches the bottom. The deepest law is not the code on the shelf and not the verdict in the court. It is that knowing of good seated in a person's own heart. It was there before any statute and it stands after any statute is repealed. A person who keeps faith with it keeps the one law that no lawmaker wrote and no enforcer can revise. And keeping faith with it includes this, that it does not turn cruel on its owner. The knowing of good judges the wrong a person does. It does not demand that a person hate himself for the wounds the world dealt him. To confuse the two, to turn the inner judge from a guide into a torturer, is itself a clouding of that knowing, and clearing it is part of the work.

Here the volume's warmest and plainest word. After all the heavy sights, a person finally holds one thing wholly in his own hand, and it must not become one more rod to beat himself with. Self-discipline is not self-torment. To govern oneself is to hold a line, not to flay oneself for every falling short. The line is do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself, held toward others and held toward oneself alike. A person keeps his own conduct clean, and grants himself the same mercy he would grant another, the same allowance for circumstance, the same understanding that no one is without fault and he is no exception. The seventh layer of Part One said no one is without fault, and the one that a person most often forgets to forgive is himself. To remember that layer, and turn it inward, is where self-discipline stops being a burden and becomes what it was meant to be, a person standing on his own ground, at peace, owing his uprightness to no system and his self-respect to no one's permission.

Turn the lens to the West once, lightly. The same turn is there, that the conscience is meant to guide a person and not to devour him, and that a mercy withheld from oneself is a mercy not truly understood. Many a tradition that preaches loving one's neighbor sets beside it, quietly, as oneself, and the two words carry the whole weight. The love owed to others is measured against a love a person is assumed already to hold for himself. Strip that inner love away and the whole measure loses its footing. East and West, the deepest law bends toward mercy at both ends, outward and inward, and a law that is merciless to its own keeper was misread somewhere.

So this section sets a nineteenth layer, and Part Two seals here. The deepest law sits in the heart, and it completes the layer of tormenting no one at both ends, torment no one else, and torment not yourself. It leans on no court and no code. It is a person's own knowing of good, held with a firm hand toward his conduct and a merciful one toward himself. This is not softness and not self-excuse. A person still holds his line, still answers for what he does. But he does not take up a borrowed measure and flog himself with it on behalf of a world that tilted against him, and he grants himself the allowance for circumstance that he would grant any other person. Zhuangzi warned against sacrificing oneself to an outside standard, Confucius gave the measure of what you would not want done to yourself, Wang Yangming set the knowing of good in the heart, and all of it comes to rest in one plain thing a person can hold, torment no one, and torment not yourself.

Now set the whole of Part Two together. It began in the heaviest place, the strong and the weak, and walked down through public legal education, lawyers, the source of the lawmaker, the vested party, the roads of the weak, every layer showing the outer law tilting toward those with more than enough. Then it turned and climbed, through self-discipline, through the no-lawsuits state and its three layers, up to this, the law within the heart. From the eleventh layer to the nineteenth, heavy in the first half and bright in the second. It first let the reader see the force that pulls the running law toward the strong, and then put back into his hands the one thing no one can take and no one else decides. Only once that force is seen does it become clear why self-discipline is the highest law, because it is the one position in the whole structure that the structure cannot move.

Part Two spoke of how the law runs, and ended in a person's own keeping. The next part comes back down to the most concrete place of all, the law landing on one living, ordinary person, the direction of proof, the naming of guilt, and the friction between a dead law and a live person. Let the reader carry this warm thing, self-discipline that torments no one and not itself, into Part Three.

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