VOLUME VII, CHAPTER 9, SECTION 3
This Book Is One Concrete Shape of This Great Love
The last section made clear what this great love is, and at its end drew out one line: this book is exactly one concrete shape of this great love. This section makes this layer clear. Great love has no shape. It is a heart, it cannot be seen, cannot be touched. But this heart, if it is only kept in the chest, is born with the person and dies with the person, and cannot stay. It must borrow a concrete shape before it can settle, stay, and be handed down to later ages. This book is exactly the shape this great love took, in order to stay in the human world: it has taken that heart, not for itself, only for others, and word by word, line by line, set it into writing that can stay.
One. Great Love Has No Shape, and Must Borrow a Shape to Stay
First, this layer: great love has no shape, and must borrow a shape before it can stay in the human world.
Great love is a heart, and a heart has no shape. While it surges in a person's chest, how true it is, how burning hot. But if it only stays in the chest, it is born with this person's life and dies with this person's death. Once the person is gone, that heart scatters too, is gone, and cannot reach later ages. To keep this heart from scattering with the person, so it can be handed down to later ages, it must be given a concrete shape: set into writing, or turned into deeds, or set up as institutions. With a shape, that shapeless heart has a carrier it can cling to, be kept in, be passed on by. Those who come later, though they never saw the one who held this heart, can through that shape touch that heart. This book is one of the shapes this great love took: it takes that heart, not for itself, only for others, and word by word, line by line, sets it into writing, so it does not scatter with the person, but can stay in the human world and be handed down to later ages.
From ancient times to now, how many people have held a heart of great love, a heart so true, so burning hot, and yet, because it was never set into a shape, as they passed away it sank out of sight and out of hearing. People say only that the good-hearted are rare, past and present, but that may not be so: how many nameless good hearts, only because they left no shape behind, were like snow falling into the sea, leaving no trace. Leaving a shape is one way to keep that heart from being born and dying with the person and leaving no trace. Why this book had to be written, had to be set into writing, is not to pass on a name for the one who wrote it. It is so that heart of great love has a shape where it can stay and be passed on, so that people of later ages, even if they never saw the one who held this heart, can through these words touch it and take it up. A shape is set so that the heart can cross the river, can cross over to those who come later. The shape is the boat that carries the heart across. Without a boat, that heart can only be trapped on this bank, looking toward later ages and unable to cross.
Two. What This Book Sets Down Is That Heart
What this book has set into writing is nothing else but that heart of great love.
A book can set down many things: it can set down knowledge, set down skill, set down one person's fame and rank, set down a clever thought of a moment. What this book sets down is that heart, not for itself, only for others. All along the road it wrote of saving people, growing the heart, setting up institutions, guarding the five, going back to the human world, guarding paradise, and under every word and every line is that heart that cannot bear to see all living beings suffer, cannot bear to see the five go out, cannot bear to see this paradise destroyed. Readers reading this book read not only those arguments, that lawmaking. Read to the deepest place, what they read is that heart. Arguments go out of date, lawmaking changes, but that heart, not for itself, only for others, can pass through the words and warm the hearts of readers all the way down the later ages. So this book being a shape of great love lies not in how many arguments it wrote, but in its having set down that heart. That heart is what this book truly means to leave to the human world.
This is also why this book must not be read only as a book that makes arguments. If you take it only as a set of teachings on institutions, on the tool, on the human world, to memorize and to study closely, you get only its skin, not its bone. Its bone is that heart. Those who truly understand it, reading to the end, may not remember each piece of lawmaking, one by one. What they remember is that warmth running from beginning to end, that cannot bear to see all living beings suffer. Arguments can be disputed, lawmaking can be added to and cut, only that heart cannot be disputed, and there is nothing in it to add or cut. It is just there, word by word, line by line, handing itself to everyone willing to read into it. To read this book and see only its arguments and not its heart is like walking into a mountain of treasure and picking up only bricks and stones, never seeing the pearl. That pearl is exactly that heart of great love.
Three. The Shape Will Decay, the Heart Can Last
This shape, the paper will yellow, the ink will fade, the book will decay. But the heart set within it can, by this shape, be passed down generation after generation, lasting and never dying.
A book, as an object, will decay: the paper will yellow and rot, the volumes will come apart and be lost. But the heart set in the words does not die with the decay of this object. So long as there is still one person of a later age who reads these words, touches that heart, is warmed by it, moved by it, and has the same heart woken in his own, then this great love has come alive again in this later person, and carried on. The shape is a boat that will decay. The heart is the passenger the boat must carry across. The boat may decay, but so long as that heart to be carried across has been carried, stretch by stretch, into the hearts of those who come later, the crossing is made. This book, as a shape, will one day decay. But that heart of great love it has set down and carried across can, through one later person after another that it wakes, be passed on and on, lasting in the human world. This is exactly the point of taking a shape: not so that the shape itself does not decay, but so that the heart the shape carries can, by the shape, cross over to later ages.
This layer shows most how clear-seeing the one who wrote it is. Those in the world who write books mostly hope their books will be handed down and never decay, their names left for a thousand years. In that hope there is always still an "I" hidden: my book, my name, my never decaying. But this book's intent is not there. It does not ask that this one shape itself be kept for a thousand autumns and ten thousand years. It asks only that the heart the shape carries can cross over to those who come later, and come alive in their hearts. Though the shape decays, so long as the heart has crossed over, the work is done. Though the shape remains, if no one takes up that heart and no one has it woken, the shape kept is an empty shell. So, looking at this book, there is no need to worry over its decay on its behalf. That decay was expected from the start, and does no harm to its intent. What to hope for on its behalf is whether that heart can cross over into the hearts of one later person after another. This clear-seeing of "weighing the heart and not the form" is the natural outflow of that ground color, originally, not a single thing, in how this book treats itself.
Four. No Need to Cling to This One Shape
And just because of this, there is no need to cling to this one shape, this book. It is only one of the shapes that great love took, not the only one, and not the one that matters most.
For great love to stay in the human world, there was never only one kind of shape: this book is one kind, a deed done for others is one kind, a set of institutions that guards people is one kind, one person teaching that heart by word and by example to those after him is one kind too. If this one shape, this book, can wake that share in the hearts of those who come later, good. If one day it is forgotten, replaced by new shapes, no harm either: so long as that heart of great love still lives in the human world in other shapes and is handed down to later ages, this book's intent is already fulfilled. So there is no need to cling to whether this book can be handed down for a thousand ages, whether people will remember it. Clinging to the survival of the shape is, in fact, getting caught on form, losing that ground color of originally, not a single thing. What matters was never this one shape itself, but whether that heart can, through all kinds of shapes, carry on in the human world. See through this layer, and only then have you truly taken up the intent of originally, not a single thing, a great love remains in the human world.
Think this layer through, and there is also a rare ease hidden in it. Those in the world who write books and set out teachings, once the book is done, mostly fret over its spreading, fear its sinking out of sight, reckon over what is said of it. Under that fretting, fearing and reckoning is still an "I" that cannot be set down. But this book set this layer down from the start: it was written because that great love had to flow out. As for where it flows, how far, whether it can stay long, that is handed over to heaven's will and the human heart, and fretted over no more. This ease is not not caring. What it cares about is not the survival of the shape, but the spreading of that heart. So long as that heart carries on in the human world in some way, whether this book decays or is handed down no longer matters. This ease of "doing all that is in me, and asking nothing of the rest" can only grow from that ground color, originally, not a single thing. It is that ground color, landing on how one treats the work of one's own heart's blood, the stroke that shows the most skill.
Five. The Layer This Section Makes Clear
This section has made clear that this book is one concrete shape of this great love.
Great love has no shape, and must borrow a shape before it can stay in the human world. This book is exactly that heart, not for itself, only for others, set into writing. What it sets down is not knowledge or fame and rank, but that heart. The shape will decay, but the heart set within it can, by the shape, cross over generation after generation to later ages, lasting and never dying. And just because it is the heart that matters, there is no need to cling to the shape: this book is only one of the shapes of great love, and that heart carrying on in the human world through all kinds of shapes is the true meaning. This book is a shape of great love, but this shape of it, how humble, how small? It likens itself to a small oil lamp, not a savior, not an answer to everything. The next chapter goes on from here to make clear: this small oil lamp, what is it in the end, and what is it not. This book likens itself to a small oil lamp, and in this likening there is humility, and deep meaning too: it does not dare to take itself for a torch or for the sun, it will only own itself as a faint light. But just in this owning itself as a faint light lies the most honest placing it makes, of itself and toward its readers.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.