VOLUME VII, CHAPTER 4, SECTION 3
The Four Faces Check One Another: Beyond Holding Up, They Must Rein Each Other In
The last section made plain that the four faces hold one another up, and left a question. If holding up has no restraint, and one face grows large on the support of the other three and then topples them, what then? This section lays that layer down, the most telling and deepest part of this living mechanism. Beyond sustaining one another, the four must check one another. Sustaining lets each face stand firm. Checking lets no face grow too large. The two together make the mechanism whole. Along the way, set against the Western separation of powers, we see how deep, and how new, this laying of the institutions is.
See first what holding up alone would do. The four support and complete one another, which is good. But with no restraint, a new danger grows. One face, held up by the other three, stands firm and grows large, and with no check may turn on the three, topple, swallow, drive them. Politics falls to this most easily. The common instrument, held up by culture, economy, law, once grown large, may turn and knead culture into a paint for itself, clutch economy as a purse to take from at will, twist law into a force for seizing people. Then the four are no longer a whole holding one another up, but one face large and three bowed. The support becomes the very feed of that one face's overgrowth. So holding up alone is not enough. Beyond it must be a layer of mutual restraint, mutual checking, so that no face can grow large enough to press down the rest.
This danger is no idle thought. It has played out through the rise and fall of ages. Many a world, where the four could at first sustain one another, saw the common instrument grow large on the strength of the whole, first taking teaching for its mouthpiece, then wealth for its purse, then law for its blade, until three of the four faces served one, and the world passed from a whole into one man's private holding. And the reverse: wealth grows large, buys the instrument, keeps the scholars, works the law, and the four are swallowed by one. Whichever face grows large, the end is the same: the four lose balance, the whole breaks, and the five have nowhere to rest. Support is a double edge. Used well, the four stand together. With no check to rein it, that support becomes the stuff of overgrowth. So one who lays this mechanism must never lay support without check.
How do the four check one another? Each, by its own force, reins in the others, keeping them from crossing the bound. Culture checks the three: the heart that guards others, the power to tell right from wrong, is an unseen measure. When economy would harm, politics would tyrannize, law would sink into a force for seizing, the judgment in the heart, this is wrong, is the first resistance. Economy checks the three: a living that stands on its own, a household with a floor, and a person need not bow to another, and against the instrument's driving and force's pressing, the people have the ground to refuse. Politics checks the three: the instrument turned to service, whose plain duty is to guard the people, when culture is twisted, economy plundered, the weak wronged, should come forth to guard and set right. Law checks the three: the clear line, the living measure, is the bound all four keep, culture may not teach evil, economy may not grab and plunder, politics may not cross the bound to harm, all held within the law. Each face, by its force, reins the other three, and each is reined by the other three. So no face can grow large past all restraint.
Sustaining and checking look like one help and one guard, opposite in direction, and are two faces of one body, neither to be missed. Sustaining without checking, and the more the four help, the more likely one grows large and topples the rest. Checking without sustaining, and the four eye each other, pull against each other, none stands firm, and all falls to a loose heap. Sustaining lets the four grow and stand. Checking keeps growth from becoming overgrowth. The two are one: support holds a check within it, a check holds support within it. Culture helps economy, and reins economy. Law guards politics, and binds politics. The same bond, seen from making it stand is support, seen from keeping it in bound is check. The four together are one living whole of support and check woven, each growing the others and reining the others, no face large, no face left weak. This is the true depth of the mechanism.
See here why the mechanism is living, not dead. A dead rule is a fixed frame, holding for a time, unable to hold through change. A living mechanism is that net of support and check among the four, forever balancing: a face showing the first sign of overstrength, and the force of the other three comes of itself to rein it. A face showing weakness, and the force of the other three comes of itself to prop it. It rests not on some once-and-for-all fixing but on the never-resting mutual aid and mutual rein among the four, adjusting itself, finding its balance again. This is what makes it more lasting, more whole, than any single face grown large or any one iron rule: it is a living body that finds its own balance again, not a dead frame that loosens in time and is bored through.
Speaking of checking, one thinks of the Western separation of powers. The two look alike, and are one shallow, one deep, and must be told apart. The Western separation of powers divides the three powers within one political institution: making law, carrying it out, judging by it, three powers each set apart, checking one another. That is a dividing and checking within the one face of politics, splitting a government into three so it reins itself within. That design has its own fine point, and it has held real force in guarding against the overreach of political power. Its aim is chiefly to guard against the tyranny of political power itself, lest one hand hold the whole of making, carrying out, and judging, and so it splits them to rein each other. This book lays down something a layer deeper: it divides not three parts within one face, but culture, economy, politics, and law, the four roots that differ at the root, and sets these four to check one another. The face of politics, in this book, is checked from outside by culture, economy, and law, not reined within by splitting itself in three, but reined by three other faces that differ at the root. This laying-down, four institutions apart, four faces checking one another, had no forerunner. The West divides powers, this book divides faces. The West seeks check within one face, this book among the four. There lies the difference of shallow and deep. And the difference of what each guards against: the West guards mainly against the overreach of political power within, this book guards not only against political overreach but against wealth cornering and harming the people, teaching twisted to mislead them, law sunk into a force for seizing. The West guards against overgrowth within the one face of politics, this book against overgrowth in any of the four. What is guarded being wider, what is divided runs deeper: not one face into three, but the whole into four. So the same four words, divide and check, fall in the West within one face, and in this book among the four faces. One is a fineness within a political system, one a remaking of the whole world's frame. Know this, and you will not take this book's four-faced check for an Eastern copy of the separation of powers.
This living mechanism of four faces sustaining and checking one another joins the ancestors' vein and lays what had no forerunner. The ancestors long held the wisdom of mutual generation and mutual overcoming, the five phases each generating and each overcoming the next, support and check in one body, an old and single seeing. This book, laying the four faces to sustain and check one another, joins that vein in form, not spun from nothing. Only the ancestors did not, in their day, set culture, economy, politics, law plainly into four institutions, each standing on its own, sustaining, and checking. This book takes up that old seeing of mutual generation and overcoming, sets it on the four faces, and makes a living mechanism of four apart, checking one another. Its form joins the ancestors' vein. Its stroke has no forerunner. The next section carries it on: what, truly, is the charge of this living mechanism?
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.