VOLUME VI, CHAPTER 2, SECTION 4

VOLUME VI, CHAPTER 2, SECTION 4

The Root of Torment, and Benevolence, Righteousness, Good Faith, and Filial Love

The last section told you that culture is a broad field, the things the last generation lived and gathered, handed down to the next. This section reaches into that field and pulls out the one thing that matters most, the one thing that can actually cure the sickness of this world, and tells it through. That one thing is a single word, character. This section first makes the root sickness plain. The root sickness of this world is torment. Torment comes from a shortage of character. And character education is the only medicine for it. Then it invites the good virtues the ancestors set up long ago, out one at a time, first the two cornerstones, benevolence and righteousness, then the two roots, good faith and filial love.

Let me ask you one thing first. The first volume lit an enormous fire. Where, at the source, does that fire start? Look back. Capital chasing profit, pushing people out one by one. People in the wrong seats wrecking the institutions. The law-blind official handing out licenses, setting a tool down in a human position. The bad people who designed the schools, driving the poor to teach their own children to cheat from the age of six. These things all look different from one another, but dig down, dig all the way to the bottom, and they are all the same thing.

It is torment. Capital squeezing a person until there is no way left to live is torment. Bad people wrecking the institutions and pushing good people out is torment. Driving a child to learn cheating from the start is tormenting the next generation. The fire the first volume lit burned that one word. This world is full, everywhere, of torment. People torment people, the strong torment the weak, those with power torment those without, and one generation torments the next.

So where does this thing, torment, come from? Let me tell you. Torment comes from a shortage of character. Think about it. A person of real character, would he torment anyone? He would not. A person with others in his heart, a person who cannot stand to see others suffer, a person who will take the loss himself rather than put another in a hard place, cannot bring himself to do a tormenting thing. Torment begins in a heart that holds no one but itself, a heart willing, for the sake of grabbing a little more, to leave another person humiliated. At bottom, torment grows out of a shortage of character.

So then, what do you cure torment with? You will probably think, with law, with management. Whoever torments, pass a law and fine him, set up an office and manage him. Let me tell you, that is walling the flood, not channeling it. You pass a law, and the tormentor slips through a gap in it. You set up an office, and the person running the office starts tormenting in his turn. The laws get thicker and thicker, the offices bigger and bigger, and the torment does not shrink. Why? Because you are only blocking at the far tip, and never curing at the root. The source of torment is a heart short of character. Leave that root unfixed and only wall off the outside, and you can wall it your whole life and never wall it all.

The one and only medicine for this sickness of torment is character education. Teach a person, from childhood, step by step, into a person of character. Once a person has character in his heart, he simply does not torment. There is no need for a law to fine him, no need for an office to manage him. From the bottom of his heart, he cannot bring himself to do a tormenting thing. That is curing at the root, truly.

And go one layer deeper. A society where every person has character, what would it look like? It would be a society with almost no need for all those laws, all those offices. Because no one torments anyone, the laws and the offices set up for nothing but to guard against torment and to punish it would sit there with nothing to do. This is a very deep position in this whole book, and the chapter on law takes it up on its own later. Arrange the institutions sensibly, give everyone character, and there is almost no need to enforce anything at all. The root of it is here, in this section. Character is the only cure for torment. And character is taught.

So then, the character to be taught, what does it consist of? None of this was invented by anyone. These good virtues, the ancestors set them out, one at a time, clear as day, thousands of years ago. All I am doing here is inviting them out from the ancestors and, in plain words, laying them in front of you again. One at a time, let me set them up for you, and when they are all set up you will see that every one of these old-sounding virtues, looked at deeply, runs down to those same three words. Not tormenting.

The first is benevolence. Confucius spoke of benevolence his whole life. And the plainest thing he ever said about it was six words. Do not do to others what you would not want done to you.

Take that line and read it again inside this world of ours. You do not want to be squeezed until there is no way left to live, so do not go and squeeze another that way. You do not want to be tormented, so do not go and torment others. You see, the virtue of benevolence, looked at deeply, has not tormenting underneath it. A person with benevolence in him instinctively treats others as people too, instinctively cannot bear to put another in a hard place. Set this one up, and more than half the torment in this world falls away.

Do not think small of those six words. They do not ask you to lay down your life or ruin your family. They ask only the plainest thing, that you put yourself in the other person's position and think for a moment. You do not want to go hungry, so you understand that he does not want to either. You do not want to be looked at coldly, so you understand that he does not want to either. Think it through once, and the hand you were about to raise to squeeze someone, to give someone a hard time, pulls itself back on its own. Thousands of years, Confucius said ten thousand words about benevolence, and the one that works best is still this plainest little act of thinking. The moment a person is willing to think this way, he cannot bring himself to torment.

Confucius said one thing about benevolence that goes a layer higher. If you want to stand, help others stand. If you want to get on, help others get on. That is a layer above not tormenting. Not tormenting is not harming, keeping yourself from putting others in a hard place. Helping others stand, helping others get on, is not only not harming, but wanting to reach out and pull people up. That heart at the end of the last section, standing up and turning back to help those who cannot get up, is planted right here, in benevolence. So benevolence has two layers. The bottom layer is not tormenting others. The top layer is being willing, on top of that, to pull others up. A person with benevolence in him can do both.

Now, righteousness. What is righteousness? It is the thing that ought to be done. Once you have taken it on, you do it, and you do not count whether it costs you. Mencius weighed righteousness so heavily that he spoke of giving up life itself for the sake of what is right. That sounds lofty, but brought down small, righteousness is plain enough. A person, what he has promised, what he has taken on as right, even at a loss to himself, grits his teeth and sees it done.

The greatest thing about a person of righteousness is that he can be relied on. You hand him a matter and you rest easy, because you know that whatever he has taken on, he will see through even if he has to sell the pot to do it. A society with many people of righteousness in it, what is it like? It is one where people dare to entrust things to one another, dare to open up to one another, dare to hand each other their backs, without having to guard at every turn and lay traps at every step. Think how exhausting it is to live in a society where no one dares trust anyone, where everyone is on watch against being cheated by the next person. Righteousness is the virtue that lifts that exhaustion, bit by bit, out from between people.

Benevolence and righteousness are the first two cornerstones of character. A person with both stands straight and can be relied on. He does not torment, and he is willing to help. What he takes on he sees through, even at a loss. Many such people, and this world grows decent and warm-hearted. And how are these two taught to the next generation? By the same old truth from the last section. Not by explaining clearly what the words benevolence and righteousness mean. It is by having a real person who has benevolence and righteousness in him, alive in front of the child, so the child sees with his own eyes what it looks like to take a loss and still not put another in a hard place, what it looks like to keep a promise even if you have to sell the pot. The child watches, watches for years, and this benevolence, this righteousness, soaks into him a little at a time.

Now the next two, good faith and filial love. One governs whether people can hold together at all. The other governs where a person's character grows from in the first place.

First, good faith. Laid all the way bare, it is three words. Your word counts. Confucius said a thing that weighed good faith very heavily. A person without good faith, I cannot see what he is good for.

Do not think small of those three words. A society where no one's word counts, where a thing promised today is taken back tomorrow, where a signed contract is welshed on and a handshake is reversed, is a society that can get nothing done. Why? Because no one dares trust anyone. You dare not trust him, he dares not trust you, and every deed has to be done on guard against the other reneging, every agreement signed while calculating whether the other will welsh. In the end fewer and fewer things can be done, because without good faith, no bridge can be built between people at all. The virtue of good faith is that bridge between people. With the bridge, things get done. With the bridge collapsed, even the simplest thing cannot.

And here you should be thinking of the most painful thing from the last chapter, the thing a later section takes up in detail. That standardized test, that school-district system, driving the poor into a corner, teaching children from the age of six to borrow an address, to fake where they live, teaching children to cheat from the start. Cheating is the very opposite of good faith. A child driven to cheat from the age of six, cheating until it is a habit, cheating until it is his nature, will find it very hard as a grown man to keep good faith at all. This destroys the virtue of good faith at the root. And once good faith is destroyed, it destroys more than this one child. It means he cannot stand firm later, means the people around him dare not trust him, means the bridge between people has collapsed another stretch. So the first thing character education must raise back up is this word, good faith. What the child must learn from young is not how to fudge his way through, not how to round off a lie, but this. Promise, and then do it. What you cannot do, do not promise. Get this one steadied, and this child will stand firm his whole life.

Now, filial love. Filial love is being good to the parents who bore you and raised you. This virtue looks like a small matter inside the home, but in truth it is the starting point of every virtue a person has. Think about it. A person who will not cherish even the parents who bore him, who raised him, who went white-haired for him, can you expect that person to cherish others, to cherish strangers, to cherish all under heaven? Hardly. A person who cannot warm to even the ones closest to him is mostly cold to the ones farther off.

Confucius said it plainly, filial love is the root of benevolence. That great tree of benevolence, the one that is willing to treat others as people and pull people up, has its root planted in filial love. Why? Because a person's ability to cherish another is first learned at home, in filial love toward his parents. He first learns, at home, to cherish the one who bore him and raised him, and then that cherishing is pushed outward, a little at a time, out to his brothers, out to his friends, out to his neighbors, out to strangers he has no tie of blood to at all. Pushed all the way to the end, it becomes benevolence.

So character education often does not begin by talking of grand things like benevolence and righteousness. It often begins from this nearest, plainest word, filial love. First teach the child to cherish his parents at home, plant that seed of cherishing another. Once the seed has taken, then benevolence and righteousness have somewhere to grow. Good faith and filial love, one reaching outward to build the bridge between people, one reaching inward to plant the root of a person's cherishing. Set both up, and a person is reliable on the outside and rooted on the inside. And a person who is reliable outside and rooted inside is, wherever he goes, a good brick in the wall of this world. The next section invites out the last two virtues, integrity and courage, and then gathers all six of them in toward the plainest place of all, toward those three words. Not tormenting.

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