VOLUME VII, CHAPTER 4, SECTION 2
The Four Faces Sustain One Another: No Face Stands Alone, All Four Hold Each Other Up
The last section made plain that the four institutions are four faces of one whole, whole only together. This section goes further. The four are not only set side by side. They hold one another up and complete one another. Lay one face alone, however well, and it cannot stand. Only with the four holding one another up does each stand firm. To sustain one another is this: one face lays a floor for the next, the next guards the back of the first, and the four lean on each other into one whole that holds.
Why does one face alone never hold? This matters, for people ordering the world fall into one common sickness: seize one face, take it for the whole cure, and pour everything into it, dropping the rest. Take culture alone: grow the heart, spread learning, and leave living untended, the instrument unset, the line unlaid. The heart may grow a while, but with the belly empty it cannot be kept. With the instrument still harming, the grown heart cannot even guard itself. With no line, people harm one another and no teaching can hold them. The heart grown, standing alone, leaning on nothing, cannot in the end hold up a whole world. Take economy alone: make the yield large, and leave the heart untended, the instrument unset, the line unlaid. Enough to eat, but the greed and reckoning in the heart never cured, and with surplus one goes and harms. The instrument still bleeding the people, and the large yield is seized. No line, and cunning grabbing runs free. The large yield, standing alone, cannot hold either. Politics and law alone, the same.
Take politics alone: order the instrument, set the discipline, make clear reward and punishment, and leave the heart untended, the living unmet, the guarding line unlaid. The instrument may be clean a while, but those in its seats have hearts ungrown, and power in hand breeds greed. With living wasted, the strictest discipline cannot press down a starving people. With no line that guards the people, the discipline slides easily into a tool for seizing, the stricter the crueler. Take law alone: lay the clauses fine, dense and severe, and leave the heart untended, the living unmet, the instrument unset. Heart ungrown, and the people will not keep the law, only slip through where no one watches. Living unfixed, and the people cannot keep it, hunger and cold outrunning the law. Instrument unset, and the power of enforcement falls into the hands of those who harm, the finer the law the deeper the harm. So of the four, whichever you pull out to stand alone fails for want of the other three. Each face's steadiness leans on the other three to lay its floor and guard its back. This drives out the next layer: the four must be in one place, holding one another up.
How do the four hold one another up? Look pair by pair. Culture holds economy: the heart that guards others grown, and trade need not be all cheating, the yield made large is returned to the public, not swallowed. Economy holds culture: the floor of living laid, and a person need not go against himself for a mouthful, and that heart that guards others can be kept. Politics holds economy and culture: the instrument turned to service, no longer bleeding and taxing, and the yield can be kept, the heart grown in peace. Economy and culture hold politics: the heart grown, the living full, and those in the instrument's seats are not so easily driven or lured into harming the people, and the instrument keeps its place. Law holds the three: a clear line, and the heart has a bound to keep to, the living a guard, the instrument a rein. The three hold law: the heart willing, and the law is not dead letters. The living able, and the law can be kept. The instrument placed, and the law does not become a tool for seizing. The four, two by two, lay each other's floor and guard each other's back.
Say it another way: each face is held up by the other three and holds up the other three. Culture, held by economy, politics, law, can grow the heart, and culture holds those three, for a heart set right means less cheating in trade, less greed in the instrument, more who keep the law. Economy, held by culture, politics, law, can be made large and kept, and economy holds those three, for a full living means a heart at ease, those in the instrument's seats less driven and lured, the law more easily followed. Politics and law the same, each held by three and holding three. This holding and being held, round and round, weaves a net that ties the four together: stir one face and all four answer, steady one and all four are eased. This world as one whole rests on that net. Were the four truly four separate things, this world would fall into four heaps, no whole at all.
The four woven together are not four added but one living whole, each soaked into the others, short one and the rest weaken. Four added is four boards in a row, each apart, take one and three remain, no more, no less. The four sustaining one another are not so. Take economy away, and the heart cannot hold, the instrument is easily driven, the law hard to keep, all three loosen at once. Take law away, and the heart has no bound, the living no guard, the instrument no rein, all three lose their footing. So the four are multiplied, not added, one steady helps three steady, one falls and drags three down. To sustain one another is this mutual help, this leaning on each other. It goes a step past no face may be missing: that says short one face and the whole is broken. To sustain one another says the four grow and root one another.
Take a plain image, four walls of a house. Not four boards each standing alone, but four locked together, each holding the next, four interlocked into one house. Pull one out, and the other three do not stand neatly with one gone. The other three lose their support and topple with it. So one who orders the world must never pile one wall higher and thicker and leave the other three unbuilt. One wall high and three unlaid, and that wall too will fall.
This sustaining shows clearest on the five. In a real human, keep, guard, love, mercy, heart are held up by the four faces together. Keep the rules leans on law to light the line and on culture to grow the self-keeping heart. Guard, love, mercy lean on culture to grow them, on economy to give the strength to guard, love, feel, on politics to keep the instrument from trampling them, on law to guard them from being seized. A good heart, short any face, stands crooked: with living pressed hard, goodness barely holds. With the instrument harming, goodness has no field. With the line unclear, goodness has nothing to lean on. The five alive and standing in a real human is the fruit of the four sustaining one another. Short one face, and one or more of the five cannot hold. Why must the aim of guarding the five have all four faces, sustaining one another, to be met? Because the five are grown by the four together. The four short, the five short.
This also throws back light on the earlier volumes and this one. The earlier volumes laid culture, economy, politics, law one at a time, seeming to speak each of one matter, and each was laying a patch of ground for the five: culture the ground of a grown heart, economy the ground of a settled body, politics the ground of freedom from the instrument's trampling, law the ground of freedom from mutual harm. Four patches laid, and the five have full ground to grow. This volume sees the four as one, sees how the four patches join into one whole ground, how a missing corner leaks and the five wither there. So the four sustaining one another is no floating idea. It is the real footing of whether the five can be fully grown. The next section asks: if the four only hold one another up, might a new danger rise, one face growing large on the others' support and then toppling them? Beyond sustaining, must there be a layer of checking, of reining one another in?
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.