VOLUME VI, CHAPTER 5, SECTION 3

VOLUME VI, CHAPTER 5, SECTION 3

That Contrast That Makes Your Scalp Crawl, the Representatives of the Law Turn Out to Be Illiterate in the Law

The two sections before set the true nature of the law upright, its intent is to protect the people, it is a living ruler that leads people to keep themselves in check, read the intent, not the letter. This section takes you to see a contrast that makes your scalp crawl. The ones who in reality hold this ruler, the representatives of the law, the ones who should understand the law best, turn out, so many of them, to be the ones illiterate in the law. And this illiteracy in the law, in their hands, is far more fearful than an ordinary person's, because in their hands is pinched the ruler that decides a person's life or death.

Let me first say clearly, in this chapter, who are called illiterate in the law. It is not the ordinary person who never read the law. An ordinary person not knowing the letter of the law is only not knowing the letter, and that is a small matter, and no harm. The illiterate in the law that this chapter speaks of is another kind. It is the ones who read the letter of the law until it flowed, every clause at their fingertips, every procedure walked without a seam, and yet in their hearts there is not the living intent of the law, protecting people. This kind, the more letters they know, the more thoroughly illiterate in the law they are.

Why is knowing more letters being more thoroughly illiterate? Because the root of the law is the intent, protecting people, and the letters are only the surface. To read only the letter and lose the intent is to have grasped the surface and lost the root. The true literate in the law is the one who reads the intent, who through the letters sees the protecting of people underneath. The one who reads only the letter, however many clauses he can recite, has lost the root, and is, at the bone, illiterate in the law. It is like a physician who has memorized every line of the pharmacopoeia and forgotten that medicine is to save lives, and holding to the dead lines, doses a patient to death, and the better he knows the lines, the more people he kills. That is not a good physician, that is a killer who has memorized the book. The one illiterate in the law is exactly such a killer who has memorized the book.

Now let me point out that contrast that makes your scalp crawl. The ones who in reality hold this ruler of the law, the ones who represent the law, who should understand the law best, the ones who make the rulings, who carry out the enforcement, so many of them, turn out to be exactly this kind, illiterate in the law. They read the letter until it flowed, and lost the intent clean. They take this living ruler that was meant to protect people and use it as a dead measure to harm people.

Think how frightening this contrast is. The one you would least expect to be illiterate in the law is exactly the representative of the law. The ordinary person expects that the one sitting up there making the ruling, the one carrying the law out, must understand the law best, must hold the intent of the law, protecting people, most firmly. And in fact, so many of them hold only the dead letter, and in their hearts there is no protecting of people at all. What decides your case is not whether you were, in the intent, harmed or protected, it is whether, by the dead letter, you are over the line or not. This is where the scalp crawls. The one meant to protect you, the ruler in his hand meant to protect you, turns out to read only the dead letter, and can, by the dead letter, turn around and harm you, and feel, all the while, that he did his job right, walked the procedure, went by the book.

Let me take you back to the last section's no-stopping example, and set it in this kind's hands, and you feel it at once. That good man who pulled over to carry a dying person in to be saved comes before an illiterate-in-the-law. What does the illiterate-in-the-law see? He sees the dead letter, no stopping here, and he sees that you stopped, and so you are over the line, and he fines you, and may even, because you obstructed the road, add a heavier charge. He fixes his eyes on the dead letter, and the living intent under it, that you saved a life, that you kept exactly the law's intent of protecting people, he does not see at all, does not care at all. In his hand the ruler measures you over the line, clean, no room to argue. And he feels he did right, went strictly by the rule, and there is no fault in him. This is the illiterate-in-the-law. In his hand the ruler that was meant to protect people has measured a life-saving good man into a criminal.

And an ordinary person being illiterate in the law harms no one, but this kind being illiterate in the law is a thing that costs lives. Why? Because in his hand is pinched a most fearful thing, the power to decide a person's life or death. An ordinary person reads the letter wrong, and at most he himself takes a small loss. But this representative of the law reads the intent away and holds to the dead letter, and the ruling he makes, the enforcement he carries out, decides whether a person keeps his home or loses it, keeps his freedom or loses it, keeps his good name or loses it, and in the heaviest cases, keeps his life or loses it. In his hand is pinched a person's road to life and road to death. His one thought toward the dead letter, and away from the intent, can, lawfully, by the book, with the procedure complete, drive a living person to a broken home, to lost people, to death.

This is why this kind's illiteracy in the law makes the scalp crawl more than anything. It is not that he is illiterate, it is that he is illiterate and holds the power over life and death besides. He holds the ruler that decides a person's fate, and in his heart there is no intent of protecting people, only the dead letter. So the ruler in his hand no longer protects people, it harms people, and harms them lawfully, by the book, with no fault to be found. A person harmed by him has nowhere even to reason it out, because everything he did was by the book, the procedure complete, and on the surface there is not a flaw. This is the most fearful harm in this world, harm done wearing the full skin of the law.

Then you will surely ask, these representatives of the law, are they born bad, born wanting to harm people? Here, the same as the fourth chapter, I have to hold your fire back first. They are not born bad. Look at how this kind came to be. He went to school, and what he learned was the letter of the law, clause by clause, case by case, procedure by procedure, and he was tested on the letter, and promoted by the letter, and in the whole of it, no one ever earnestly taught him that under these letters there is a living intent, protecting people. He was raised, from the start, into one who reads the letter. This joins straight back to the second chapter, that education gone wrong, teaching only the letter, only the technique, and not growing the character, the heart, underneath. This kind is exactly a product of that education gone wrong, his head stuffed full of the letter of the law, and that leg of character, of the heart, that reads the intent and holds the protecting of people, no one ever grew for him. So he is not born bad, he is raised crooked, raised into one who has only the letter and not the intent.

See this, and you understand why, come the later half of this chapter, the first step is still not to strike, but to save. This kind illiterate in the law, in his hand the ruler harms people, and the account of the people he harmed, not one cent of it will be let slide. But he himself is also one raised crooked by that education gone wrong, one whose leg of character no one grew, and he too is a person to be saved, to be reforged. To strike him, drag him down, is no use, for that education gone wrong is still there, and it raises crop after crop of the letter-reading illiterate-in-the-law just the same. What is to be undone is that mechanism which raises people into the illiterate-in-the-law, and that thought in his hand which reads the dead letter and loses the intent, not the striking of these people, one by one, whom the mechanism raised crooked.

So this section nails down for you this contrast that makes the scalp crawl, the representatives of the law, so many of them, are the ones illiterate in the law, reading the letter and losing the intent, and in their hands, the ruler that was meant to protect people turns into a knife that harms people, and harms lawfully, by the book. And this kind's illiteracy in the law costs lives, because in his hand is pinched a person's road to life and road to death. But he too is one raised crooked, a person to be saved. The next section takes you down to the ground, to see how many there are of this kind, everywhere, and how that thought in the hand of each, toward the dead letter and away from the intent, holds a person's very road to life or death.

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