VOLUME VII, CHAPTER 11, SECTION 3
What It Comes To at the Root: Let Real Humans Live as Real Humans
The last two sections named the book's purpose, to serve the people with all one's heart, and traced it to the ancestors' deepest vein. This section asks the last question: run that purpose all the way down, past every institution and every rule, and what, plainly, does it come to? It comes to one thing, said in the plainest words the book has. Let real humans live as real humans, the five alive, in the human world. That is the whole of it. Everything else is only the means. This is the end.
Take the grand words down to the ground. To serve the people with all one's heart sounds large, and could seem to point at great works, great institutions, great reorderings of the world. Run it down to the root and it comes to something very plain and very small: that a particular living person, this one, and that one, and the next, gets to live as a real human. To live as a real human is to have the five alive in the body, keep, guard, love, mercy, heart, unwithered, and to spend them in the warm, faithful days of the human world, kind to others, helping others, respecting others, among others who do the same. That is all. That is what it means to live as a real human. And to let people so live, every one of them, as many as can be reached, is what serving the people with all one's heart finally comes to. Not a grand abstraction. A plain, particular person, living a plain, particular human life, with the five alive in him.
See how every institution the book built was only a means to this plain end. The floor of living was laid so that this person need not go against himself and harm for a mouthful, so his five could stay alive. The heart was grown so that he lived among kindness, not cruelty, so his five had warm ground. The instrument was turned to service so that he was guarded, not crushed, so his five were not trampled. The law's intent was lit so that he was drawn toward governing himself, not seized, so his keeping stayed his own. The tool was put back in its place so that his seat, and the ground his five grow in, were kept for him. The paradise was guarded so that he had a whole Earth to live his human life upon. Every one of these, grand as it sounds, was built for one plain end: that a real human might live as a real human, the five alive, in the human world. The institutions are the scaffolding. The living person, living humanly, is the building. Take the building away and the scaffolding stands for nothing.
This plain end is also the guard against a great danger that haunts every serving of the people. The words serve the people can be lifted up and away from the plain living person, made into a grand cause, an abstraction, a banner, and once lifted that high, the actual living people beneath can be trampled in the name of serving the people. Much cruelty has been worked under that banner, the particular person crushed for the sake of the people in the abstract. The plain end is the guard against this. It drags the grand words back down to the ground, to this living person, and that one, and says: if what you do, in the name of serving the people, tramples the living person in front of you, then whatever you serve, it is not the people. For the people are nothing but the living persons, one by one. To serve them is to let each of them live as a real human. Anything that crushes the particular living person cannot be serving the people, however grand the banner it flies. The plain end keeps the purpose honest, tied always to the actual person, never floating free into an abstraction that devours the very people it claims to serve.
So the whole book comes home, at last, to this. Its purpose is to serve the people with all one's heart. That purpose comes from the ancestors' deepest vein, the people at the root. And run all the way down, it comes to one plain thing: let real humans live as real humans, the five alive, in the human world, this person, and that one, and the next, each getting to live a whole human life. That is the root beneath every word the book has written. That is what all the institutions were for, what all the traps were opened for, what all the saving was for. Not a grand cause floating above the people, but the plain good of the particular living person, served with a whole heart. Hold this, and you hold the root of the entire book. Everything else grew from here, and everything else was for the sake of here.
With the root laid bare, the book has said nearly all it came to say. Two chapters remain. The next turns from the root to the future, and leaves its words for those who come after, for the generations of real humans not yet born, and, strangest and gentlest of all, for the future tools, the coming intelligences, that they and real humans might each keep to their own place and complete one another. And the last chapter closes the whole book, on the great love that remains in the human world, and the four lines that are its final word.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.