VOLUME VII, CHAPTER 11, SECTION 2
Where the Purpose Comes From: the Deepest Vein of the Ancestors
The last section named the book's purpose: to serve the people with all one's heart. This section traces where that purpose comes from. It does not begin with this book. This book invented nothing. The purpose joins a vein the ancestors opened thousands of years ago and handed down, generation to generation, the deepest vein in all their teaching: put the people at the root. This book only received that vein, and sank one more well into it, for this age. To see this is to see that the book stands not alone but in a long line, one late lamp lit from a very old fire.
Hear the ancestors, in their own weight. They handed down: put the people at the root, take the human as the root of all things. Set the person, the living human, at the center and the ground of everything one builds, and let nothing, not wealth, not power, not the state itself, stand above the living person it was all meant to serve. This is the root of the book's whole way, and the ancestors laid it long before. They handed down: when the great way prevails, all under heaven is shared. The world is not one man's private holding, not the property of the powerful, but the common ground of all, held in trust for all, its goods meant to reach all. This is the root of the book's returning the yield to the public, and the ancestors laid it long before. They handed down: be humane to the people and care for all things. Hold the people with a humane heart, and from there let that care reach outward to all living things. This is the root of the book's great love, near first and reaching far, and the ancestors laid it long before. They handed down: the people are the ground of the state, and when the ground is firm the state is at peace. The people are not the tools of the state but its very foundation, and a state stands only so long as its people stand secure. This is the root of the book's turning the instrument to service, and the ancestors laid it long before.
Set these together and one vein runs through them all: the people at the root. Take the human as the root. All under heaven shared, for the people. Humane to the people, caring for all things. The people the ground of the state. Every one of these puts the living person, the many, the ordinary people, at the root and the center, and bends all else, wealth, power, the state, the world itself, toward serving them. This is the deepest vein of the ancestors, older than any dynasty, deeper than any single teaching, running under the whole of their handed-down wisdom. And the book's purpose, to serve the people with all one's heart, is simply this vein, drawn up into one line, for this age. The book did not open the vein. It received it. It did not first put the people at the root. It stood on the root the ancestors laid, and built there.
Say plainly, then, in the honest posture this book has kept throughout: the book is the student, the ancestors are the masters. The purpose is not the book's discovery but the ancestors' bequest. Where the book says serve the people with all one's heart, it is repeating, in its own age's words, what the ancestors said in theirs: put the people at the root, all under heaven is shared, be humane to the people and care for all things, the people are the ground of the state. The words differ with the age. The vein is one and unbroken. The book takes its place in that line as the latest to receive, not the first to speak, and it bows to those before it, whose fire it carries and never kindled. This is no false modesty. It is the plain truth of where the purpose comes from, and to claim otherwise, to dress the ancestors' bequest as the book's own invention, would be a theft and a lie, and would cut the book off from the very vein that gives it life.
And seeing the vein, one sees why the purpose can be trusted, and why it will outlast this book. A purpose that began with one book could die with that book. But this purpose did not begin with this book. It has run, already, for thousands of years, through the rise and fall of ages, carried lamp to lamp down the long line of the ancestors to this late hour. It has outlasted every dynasty that forgot it and every power that trampled it. It has been buried and dug up again, forgotten and remembered again, betrayed and returned to again, and it runs still. A vein this old, this deep, this often proven, does not die because one late book that carried it is forgotten. It will run on, into ages this book will never see, carried by lamps not yet lit. The book's purpose is trustworthy because it is not the book's. It is the ancestors', and the ancestors' vein does not run dry. The next section lays down what this purpose, traced to its root, finally comes to: not a grand or distant thing, but one plain thing, to let real humans live as real humans, the five alive, in the human world.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.