VOLUME VI, CHAPTER 2, SECTION 5

VOLUME VI, CHAPTER 2, SECTION 5

Integrity and Courage, and Tormenting No One

The last section invited out four of the good virtues the ancestors set up, benevolence, righteousness, good faith, and filial love. This section invites out the last two, integrity and courage. One governs whether a person's hands stay clean. The other governs whether he dares to step forward when the moment calls for it. With all six gathered, this section draws them in toward a single virtue, the one with the lowest threshold, the widest reach, and the surest cure. Tormenting no one.

First, integrity. Integrity is not taking what you should not take, not occupying what you should not occupy. The most important thing about a person of integrity is that his hands are clean. This virtue the chapter on politics takes up again, on its own, and heavily. Because I have to tell you something. The worst-hit zone of torment in this world is not out somewhere else. It is right inside the offices where things are run. How staggering the graft is, you will see clearly when you get to that chapter.

What is graft? Laid bare, it is a hand reaching where it has no business reaching. What should belong to the public, the money that should go to everyone, he sits in the seat where things are run, reaches out his hand, and tucks it into his own pocket. This is the greatest torment of all, because the one he torments is not a single person. It is the millions of people that money was supposed to reach.

Think about it. A sum of money that should have built a bridge and paved a road, that should have paid for a poor person's medicine, that should have put textbooks in children's hands, is tucked away by one hand. How many people, strangers to one another, who should have lived a little better on that money, are harmed? They will go their whole lives never knowing that the share that should have been theirs was quietly drawn off, by whom, in what unseen corner. That is the cruelest thing about graft. It is not like a robbery in the street, where the one robbed can see it and cry out. It is in the dark, drawing off the rightful share of millions of people a little at a time, and the ones harmed have nowhere even to cry out. So the virtue of integrity guards not any one person. It guards the millions, unseen, who that money was supposed to reach.

And what do you cure graft with? Again you will say, catch them, lock them up, whoever grafts, catch him and lock him up. Same line again. Catching and locking up is the far tip, not the root. You catch this one, and the next person to fill the seat reaches his hand out just the same. Why? Because you never taught the person, at the root, into someone whose hands are clean. Trace it to the source, and it comes back to this word, integrity. Teach a person from young into someone with clean hands, someone who resolutely does not take what he should not take. A person like that, the day he sits in the seat where money and matters are run, simply does not reach out his hand. Not because he is afraid of being caught, but because from the bottom of his heart, he cannot do the thing of tucking the public's money into his own pocket. One word, integrity, set in the heart from young, keeps any number of people who would have become corrupt officials from ever becoming them. That is worth more than catching a hundred corrupt officials after the fact.

Now, courage. When you hear courage, do not first think of the brawling, chest-beating, spoiling-for-a-fight kind of nerve. That is not the courage the ancestors meant. The courage the ancestors meant is this. Seeing the thing that ought to be done, you dare to do it. Seeing the thing that is wrong, you dare to stand up. Confucius put it most precisely. To see what is right and not do it is to have no courage.

Think about it. A society with benevolence, with righteousness, with good faith, with integrity, is that enough? Not yet. Why not? Because there are always, in this world, some people in the wrong seats with ill in their hearts, wanting to wreck a good institution, to push good people out, to reach out and torment the weak who have no power and no standing. And at that moment, if the good people all around, plainly seeing the wrong, all lower their heads and dare not make a sound, then these bad people grow only bolder, only more reckless. The bad run wild, often, not because the bad are many, but because the good dare not speak.

So this world needs, on top of those virtues that gather a person inward, this one that pushes outward. Courage. It is the thing that lets a good person, at the moment he sees the weak being tormented, sees a good institution being wrecked, dare to stand up, to put himself in the way, to say the words this is wrong. Look back at the last section, and at the person in the first volume, the one who dared carry the fire all the way here, high in character and clear of sight, the one who should be invited out to replace the corrupt in office, to take part in making the rules. For that person to go and do those things, what he leans on is exactly this courage. With only benevolence, righteousness, good faith, and integrity, he is a good person, but if he has no courage, all he becomes is a good person who keeps to himself and will not stand up. It is courage that turns a good person from keeping to himself into being willing to step out for the sake of this world. Integrity and courage, one guarding your hands, one straightening your spine. Clean hands and a straight spine. A person like that, set into any seat at all, can be relied on, and dares to take responsibility.

Look at the six virtues now. Benevolence, righteousness, good faith, filial love, these gather a person inward, raising his heart soft, thick, wide enough to hold others inside it. Integrity and courage push outward, one keeping the hand from reaching the wrong place, one straightening the spine to step up when the moment comes. The inward-gathering ones make you a good person. The outward-using ones make that good person actually count for something in this world. Without the inward ones, a person has no foundation. Without the outward two, a person has a foundation but cannot bring it to bear. All six together, and a person has both a thick and kindly heart and a clean pair of hands, a straight spine.

Now let me draw these virtues in toward the plainest and most useful virtue of all. This one the ancestors spoke of for thousands of years. From Confucius saying do not do to others what you would not want done to you, to Laozi and his teaching of not forcing things, from benevolence and righteousness, to good faith and filial love, to integrity and courage, everywhere they are speaking of it, everywhere pointing toward it. And yet, strangely, in thousands of years, no one ever took one plainest word and set it out on its own, and hung it at the very highest place. This book sets it out on its own. Three words. Not tormenting.

Look back at the six virtues just set up, and hold each one against those three words, and you will see it. Benevolence, looked at deeply, is not tormenting others, do not do to others what you would not want done to you, I do not lay on you what I would not bear myself. Righteousness is not making others suffer for the sake of your own gain, taking a matter on and seeing it through even at a loss, and not pushing your trouble off onto someone else. Good faith is not tormenting with empty words the person who entrusted himself to you, keeping the promise you made, not leaving the one who trusted you out in the cold. Filial love is not putting the parents who bore you in a hard place, learning first, on the ones closest to you, not to torment. Integrity is not reaching out to torment the public, not taking what you should not, not tucking away what belongs to everyone. Courage is, when you see someone tormenting the weak, daring to stand up and put yourself in the way, not only tormenting no one yourself, but not letting others torment either. You see, the good virtues the ancestors set up, drawn in toward the plainest place, drawn all the way in, run down every one of them to those three words. Not tormenting.

Not tormenting is the bottom stone under all these virtues. And the most remarkable thing about it is that its threshold is the lowest. Benevolence, righteousness, and the rest sound lofty, and an ordinary person, hearing them, doubts himself, feels he could never reach so high. But not tormenting, anyone can do. It does not ask you to give your life for righteousness or ruin your family for a cause. It asks only the plainest thing. I do not put you in a hard place, you do not put me in a hard place, each of us keeps to our own position, and neither goes squeezing, harming, or troubling the other. This threshold is low enough that a person who cannot read understands it and can do it. Low enough that the one picking through the trash in the third section, the illiterate old farmer, with never a day of schooling, but never in a whole life having taken the smallest advantage of anyone, always repaying what he owed, was doing exactly this. Not tormenting. He did it.

And you see, that is the most wonderful thing about not tormenting. Those lofty virtues, giving your life for what is right, ruining your family for a cause, an ordinary person meets maybe a handful of times in a whole life, and meeting them may not manage to do them. But not tormenting is something you can use, and can do, every single day, in every small thing. Not cutting in line is not tormenting. Doing business without cheating anyone is not tormenting. A small official not giving a hard time to the ordinary person who came to get something done is not tormenting. It does not ask you to do some earth-shaking deed. It asks only that in every small thing, you do not put another person in a hard place. A virtue like that is the one that truly lands on every person, and truly makes this world a little better, a little at a time.

Its threshold is the lowest, and yet its reach is the widest, and the sickness it cures is the one it hits most exactly. Look back at the whole fire of the first volume. What did that fire burn? At the very deepest, it burned torment. People tormenting people, the strong tormenting the weak, this generation tormenting the next. So the one cure for this world, at the very deepest, is those three words turned around. Teach people, one at a time, into people who do not torment. Do not torment yourself, do not tear down your own position with your own hands. Do not torment others, do not, for the sake of grabbing a little more, leave another humiliated, in a hard place, with no way to live. Do not torment the public, what you earn is yours, but what belongs to everyone you never keep back for yourself. Do not torment the next generation, do not hand cheating, greed, and torment down to your children. Set those four up, and the source of the whole fire of the first volume is pulled out.

So then, the last question. How do you teach a person into someone who does not torment? Not by writing it into a textbook and having the child memorize what the three words not tormenting mean. Memorize it however perfectly, and it is useless. It is by having a real person who does not torment, alive in front of the child, living those three words out for him to see. Letting the child see with his own eyes how a person, even at his own loss, does not put another in a hard place. How a person, even when his hand could reach and no one is watching, does not pocket what he should not take. How a person, seeing the weak being bullied, dares to stand up. The child watches, watches for years, and not tormenting stops being three words and becomes part of who he is, soaked into his bones.

That is character education. It is not on the exam. It is not in the textbook. It is in the way a real person of character, a person who does not torment, lives it out in front of the next generation. Turn back and think of your own life. Those few truths of being a person that you truly took in, where did you learn them? Mostly not by memorizing them from a textbook. You learned them as a child, watching your father, watching your mother, watching some person you admired from the bottom of your heart, watching how they treated people and did things, taking it in with your eyes, keeping it in your heart, until slowly it became the shape of you. A child does not turn into a person who does not torment because a teacher wrote not tormenting on the board and had him copy it ten times. He needs a living person in front of him, year after year, living not tormenting out for him to see. And that is exactly why AI cannot stand in for this. A machine can explain what not tormenting means more clearly than anyone, but it has no not-tormenting living body to stand in front of the child. However clearly it explains, it cannot soak into the child's bones.

So turn back once more and look at the position you are guarding in this chapter, the handing down, and see how much it matters. What it hands down is nothing less than the one medicine that cures the hundred sicknesses of this world. And this medicine AI cannot compound, because it has no character of its own, cannot do or live out a not-tormenting example for the child to see. This medicine can only be passed, by a real person of character who does not torment, one generation to the next, by hand. The next section tells you that to compound this medicine, to hand it down, to settle people, you need a place, you need a furnace. That place is the school. But what the school today should truly be doing is a long way from what most people take it to be.

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