XXV. "Qian Knows Through Ease, Kun Is Capable Through Simplicity": Ease and Simplicity Are Not Superficiality or Shortcut

At this point in the chapter comes a sentence most easily read too lightly, and yet in truth among the deepest: "Qian knows through ease, Kun is capable through simplicity." Ease and simplicity are how the virtue of Qian and Kun manifests itself in what a person can know, can follow, can make endure, and can make grow great. If the Way of Heaven and Earth were dark, tortuous, and entirely reliant on cunning and deceit, a person would have no way to draw close to it; if the achievement of bringing things to completion were burdened with endless, vexatious contrivance, the myriad things would have no way to follow it. The Way of Qian is upright, great, and shining bright, and so it is easy to know; the Way of Kun follows principle and forms its own pattern, and so it is capable through simplicity.

"Ease" does not mean carelessness, nor that everything is entirely without difficulty. Heaven's motion is vast and boundless, beyond a person's ability to exhaust, and yet it does not show itself to people through deceit. The sun and moon have their constancy, the four seasons have their order, and good and evil, gain and loss, have a principle that can be traced. The basic direction of the great Way can be grasped through human relations and daily life: filial devotion to parents, trustworthiness to friends, righteous taking, benevolence toward the people -- none of these require first mastering some arcane technique before one can even begin. The Master said, "Is benevolence indeed far off$2 I desire benevolence, and benevolence is at hand" -- precisely because the Way of benevolence sets up no hidden threshold.

"Simplicity" likewise does not mean carelessness or negligence, but grasping the root and reducing unnecessary disturbance. The Earth receives Heaven's seasons and lets the myriad things grow each according to its own nature, without issuing a separate command to every single blade of grass. Good governance establishes trustworthy laws, employs the worthy and capable, lightens labor service and taxation, letting the common people each diligently pursue their own occupation; bad governance changes its orders morning and evening, multiplies documents, and tangles names and categories, leaving people with nowhere to turn. Being capable through simplicity means achieving great effect with little private contrivance.

The words of the Most High can be viewed alongside this especially well. "The great Way is very level, and yet the people love byways" -- the great Way is level and easy, and yet people love to take deviant little paths. "In governing people and serving Heaven, nothing surpasses being sparing" -- to be sparing is to cherish one's strength, not to disturb things carelessly. He also said, "The more laws and orders are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there are," showing that more elaborate institutions are not necessarily better governed; if the root itself has lost its correctness, elaborate laws instead provide more room for cunning and deceit. Both ease and simplicity oppose letting artificially constructed complexity obscure the natural order of things.

The Confucian tradition likewise honors substance and rejects cunning. The Master said, "Clever words and an ingratiating countenance are seldom signs of benevolence," because excessive ornamentation so often separates speech from the heart. The words of the benevolent person may be plain and direct, and their trustworthiness lies precisely in the correspondence between inner and outer. Master Zeng, transmitting the Master's Way, summed it up as conscientiousness and empathetic reciprocity (zhong shu) -- few in words, broad in meaning, able to run through countless situations of human relation. That the great Way can be shown to people in near and direct language is not a poverty of content, but a clarity at the root.

The difficulty of ease and simplicity lies precisely in the fact that private desire constantly manufactures complexity. A person unwilling to acknowledge his own fault will weave together many excuses; one intent on private gain will set up layer upon layer of pretexts to conceal it. If governance takes the people's livelihood as its root, many choices can be decided clearly; if it must also accommodate the private interests of the powerful, its laws grow ever more convoluted. Hence, returning to ease and simplicity is not merely trimming away outward form, but rectifying the heart and removing private interest. When the heart is correct, speech is straightforward; when resolve is public-spirited, commands are clear.