Reducing the many

‘At the centre of the earth is a mountain. Integrity.
The noble one thus reduces the many to increase the few,
He weighs things up to balance out their distribution.’

According to Wilhelm, the noble one is involved in the redistribution of wealth, but it’s always seemed to me that there is more to it than that.

I found an unexpected new perspective while reading Sheri Ritchlin’s beautiful little book, One-ing. She quotes Shao Yung:

‘Ten divides and makes one hundred.
One hundred divides and makes a thousand.
A thousand divides and makes ten thousand.
It is like the way a root has a trunk,
a trunk has branches,
a branch has leaves.
The bigger they are, the fewer they are.
The finer they are, the more they are.
Unite them and it makes one.
Spread them out and they make ten thousand.’

Seen in this light, the ‘many’ – which can mean very simply ‘more than one’ – no longer looks like the Sheriff of Nottingham to the noble one’s Robin Hood. They’re the leaves from the branch from the trunk – or in the imagery of Hexagram 15, they might be the grains of soil from the bedrock.

The single mountain erodes and becomes the countless grains of soil; the wide open expanse of soil hides the one mountain from our view. Stephen Karcher says this Image is about ‘articulating the treasure hidden in the field of life.’

What is the noble one doing? I think he gives less of himself to the many things, and returns from multiplicity to simplicity – towards those things that are fewer, and bigger. He can complete his ‘small stuff’ and return to the bedrock, and from this unitary perspective ‘weigh things up and balance out their distribution’.

(This imagery actually reminds me of a well-known teaching story. The lecturer shows his students a big jar and a pile of sizeable rocks. He puts the rocks in the jar until he can’t cram any more in, and asks them if the jar is full. They say, of course, that is is. So then he takes out a stock of smaller pebbles and pours them into the jar, into the spaces between the big rocks, until no more will go. Now, when he asks if it’s full yet, the students are a little more wary – and sure enough, he ‘fills’ it again with gravel, and maybe over again with sand and then with water. But the ‘moral’ of his demonstration comes when he asks them how many of the big rocks he could have fitted in had he started out by filling his jar with sand – with ‘small stuff’.)