XXVI. The Knowability of Ease: Why the Great Way Must Be Open to Ordinary People

If the Way of Heaven and Earth could be known only by a tiny few, with everyone else able only to follow blindly, the Yi could never become the Way of all under Heaven. That Qian knows through ease shows that although the Way is lofty and bright, it is never separate from the common people's daily life. Everyone can begin from loving one's kin, respecting one's elders, keeping faith, and knowing shame; everyone can likewise observe cold and heat, movement and stillness, gain and loss. Learning has its depths, but the gateway into it is monopolized by no mystery.

Master Meng said, "The Way is like a great road -- how could it be hard to know$1 The trouble is that people do not seek it." A great road can be seen by everyone; the difficulty lies not in some deliberate concealment, but in people being led astray by private desire and unwilling to seek it out. He further traced the Way of the ancient sages back to filial devotion and brotherly respect, realizing the highest Way in the daily life of the family. This is not lowering the sagely Way, but showing that sage and ordinary person communicate with one another. If a person cannot even fulfill filial devotion and brotherly respect, and yet delights in discussing what is lofty and abstruse, this is abandoning the near to seek the far.

Master Xun, by contrast, stressed that learning has its proper sequence. Though the Way can be known, a person still needs a teacher's example, accumulated practice, and single-minded concentration. Being easy to know does not mean grasping it all in a single hearing. The road is level and straight, and yet the traveler must still walk it step by step; the meaning of the classics is clear, and yet ingrained habit may still obstruct its practice. Hence ease can be approached, but not treated lightly; simplicity can be followed, but not used as an excuse for laziness. To mistake ease and simplicity for needing no effort at all is to explain the great Way by mere desire.

The Mozi hoped that every statement would have a basis, an origin, and a use, tested against ancient precedent, the experience of the common people, and the benefit of the state and its people. This demand, too, carries the sense of dispelling secrecy. If a proposition cannot be examined by others and is proclaimed on authority alone, it easily becomes a deception of the world. Though the various schools disputed over benevolence, righteousness, ritual, and music, pre-Qin thought generally valued that speech be verifiable and action be usable. That Qian is easy to know by no means rejects debate, but means that it can withstand open scrutiny and debate.

Master Guiguzi's techniques place great weight on secrecy, and have their use in diplomacy and in facing an adversary; yet if every human relation were treated as a game of opening and closing, the closeness of kin and friends would lose its genuineness. What being easy to know accomplishes is "having closeness" -- people are able to be close to one another precisely because they can understand and trust one another. If family members spend every day guessing at each other's hidden intentions, and friends guard against each other's every scheme in every sentence, such a relation cannot endure. Technique may respond to extraordinary matters, but the Way must establish everyday trust.

That the Master did not speak of oddities, feats of strength, disorder, or spirits likewise brought learning back into the realm of what human relations can put into practice. Revering ghosts and spirits while keeping a distance from them, and "not yet being able to serve the living, how could one serve the spirits" -- neither denies sacrifice, but refuses to let people use talk of the distant and obscure to escape the responsibility right before them. The brightness of the Way of Qian lies in this: what ought to be done is, for the most part, plainly evident. The difficulty is so often not "not knowing that one should be filial, righteous, or trustworthy," but whether one can carry it out when actual interest is at stake.