Week 2, Reading 2: How Strength Turns Weak

Q [80b, 81m/b, 82t/b] Master Jia explores the reasons why the First and Second Emperors failed at sustaining their empires despite their status and the people’s readiness to be led by a single ruler. He illustrates what led a commoner (lacking a noteworthy title, impressive weaponry, and keen stratagems) to assuredly overthrow the Second Emperor and gain the people’s support. In large part, the fall of the First Emperor occurred because he took two different things as being the same. He failed to realize that seizing a state and guarding it—that attacking territory and then retaining it—required different and even opposing skills. He applied deceit, force, violence, both, while annexing territory and after he had already gained mastery of the six directions. Why didn’t he let himself dissolve into rest when his might was no longer needed? He failed to see how stuck he was inside his own perspective, unwilling to extend his short-sight into one which would welcome the wisdom of others. His desperation to so assiduously affirm his authority by exiling the practices of antiquity; his idea that creating something powerful and new meant creating it in a vacuum single-handedly—the foundation set by these strength-driven* measures ended up crumbling as though made of the tenderest fabric. There was still a chance for the Second Emperor to gain footing, the people were deeply willing to be led towards stability. Yet, he too was completely blinded by the allure of force. He missed the clear fact that his present time demanded a gentle Way. As someone so obsessed with banishing the past, he himself was out of step with the present; swamped by his past accolades out of a refusal to really look at what the present called forth. It would have been most appropriate for him to do barely anything, to stay as though in the shadows; all that was required was a light touch, one which would have bestowed upon the Qin Empire the powerful quality of adaptivity.

*Strength transforms into weakness when misaligned with its surroundings. Strength needs to be constantly evolving its qualities in order to stay as strength.

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