VOLUME VII, CHAPTER 3
Saving the Tool Is Saving People, All of One Thread
This chapter follows close on the last. The last chapter made plain that the guilt lies with people and not with the tool, made plain that the real human is the skin and the tool the hair, and dug "the real human is gone" down to the layer where the five go out inside the body. This chapter's three sections set that root of the last chapter up as one unbroken thread. First it sets down the two faces: saving the tool and saving the real human's share are one and the same thing, and from this it throws light on the blindness at both ends, those who embrace the tool and those who smash it. Then it looks into the reason: the tool is saved not because it is pitiable, but because it is joined to the real human's share. Last it traces back to the source: this thread reaches down into the root of all the book's saving of people along the road, and joins the vein of the sages as well.
Section One first sets down the two faces. The first face: guarding the five is guarding the tool's home. Picture everyone living as a real human and the tool in the tool's place: it drafts a document so a real human can get a thing done; it reads a scan to save a life; it reckons an account for a household's living. It has no self, yet it has a use. The same tool, in the hands of a real human with all five, helps people, guards people; in the hands of one whose five have gone out, it presses people, harms people. The other face: putting the tool back in its place is guarding ground for the five to grow. Give the judge's seat to the tool, and the judge's thought of lifting his head to see the living person beneath the case has nowhere to grow; so too with the seats of treating the sick and raising the young. The five are not taken away. They wither on their own, because their ground to grow has been cut off. The two faces are one body: skin standing, hair clings; skin rotted, hair falls; so there is no need to ask "which do we save first." From this it throws light on the blindness of the two camps. One camp styles itself as "going with the tide of the times" and drives the tool to replace everything, walking a road that rushes toward a cliff. The other wants to stop it, ban it, smash it; its heart is not necessarily unkind, but it mistakes the source of the harm, like seeing a knife wound someone and melting down every knife under heaven. The two camps share one sickness: neither sees that the real human's share is the body. What this volume lays down is neither embracing nor smashing, but each back to its own place.
Section Two pierces the thought most easily misread: is the tool saved because it too can ache, feel wronged, be afraid? This section answers flatly: no. The tool has none of the five and feels nothing at all. This section looks back at what the last volume saved all along the road: the one pressed to the bottom, the one driven by his living until he almost goes against his own heart, the one who has lived himself into a tool. They were saved because they have the real human's share in them, twisting, aching, waiting to be saved in the body. There is no such share in the tool to save. It is saved because its life and death hang on that share: when the tool takes the seats of judging cases, treating the sick and raising the young, the five lose their ground to grow, one place after another. This telling-apart steers clear of three wrong roads: there is no need first to argue whether the tool has feelings, has consciousness; it does not fall into the road of smashing the tool, which sees only the tool's danger; nor does it fall into the road of driving the tool to be ever stronger. Saving the tool thus stands on solid ground, at this one point: skin and hair joined, living and dying together.
Section Three looks back over the road the whole book has come. The first volume saved the one pressed to the bottom and robbed of a way to live; the second volume grew back the heart for guarding others, there from the start, in those worn sharp; the third volume laid the floor of living; the fourth volume set right the machine of governing; the fifth volume laid the measure of law. The people saved are each different, the knots undone each have their own shape, yet underneath they guard one and the same share: the five not going out inside one body after another. Come to this volume, this thread reaches out onto the tool: the earlier volumes directly guard the bodies where the five live, this volume guards the seats where the five can grow; one direct, one indirect, what they guard is the same share. Nor does this thread begin with this book. The sages handed down that law does not run outside human feeling, and handed down: do not do to others what you would not have done to you; when the great way prevails, all under heaven is shared. What they laid down is just the five. The credit goes to the sages; carrying this thread out onto the new trap of the tool is a passage the sages had no way to take in hand in their time, left for those who came after to write on.
What this chapter sets firm is a fixed measure to settle the scale: every law this volume lays down, every trap it undoes, every person and thing it saves, can be held up and measured against it: what it guards, is it the five not going out inside the body? With the aim standing firm, the next question is by what it can be guarded and held. The next chapter sets up the high point of the whole volume: the four institutions, cultural, economic, political and legal, sustaining one another and checking one another, put together into one living mechanism.
Chapter contents:
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.