XXVIII. Ease and Simplicity Do Not Reject Complexity, but Refuse to Be Enslaved by It

The affairs of the world are inherently complex. Mountains and rivers each have their own configuration; human feeling has ten thousand forms; matters of governance pull upon one another; the images of the hexagrams stir one another into motion. The Yi never denies complexity -- otherwise there would be no need for sixty-four hexagrams and three hundred eighty-four lines. The meaning of ease and simplicity is not to delete complex reality, but to grasp the fundamental relations within complexity, so that a person can know and can act.

Treating illness requires discerning the pattern of symptoms; governing a state requires observing custom; discussing warfare requires examining strength and weakness -- none of these can be handled by a single formula covering every situation. And yet the root of discerning symptoms is preserving life; the root of observing custom is giving the people peace and achieving order; the root of examining strength and weakness is avoiding harm and achieving victory. If one forgets the root, the more details there are, the more one is lost. Simplicity is like the plumb-line and ink-marker, giving the ten thousand particulars a standard; ease is like a bright lamp, keeping one from losing direction amid every twist and turn.

The changes of the Sunzi's art of war are extremely numerous, and yet its guiding thread is knowing the enemy and knowing oneself, avoiding strength and striking weakness, achieving victory by adapting to the enemy. The concrete deployment cannot be fixed in advance, and yet the fundamental judgment remains clear. Master Guiguzi's arts of alliance and counter-alliance are likewise manifold in their changes, and yet take discerning feeling, examining configuration, and knowing speech as essential. That the arts of the various schools can be learned at all always depends on the guiding thread governing the particulars. Complexity without a guiding thread is mere disorder; complexity with a guiding thread is true subtlety.

A person's inner heart, too, can use complexity to evade a simple responsibility. Knowing full well that one ought to apologize, one instead repeatedly analyzes the other party's fault; knowing full well that one ought not take something, one instead discusses many exceptions; knowing full well that one ought to study diligently, one keeps searching endlessly for a better method. Complex thought is sometimes necessary, but sometimes it is merely desire delaying action. Being easy to know demands seeing the plainest righteousness clearly; being simple to follow demands taking the very next step first. The Way of Qian and Kun is vast and great, and yet it never shelters indecision.

Conversely, mistaking crudeness for simplicity is equally dangerous. Facing famine and saying only that the people should work harder, facing litigation and saying only that both sides should each yield a little, facing differences in talent and examining everyone by the very same measure -- this is not simplicity, but laziness. True simplicity comes from a summary drawn after thorough observation, one that can still accommodate difference; crude simplicity refuses observation altogether, covering incompetence with an empty phrase.

Ease and simplicity therefore demand that lofty brilliance and the constant mean (zhongyong) be joined together. One who is loftily brilliant sees the whole; one who follows the constant mean carries out daily practice. Loftiness without grounding easily turns into abstruse talk; daily practice without a view of the whole easily turns into mere triviality. That the noble person "reaches the utmost of loftiness and brilliance while following the constant mean" is precisely a going back and forth between the vast and the near at hand. The principle of Heaven and Earth does not lie outside daily life, and the affairs of daily life, too, can lead through to Heaven and Earth.