VOLUME V, CHAPTER 6, SECTION 3
The Law Within the Heart. Torment Not Yourself
The previous section held that no litigation asks a person not to torment others. But the deepest position of law sits not in any courtroom, it sits inside every single person's own heart. Taking the outer law and carrying it inward, judging yourself by a standard someone else set, this is the law within the heart. This section sets down that layer, and completes the word torment no one.
One. Wang Yangming's Line, What the Bandit Inside the Heart Actually Is
Around 1518, while suppressing bandits in Jiangxi, Wang Yangming wrote a line quoted earlier.
It is easy to defeat the bandits in the mountains. It is difficult to defeat the bandits in the heart. Wang Yangming, Letter to Yang Shide and Xue Shangqian.
Bandits in the mountains are easy to defeat. The bandit inside the heart is hard to defeat. Yet few people ever stop to ask what that inner bandit actually is. Take a scene everyone has lived through. A person accomplishes something and feels genuinely glad, and then the moment he thinks of someone else who did it bigger, faster, or with more polish, that gladness turns instantly into anxiety and self-reproach.
No one stood up to say this to him. He said it to himself. That voice, the one that picks up another person's ruler to measure himself and then punishes himself once the measuring is done, is the bandit inside the heart. It sits nowhere outside, it sits inside his own mind, following him all day long, judging him more diligently than any outer law ever could. Wang Yangming called it hard to defeat precisely for this reason. An outer bandit can be evaded. The inner one cannot, because it is part of you.
Two. Zhuangzi Speaks of Setting Down the Self Defined by the Outside
Around 300 BC, Zhuangzi, in the chapter The Great and Venerable Teacher, offered a way to break it.
Cast off the limbs and body, dismiss hearing and sight, depart from form, discard knowledge, and become one with the Great Pervader. This is called sitting and forgetting. Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi, The Great and Venerable Teacher.
Set down the body's senses, set down clever intellect, leave behind outer form and the standards of knowledge, and become one with the great flowing whole, this is called sitting and forgetting. Set down, layer by layer, all those piled-up shoulds and should-nots, goods and bads carried inward from the outside world, and once you arrive at that place, the bandit inside the heart is naturally no longer there.
Zhuangzi's line the utmost person has no fixed self carries the same meaning, not being bound by that self defined by outside standards. People in the twenty-first century often speak of finding yourself. Zhuangzi says the reverse, set down first the false self someone else pieced together for you, and only then does the real self have room to show itself.
Three. Laozi Speaks of Not Treating the Outer World's Favor and Disgrace as Your Own Body
Around 500 BC, Laozi wrote, in Chapter 13 of the Daodejing.
Favor and disgrace alike bring alarm. Value great trouble as you value your own body. Laozi, Daodejing, Chapter 13.
Favor alarms, and disgrace alarms too, and a person treats a great outer trouble as heavily as he treats his own body. Laozi speaks to this very same layer, a person led around by outside favor and disgrace, afraid of losing it when favored, feeling worthless when out of favor, living his whole life inside other people's opinions, never at peace.
Landed in daily life, this looks like being lifted by two words of praise and unable to sleep after two words of scorn. Both praise and scorn are things that come out of another person's mouth, never truly in one's own hands, and a person who treats favor and disgrace as his own body has handed his entire peace of mind over to what others happen to say. Laozi's valuing the body is not telling a person to be selfish, it is telling a person to hold onto that real self that does not rise and fall with favor and disgrace, rather than trading it away for a few passing words from someone else's mouth.
Four. Mencius Speaks of Two Kinds of Self-Reflection, One Healthy, One a Sickness
Around 300 BC, Mencius wrote, in Gongsun Chou I.
On looking within and finding myself upright, though facing thousands and tens of thousands, I will go forward. Mencius, Mencius, Gongsun Chou I.
Looking back at myself and finding I stand in the right, then even if a thousand or ten thousand people stand against me, I will still go forward. Mencius's self-reflection is healthy, measuring yourself against your own inner line of what you would not want done to yourself, correcting a mistake once found, never using it to press down on others, and walking forward once the measuring is done.
But the very same word, self-reflection, picking up a different ruler, becomes a sickness of self-torment. Measuring yourself by someone else's standard of success, and falling short of another's expectation, feeling like a failure, feeling guilty, feeling unworthy. The very same unfinished task, reflected on with the first ruler, sets a person freer with every round. Reflected on with the second, it locks him tighter with every round. What differs is not the act of reflection itself, it is the ruler in hand, whether it is what you would not want done to yourself, or a ruler someone else handed you.
Five. Use the Tool of Wei to See the Law Within the Heart Clearly
Part One established that wei is exactly the human-made. The outer law is wei, made by people. The law within the heart is wei too, a second layer of wei grown by carrying an outer human-made thing inward and letting it take root in one's own heart. The outer wei can be seen. The inner wei cannot.
The outer wei is like a wall standing in front of you, you can see it, you can go around it, climb over it, or wait for it to fall, and your heart always knows the wall is not you. The inner wei is like a shackle grown onto your own body, invisible, because it has fused with your own flesh, and you take that weight for something you were simply born with, never once suspecting it was fastened onto you by someone else.
This is the deepest harm law can do to the weak. Not punishing him with a heavy sentence, but leading him to accept that standard as how things ought to be, so that he torments himself, believing he deserves nothing, is not good enough, is guilty, and gives up on himself before anyone else has to lift a hand. In the twentieth century, Foucault spoke of discipline, of how the modern person internalizes a standard and comes to govern himself by it, and this reaches the very same layer the ancestors already saw, only he walked the road of exposing it, while the ancestors walked the road of breaking it and reclaiming freedom.
Six. The Contemporary Version of a Law Made by the Strong Hides Mostly Inside These Shoulds
What level your performance should reach, how far your education should go, how many properties you should own, how high a title you should carry, at what age you should marry, which school your child should attend, how much you should have saved by retirement. Most people spend a whole lifetime living for standards someone else set.
These standards are the contemporary version of a law made by the strong. It needs no legislature to pass it, no court to rule on it, it only needs culture, media repetition, and the constant comparing of yourself to others, and it quietly takes root inside every single heart. Not getting into a prestigious school feels like failure, not owning a home feels like falling short, not marrying by a certain age feels like something is wrong with you, and he judges himself with someone else's ruler, so the strong never even have to punish him, he has already punished himself first.
Why is this the deepest layer of all. Because when the strong openly make the law, at least you can still see your opponent, and still carry some grievance, still hope to turn things around. Once this standard moves inside the heart, the opponent disappears, and all that is left is an inadequate self. He no longer blames the system, he only blames himself, and the strong are spared even the trouble of lifting a hand, because the weak person has already placed himself under watch.
Seven. The Position Set by This Section, and Part Two Closes Here
This section sets the nineteenth layer. The deepest position of law sits not in any courtroom, it sits inside a person's own heart. The outer law can be strict or lenient, can be reformed, but as long as the law within the heart remains, a person is still inside a cage. True freedom is not the absence of an outer law, it is breaking the law within the heart. The method for defeating the bandit inside the heart was not invented by Wang Yangming, it was spoken by the ancestors across thousands of years, Zhuangzi speaks of no fixed self and sitting and forgetting, Laozi speaks of valuing the body, Mencius speaks of the true meaning of looking for the cause in yourself, Confucius speaks of the gentleman seeking it in himself while still measuring by a universal humaneness, and together these form a Chinese tradition, more than two thousand years old, of breaking the law within the heart.
Here, the phrase torment no one can finally be completed. Volume IV spoke of tormenting no one, and it was earlier understood as tormenting no one else. Only with this section does it become whole, tormenting no one means tormenting no one else, and tormenting not yourself. Torment not yourself sounds like going easy on oneself, but it is the opposite, it is not lowering your standards, it is refusing to use a ruler that was never yours to torture yourself with. A person can demand a great deal of himself, but that demand has to be one he himself accepts, one that agrees with what you would not want done to yourself, not something someone else stuffed into his head that he never truly agreed to. The first way lets a person live steadier with every year. The second lets him live emptier with every year.
Part Two has now walked from strength and weakness, through self-discipline, through no litigation, to this layer, the law within the heart. How law runs, and how a person can avoid being trapped by it, both now stand clear. The next part returns to the most concrete ground of all, how law treats one ordinary person, beginning with the direction of proof in a single case. Carry self-discipline, no litigation, and torment no one, and walk into the next part.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.