VOLUME VII, CHAPTER 5, SECTION 2
Back to the Human World: All the Law Laid Down Falls into the Days of Living People
The last section named the charge of this mechanism, and drew out three words: back to the human world. This section lays them straight. The earlier volumes laid law, undid traps, built institutions and a mechanism, all of it reasoning, rule, and frame. All of it must fall back into the plain days of one living person after another, back into a meal and a dish, a dawn and a dusk, the smoke and warmth of everyday human life. Reasoning that never falls back into the human world is scripture hanging in the air. Only fallen home does the charge of guarding the five touch ground. Going back to the human world is where this volume's law comes to rest, and where all the book's saving of people was always headed.
The earlier volumes laid much: the institutions of culture, economy, politics, law, the four-part mechanism, the charge of guarding the five. Laid, these are frame, reasoning, rule. However whole the reasoning, kept only as reasoning it is scripture on paper. The home of reasoning is not in itself but in the days of living people. To guard the five is to guard the keep, guard, love, mercy, heart in one living person after another, and the five are not on paper but in the days of living people. They are in a mother waking at her child's cough in the night. They are in a craftsman handing his craft, honestly, to his apprentice. They are in a bowl of hot soup passed between neighbors. They are in a person asking himself in the deep of the night whether he did right by others today. These are the shape of living people at their days. Law laid to the last must fall back to these plain days. Only fallen here do the five have a place to rest, and the charge come to ground. Law that does not come home to the human world is a feast set out with no one called to eat it, the finest dishes gone cold.
This is the home all the book's law most easily forgets and can least afford to forget. People laying institutions and reasoning fall in love with the laying, and grow the reasoning ever finer and the build ever denser, and slowly forget that all of it was for living people. In the end the reasoning becomes a learning set up high, apart from the living under the eaves, the reasoners reasoning, the living living, the two cut off. This book, from the first, warned itself here: every line laid must be asked, has it fallen back into the days of living people? Does what it guards reach the meal and the dish, the dawn and the dusk of one particular person? If it comes not home, guards not a person, however handsome the reasoning, it is empty. So going back to the human world is not an added stretch after the law. It is the law's own end and proof: the law is laid to come home, and coming home is why the law is laid at all.
What human world does it come home to? Not some far, strange, more-than-mortal realm. The plain smoke and warmth of everyday life right before us. It comes home to three meals a day, a cup and a bowl. To the morning market and the evening cooksmoke, the crops in the field and the trade in the shop, a child's steps to school and an old man's afternoon in the sun. To the warmth of a family round one table, the closeness of neighbors nodding in the lane, the ease of friends talking of nothing. To the round of the seasons, sowing and reaping, and the goings of human affairs, weddings and mournings, welcomes and farewells. These, plain past plainness, are the human world, the ground the five are grown and kept alive on, what all this law was to guard and to send a person home to. The human world is nowhere else. It is in this meal, this dish, this dawn, this dusk. To go back to the human world is to come home to this ordinary warmth and, in it, be a real human well, live a stretch of a real human's days.
Some make light of this ordinary warmth, as trifling salt and rice, beneath mention. That is to make light of the human world. In this very warmth is the truest resting of the five. A family at one table is love in flow. Neighbors keeping watch for one another is mercy going to and fro. An old man handing his craft to the young is guarding, carried on. Honest dealing at the market, cheating neither child nor elder, is keeping, in the heart. A clear conscience in the still of the night is goodness, lighting itself. Keep, guard, love, mercy, heart are not in some earth-shaking deed. They are in this day-on-day ordinary warmth, grown a little at a time, kept alive a little at a time. Make light of the ordinary warmth, and you make light of the very soil the five live on.
These three words fasten tight to all this volume laid. Put the tool back in the tool's place, and the real human comes home to the human world. The tool holding the person's place, and the five have nowhere to grow. Put the tool back, set it to the reckoning, retrieving, working a tool should do, and the seats that were the real human's, the days that were the real human's, are given back to the real human. The tool works in the tool's place, the real human lives in the human world. The tool takes on the heavy, the repeated, the mechanical, and the real human, hands freed and heart freed, goes to do what a real human should do and live the days a real human should live. This is not driving people out of their labor into idleness. It is loosing people from the mechanical drudgery that need not take a real human, so they have strength and heart left over to grow the five and live the warm, faithful days of the human world. The tool to the tool's place, the person to the human world: two ends of one thing.
Nor is going home a retreat into the old days, a casting-off of the tool, back to the age of the hoe and the ox. The tool is a good thing. Set in the tool's place, it works for people, lifts their load, helps them get things done, and that is its good. What going home casts off is never the tool. It is the wrong road of setting the tool on the person's place and grinding living people into shells. People may take the tool's every convenience, let it plow, carry, reckon, loose them from the heavy, while they hold in their own hands, firmly, the seats that need the five and the faithful, warm days. That is going back to the human world: not casting off the good of the tool, only refusing to give the person's place to the tool. Not retreating from this age, only refusing to be replaced and hollowed within it. To take the tool's good and not lose the real human's place, to gain the ease and not throw away the warmth of the human world, this is the true and only workable shape of going home. The next section falls one layer further: back in the human world, what do real humans do, and how do they treat one another? They are kind to one another, help one another, respect one another.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.