VOLUME VII, CHAPTER 5, SECTION 1
The True Charge of This Living Mechanism: Guard the Root
The last chapter laid the bone of the four-part mechanism, how the four gather, hold, and check one another. This section asks the weightier thing: once it stands, what is it for? Its true charge lies not in its own fineness but in guarding the root: guard the five from going out inside one body after another, put the tool back in the tool's place, and do not let it crowd out the ground the real human's share grows in. The mechanism is the form. The charge is the spirit. Once the form stands, the spirit in it must be named.
First, break an easy error. A fine living mechanism stands, and the eye rests on the mechanism itself, how the four divide, hold, and check, how close-wrought the build. Marvel only at the build and you have looked at it wrong. This mechanism is not laid for its own fineness, not a clever construction to be admired. It is laid for one thing: guard the five, put the tool back in its place. The four divided, to guard the five's survival at the four places of heart, living, instrument, line. The four sustaining, to grow the five whole together. The four checking, so no face grows large enough to crush the five. Every stroke of the design points to this root. Cut from the root, however fine, it is only a build spinning empty. So the first thing to look at in this mechanism is not how close-wrought it is, but whether it has guarded the root.
This telling-apart is vital, for the world is full of the sorrow: a finely built institution stands, runs long, and people come to remember only the keeping of the build, forgetting why it was laid. Rules grow finer, clauses denser, procedures longer, and everyone is busy keeping the build turning, and no one asks: all this, whom has it guarded, what has it guarded? By then the institution is a machine that is its own end, and the finer it turns the farther it drifts from the root it was to guard. This volume, laying this four-part mechanism, must guard against that sorrow from the first day: say plainly on the day it is laid that it is laid not for itself but for the root. The build is the servant, the charge the master. However able the servant, it may not usurp the master's seat.
Then what is the true charge? In one line: guard the root, guard the five from going out, put the tool back in its place. This root the whole book laid down. Guard the five inside one body after another is what all six volumes saved. Put the tool back, do not let it crowd out the ground the five grow in, is what this volume lays. The two are one: to guard the five, guard the ground they grow in, and the moment the tool is pushed onto the person's place, that ground is taken, and the five have nowhere to grow. This mechanism's charge is to guard both faces of that one thing: grow the five in the body, and keep those seats from the tool, for the real humans who grow the five. The mechanism is laid for this charge, and for nothing else.
To guard the five is to guard the thread of life that makes a person a person. To put the tool back is to guard the ground where that thread lives on. Together they guard one thing: that a person, in this world, lives always as a real human, and is not ground into a shell, not replaced by a tool. All this world's institutions, at the far end, are for letting a person live like a person. Culture, economy, politics, law, the heart, living, instrument, line they tend, all fall at last on letting a person live as a real human. This mechanism twists the four into one strand toward that place. That place is its charge, its root. Lose it, and all the fine thought of dividing and checking loses its footing. As with a bridge: the fine reckoning of pier and arch and cable is all for carrying people across. With no one to carry and no far bank, the fine build hangs in the void and is no bridge. This mechanism to the root is as a bridge to the crossing.
The four faces each bear a stretch of this charge, and only together bear it whole. Culture bears the growing of the five straight, handing keep, guard, love, mercy, heart from one generation to the next, the innermost stretch. Economy bears laying a floor under the five, so no one goes against himself and harms for a mouthful, and the five are grown in peace. Politics bears keeping the real human's seats from the tool, and keeping the instrument from crushing the five: the seats of judging, treating, teaching, lawmaking, which need the five to be done right, held by a placed instrument and kept for real humans. Law bears lighting the line: where the tool must stop, that the real human's seat may not be given to it, that crossing is cast out by all, laid clear by the measure. Culture grows, economy floors, politics keeps the seats, law lays the line. The four stretches together bear the whole charge. Short one face, and one stretch has no bearer, and the root cannot be guarded.
Turn it about. Forget the charge, keep only the shell of the mechanism, and it becomes a dead thing, and may turn to harm. A mechanism of four divided and checking, not pointed at guarding the five, becomes a handsome set of rules laid over the old road of pushing the tool onto the person's place and grinding living people into shells. The form remains, the spirit is lost, as a measure that forgets it was for measuring becomes a thing to beat people with. So this section says again and again: the life of this mechanism is in its charge, not its build. The build is set for the charge. Lose the charge, and the build is empty. To guard this mechanism, guard first its charge, the root. Whoever holds it must ask, at every turn, does what I do still guard the five, still keep those real human seats? Keep that asking, and the spirit is not lost. Lose it, and the mechanism, still standing, is a shell. The next section follows: with the mechanism firm and its charge clear, where should a person, following it, go? Back to the human world. All the laying-down of law must fall home into the days of living people.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.