XLVII. Further Reflection Five: How Not to Lose Oneself Amid Change

A person often carries one worry: if everything changes with the moment, will one's integrity also dissolve away$11 This chapter's answer lies already in "movement and stillness have their constancy; the firm and the yielding are distinguished." Change has its constancy; weighing according to circumstance has its boundary. What is called according with the time is the fitting expression of one and the same righteousness within different circumstances, not the arbitrary replacement of righteousness according to gain or loss.

Sincerity and trust are constant, and yet if someone entrusts one with an unrighteous task, one cannot help him do evil merely because one has already agreed; upholding ritual propriety is constant, and yet amid famine or mourning and disorder, its forms may be weighed and adjusted; loving one's kin is constant, and yet if a kinsman has done wrong, one cannot help cover up his crime of harming others. The form may change; the root does not fail. Master Meng's teaching that "only righteousness is where he stands" governs trustworthiness and follow-through by righteousness, and does not let a minor point of conduct instead harm the greater righteousness.

The firm and the yielding are likewise so. Using firmness to remonstrate directly today and yielding to comfort someone tomorrow does not show a fickle temperament, but benevolence and righteousness meeting different needs. A physician attacks an excess condition and tonifies a deficient condition, both aiming to save life; one who governs must check violent disorder and nurture a weary people, both aiming to give the people peace. If one knows only a single method, however good the intention, it may still cause harm.

The Most High's valuing of the yielding and holding to the weak addresses a bias in the world toward preferring strength and contending to be first; it does not turn the yielding into a new coercive rule. Master Zhuang's valuing of according with things' own self-transformation breaks through self-centeredness; it does not mean a person should remain unmoved by every kind of suffering. Reading the words of the various schools, one must always examine what bias they seek to remedy and what era they addressed, and not cut a single sentence out and let it harden into a rigid rule.

Not losing oneself also depends on "what one draws close to." Under the pressure of change, a person easily becomes either arbitrary or a mere follower of the crowd. Drawing close to teachers and friends who hold to the Way can remind one of the root; preserving the classics and ritual propriety and righteousness can keep judgment from being driven only by what is immediately at hand. Tradition here is not a refusal of new change, but gives change a deep root. Only when the root of a tree runs deep can its branches and leaves bend with the wind without being uprooted.

In the end, what a person holds to is not any single posture, but the Way of ceaseless generation: not harming the public good for private interest, not oppressing the weak with the strong, not sacrificing what endures for momentary gain, not substituting empty words for actual doing. Holding to this great beginning, one's action may change a thousand times over; losing this great beginning, however much the form resembles ancient ritual, it is only an empty shell.