XXIII. "Kun Brings Things to Completion": Completion Is Not Receiving a Result, but Personally Seeing It Through

The "act" (zuo) in "brings things to completion" frees the virtue of Kun from any shadow of passivity. Kun receives Qian's beginning, and yet it is no empty vessel. A seed has the spring of life within it, but still needs the soil to receive it, rain and dew to soak into it, and time to accumulate; a governmental decree may carry good intention, but still needs officials to carry it out, resources to be allocated, and the common people to take part; a teaching may hold the great Way, but still needs scholars to recite, deliberate upon, and practice it. Kun's acting is precisely what turns possibility into reality.

Bringing things to completion first requires patience. The beginning is often a single instant; completion unfolds over time. Setting one's resolve can happen in a morning; breaking an ingrained habit may take many years. Issuing a decree can be done in a single day; restoring the people's strength requires several years. Becoming husband and wife may take the span of a wedding ceremony; the completion of the household's way lies in long companionship. If one demands, with the enthusiasm of the beginning, that completion appear at once, a person easily gives up halfway. Kun's deep bearing of things means being able to endure the repetitions, the delays, and the invisibility that occur within a process.

Bringing things to completion also requires meticulous care. The great beginning governs its overall direction, but concrete things differ from one another in a thousand ways. Tilling a field requires distinguishing soil and rainfall; governing the people requires discerning rich and poor, strong and weak; teaching others requires knowing their talent and disposition, when to advance and when to hold back. If one presses only grand principles down upon everything, without asking after the concrete circumstances, the thing cannot be completed. The "simplicity" of the Yi is by no means crudeness; it is precisely because it does not let trifling private decrees interfere that it can let each thing complete itself according to its own principle. Simplicity grasps the root; it does not omit the details.

Master Xun's discussion of accumulation best illustrates Kun's acting. Half-steps accumulate into a thousand miles; small streams accumulate into rivers and seas; a fine steed cannot leap ten paces in a single bound, but an inferior horse, given ten days' journey, achieves its merit precisely by never stopping. Completing a thing does not depend on some occasional flash of inspiration, but on steady, sustained action. People's talents differ, but any virtue that can be learned must be practiced matter by matter. Ritual propriety is not achieved merely by memorizing its names, but is formed as a bodily habit through every single act of advancing, withdrawing, and deferring. Only when accumulated over long duration does it settle into ease, transformed from an external norm into one's own inner virtue.

Master Meng said that the five grains are the finest of seeds, and yet if they are not allowed to ripen, they are worth less than wild grass. A fine seed is only a good beginning; unripened, it still cannot be eaten. If the sprout of a benevolent heart is not extended and expanded, if intelligence and talent are not put into actual practice, both are like unripened grain. Extension and expansion do not mean amplifying by mere emotion, but seeing compassion when a child is about to fall into a well, and being able to extend that same compassion to the hunger, cold, and the successes and failures of governance and punishment among the common people. To carry a single momentary feeling through to a consistent policy -- this is precisely the virtue of Kun.

Kun's bringing things to completion also carries within it the refusal to contend for credit. So many of those who actually complete a matter are not its original proposers, and their labor and merit are not always visible to others. The farmer brings the hundred grains to completion; the artisan brings implements to completion; the woman who manages silk and hemp and household affairs brings the daily life of a household to completion. If such achievements are obscured by the rhetoric of those above, society comes to slight substantial work and prize empty reputation instead. That the Yi raises up the virtue of Kun so highly is precisely an affirmation, at the most fundamental level, of the achievement of receiving and completing. Without countless silent acts of doing, no "great beginning" could ever stand at all.