VOLUME VII, CHAPTER 13, SECTION 2
The Great Love Comes Down to One Line: There Is Love in the Human World
The last section made plain that a great love remains in the human world by each lamp lighting the next, and at the end it drew out one question: this great love, passed lamp to lamp, comes down at last to what one line? This section answers that question. All the thousand words of the whole book, all that vast reasoning, all those institutions, all that lawmaking, traced to the very end, that one great love comes down to one line, the most homely, the plainest there is: there is love in the human world. These words sound like nothing special, yet they are the one place all the thousand words of the whole book must come back to at the end. All the reasoning, all the lawmaking, all the care, come down at the end to this: that this one line can stand. In the human world, there is love.
One. A Thousand Words Come Down to the Plainest Line
First see this layer: the whole book said so much, and at the end it comes down to the plainest line.
This book laid down the tool and the real human, laid down the living mechanism of the four institutions, laid down the five, laid down going back to the human world and guarding paradise, laid down the root purpose and the vein of the ancestors. These thousand words, how vast they are. Yet all of it, traced to the very end, comes back not to one more deep and subtle truth, but to a plain line even a child can understand: there is love in the human world. This does not make those thousand words light. Just the opposite: the whole vastness of those thousand words was there to guard the plainness of this one line, there is love in the human world. The reasoning laid so deep, the institutions laid so close, the care spent so hard, were for nothing else than this: that these words, there is love in the human world, can stand in this world, truly stand, and not come to nothing. The deepest truths so often guard the plainest line. The plainer this line, the more you see how heavy the care in the thousand words that guard it. The great way is utterly simple. The more a thing is at the root, the more homely it is. In the plainness of these words lies the deepest care of the whole book.
The truths of this world come to two kinds of end. One kind, the more it is said the more mysterious it grows, the more it is laid the more tangled it grows, and at the end it becomes a lofty learning only a few can understand, further and further from the days of ordinary people. The other kind is the opposite: however deep, however tangled the truths laid along the way, at the end it always comes down to a plain line that ordinary people can understand and can live by. This book walks the second way. It will not make "there is love in the human world" into a lofty mystery no one can reach. It wants only to bring it back to a homely line that everyone can feel and everyone can live. For a great love was never the property of a few wise ones. It is for every ordinary person: an old farmer who cannot read, a mother worn with toil, a plain craftsman, each knows love just the same, each can live love out just the same. So this book would rather gather its thousand truths, at the end, into a line as plain as "there is love in the human world." Only because it is plain can it land in the heart and the days of every ordinary person, and only so can it keep to its duty, that "everyone can live it."
Two. "There Is Love in the Human World" Is Where the Whole Book Lands
These words, there is love in the human world, are where all the lawmaking of the whole book lands, the last answer to that long string of "for what?"
It was laid down before: the root the whole book must guard at the last is to let people live as real humans, to keep the five from going out. And people living as real humans, the five alive, brought down to what passes between person and person, what does it look like? It is this: there is love in the human world. A person meets others with that share of kindness, helps others with that share of help, honors others with that share of respect. In this world, between person and person, there is warmth, there is feeling, there is faithfulness. So "let people live as real humans" and "there is love in the human world" are two faces of one thing: when everyone lives the five out, this human world has love in it, of itself. The thousand kinds of lawmaking of the whole book, guarding the five, guarding real humans, guarding paradise, traced to the very end, guard just these words, there is love in the human world. Guard the five, and the human world has love. Let the five go out, and the human world has only coldness and calculation left, and no love any more. So "there is love in the human world" is the one place all the care of the whole book must land at the last, and most wants to guard.
This also unties a question some may hold: the whole book spoke of so many institutions, mechanisms, laws, which seem cold and hard, tangled, nothing to do with feeling. Why does it come down at the last to a word as warm as "love"? The answer: those institutions and laws that seem cold and hard are, underneath, all for this one warm word. The floor of the economy is laid so that no one, for a mouthful of food, loses the ease to love one another. The rules of politics are laid so that the common instrument does not crush the warmth between person and person. The bounds of the law are laid to guard the order in which love can go on. The institutions are cold, but the heart that laid them is warm. The form of the institutions is hard, but the thing they guard is soft. That whole set of the book's lawmaking, which seems so far from human feeling, at the root is for the one thing in this world closest to human feeling: love. See this layer clearly, and you know this book, from beginning to end, never once left the word "love." Those cold, hard laws are only a hard suit of armor that love has had to put on, so as to stand in this world and not be bullied by this harsh and overbearing world. The armor is hard. The heart under the armor, the one it guards, is soft, and warm.
Three. This Line Is Both a Fact and a Prayer
These words, there is love in the human world, tasted slowly, are both a statement of fact and a deep prayer.
Call it a fact: this human world has love in it, as it always has. A mother's love for her child, the feeling between friends, a share of goodwill between strangers, a pair of hands held out in danger, this love has always flowed through the human world, and has never been cut off. When the whole book lays down the five and speaks of the great love, it is not making a love out of nothing. It is pointing out, and guarding, the love that already flows through the human world. Call it a prayer: the love of this human world, though it is here, is also fragile. It too can be covered over, worn away, by coldness, by calculation, by a world that harms people. So "there is love in the human world" is also a prayer: may this love not be covered, not be worn away, may it be nourished in this world and never go out, passed on generation after generation. Because it is a fact, the line stands on solid ground, and is no empty dream. Because it is a prayer, the line holds deep feeling, and is no cold statement. Half of these words points to what already is, half hopes for what is to come. The solid ground and the deep feeling are both in them.
Just because it is half fact and half prayer, these words do not slide into two kinds of lopsidedness. Take it only as a fact, say "the human world has love in it as it is," and it can run into blind optimism: not seeing that the love is being covered and worn away, thinking love grows by nature and needs no guarding. That is one side. Take it only as a prayer, say "may the human world have love," and it can run into empty imagining: as if love were only a far-off dream not yet come. That is the other side. When this book says "there is love in the human world," it holds both: it points out, on solid ground, that love has always flowed through the human world, and this is no dream. And it prays, deeply and earnestly, that this love not be worn out, that it be nourished and never go out, and this is no self-satisfaction. One hand on the fact of what already is, one hand reaching toward the hope of what is to come, and so these words stand both steady and warm: steady, because they stand on what is true; warm, because they hold a deep longing. It is just these words, solid and full of feeling at once, that are most fit to be where the thousand words of the whole book land. They do not exaggerate, and they do not despair. They only tell, as it is, the truth of the human world and the longing of the human heart.
Four. This Line Is to Be Placed in Your Hands
This line, there is love in the human world, said to the end, is not asking you to remember a truth. It is placing this line in your hands, handing it to you to make it true.
Whether this line can stand does not lie in how earnestly this book says it. It lies in you, reading to here, and whether you are willing to let it come true in yourself, and around you. If in your days you add one share more of kindness, one share more of help, one share more of respect, then where you are, and around you, "there is love in the human world" has come true. And if you pass this love on to the people around you, then this line, through you, has passed one stretch further. All the thousand words of the whole book, at the end, place these words, there is love in the human world, solemnly in your hands: not to have you believe it is a truth, but to ask you, by your own every word and deed, to let this line come true in the human world, and pass it on. What this book can do is say this line and hand it over. Whether it truly stands in the human world and is carried on, that is up to you, and to thousands upon thousands like you.
Here, what this book had to do is nearly all done. It has said that one great love as the plainest line there is, there is love in the human world, and placed this line, solemnly, in your hands. From here on, the pen must stop, the book must close. And whether these words, there is love in the human world, can go on living in this world, go on being passed on, is no longer this book's affair. It is yours. This book writing down this line is like placing a seed in the palm of your hand. Whether the seed can sprout, flower, bear fruit, and scatter new seeds, all depends on whether you are willing to plant it in your days. What those before can do is hand this seed, full of hope, into your hands. The rest is up to you, and to the thousands upon thousands after you. This line, there is love in the human world, from now on is no longer in the book. It is in your hands, in your every word and deed, in the warmth you pass to the next person. That this line lives from now on in your hands is the best home it could find. It was never meant to be shut between the pages. It is meant to walk into the days of living people. The next section is the last page of the whole book. On that page are the few lines this great love, this "there is love in the human world," has last to say.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.