Whose Failing Is 鄙薄貪懦? The Hardened 局 and the Sealing of the Mind-Will

獨行篇 (Dokhaeng-pyeon) × 壽世保元 (Suse Bowon) · the 局·面·局回 cycle · Part One 〔局 — Where One Stands〕

Introduction

In Yi Je-ma’s (李濟馬) account of the human person, 鄙薄貪懦 (bibaktamna—the four names of moral self-abandonment: the mean [鄙], the cowardly [懦], the shallow [薄], and the greedy [貪]) is commonly read as four kinds of inferior person, a separate species (別種) of other set against the self. Yet this reading misses the place the Gyeokchigo (格致藁, Yi Je-ma’s foundational philosophical work) assigns to them. 鄙薄貪懦 is not a separate species of wrongdoer but the name of one who has himself discarded (棄, gi—to throw away) even the very virtue he was born least endowed with; it is one possibility latent in every person—the case in which the 心地淸濁 (simji cheongtak—the clarity and turbidity of the mind-will) has tilted toward turbidity. Its essence lies not in the magnitude of desire but in an epistemic sealing-off: the inability to see one’s own mind-will clearly. This is what the present essay sets out to show from the standpoint of 〔局〕.

The axis of analysis is the 局/場/面 (guk/jang/myeon) fluid ontology. 局 is the active configuration each person already stands in, embodied before any encounter; 場 is the relational space generated when two 局 collide; 面 is the contact membrane where two 局 actually touch. Of these three strata, 場 and the seeing (察; 眼孔, the “eye-aperture”) that occurs within it were treated in two earlier papers (Choi Jang-hyeok, “Jang-yeok Baejeong”; Choi Jang-hyeok, “Angong”). The present series therefore sets 場 aside as a non-axis and treats only 局 and the 面 that 局 produces, beginning at the first position—the inside of where 局 stands. It asks first what 鄙薄貪懦 is within a single person.

局 and 面, however, cannot be cut apart. 面 is not an independent domain but the manifestation of a hardened 局, and—as will be seen—the very definition of 鄙薄貪懦 is already a relational term (關係語). The series therefore does not chop 局, 面, and 局回 (gukhoe—the return of 局) into stages, but composes them as a single revolution, illuminating one hardened 局=面 from three positions in turn. Part One is the first of these.

1. What Has Been Discarded — The Definition of 鄙薄貪懦

Everything in reading 鄙薄貪懦 turns on a single character. The Sadan-ron (四端論, “Discourse on the Four Beginnings”) states:

人趁心慾有四不同 棄禮而放縱者名曰鄙人 棄義而偸逸者名曰懦人 棄智而飾私者名曰薄人 棄仁而極慾者名曰貪人 Among those who follow the desiring mind there are four differences: he who discards ritual propriety (禮) and gives himself to license is the mean man (鄙人); he who discards rightness (義) and steals ease is the cowardly man (懦人); he who discards wisdom (智) and adorns his private interest is the shallow man (薄人); he who discards benevolence (仁) and pushes desire to its limit is the greedy man (貪人).

That character is 棄 (gi, to discard). The mean man is not one who lacks 禮 but one who has discarded 禮 and turned to license; the greedy man is not one deficient in 仁 but one who has discarded 仁 and exhausted desire. This is not absence (缺如) but active abandonment: 鄙薄貪懦 are not those who never possessed, but those who possessed and threw away.

The Sasang Chobon-gwon (四象初本卷) fixes the constitutional types here: 鄙 is the 太陽人 (Taeyang type), 懦 the 少陰人 (Soeum), 薄 the 少陽人 (Soyang), 貪 the 太陰人 (Taeum). And the discarded virtue is not arbitrary. The 禮 abandoned by the Taeyang, the 義 by the Soeum, the 智 by the Soyang, the 仁 by the Taeum—each is precisely the virtue that constitution is born weakest in and most obliged to cultivate. 鄙薄貪懦, then, is the name of one who has discarded even the virtue in which he was constitutionally most deficient.

The Dokhaeng-pyeon (獨行篇, the earliest-composed text of the Gyeokchigo) records the boundlessness toward which that abandonment runs: the desiring-mind of the mean man knows no satiety (無厭), the private-mind of the shallow man no end (無窮), the dissolute-mind of the greedy man no limit (無極), the idle-mind of the cowardly man no rest (無歇). Bae Yeong-sun (2012) reads the 衆人 (jungin—the common many) as those who have forsaken their own original nature, and 鄙·薄·貪·懦 as biases toward power, fame, wealth, and rank respectively; he argues that this anthropology exposes the one-sidedness of the assumption that reduces Sasang medicine to a medicine of constitutions alone. Sasang medicine, on this reading, is a typology of the human person before it is a medicine of bodily types.

2. Not a Separate Species but the Extreme of Turbidity — The Clarity and Turbidity of the Mind-Will

Is this discarding self, then, a different kind of human being from me? The Sadan-ron answers unambiguously: no.

太少陰陽之臟局短長四不同中有一大同天理之變化也 聖人與衆人一同也 鄙薄貪懦之心地淸濁四不同中有萬不同人欲之濶狹也 聖人與衆人萬殊也 In the long-and-short of the visceral 局 of the four types, within their four differences there is one great sameness—the transformation of Heaven’s principle; here sage and common man are wholly one (一同). In the clarity-and-turbidity of the mind-will of 鄙薄貪懦, within their four differences there are ten-thousand differences—the breadth and narrowness of human desire; here sage and common man diverge ten-thousandfold (萬殊).

In the long-and-short of the visceral 局 (the constitutional structure), within the four differences there is one great sameness (一大同), so that sage and common man are of a kind (一同). In the clarity-and-turbidity of the mind-will, within the four differences there are ten-thousand differences (萬不同), so that sage and common man part into ten-thousand branches (萬殊). The crux is that the two axes differ in kind: the long-and-short of the visceral 局 is fixed endowment (天稟) and does not change, whereas the clarity-and-turbidity of the mind-will is variable with the breadth and narrowness of human desire.

Yi Je-ma locates the responsibility for that variability not in talent but in the mind. The visceral principle (臟理) and the talents (才能) of every common person are identical to the sage’s; for one so endowed to say “I have no talent” is no crime of talent but a crime of the mind (心之罪). 鄙薄貪懦 therefore arises neither from a different set of viscera nor from a different set of talents. It is merely the extreme tilted toward turbidity upon a single spectrum—the spectrum of the mind-will’s clarity and turbidity—and that spectrum is the ground on which all persons stand together. It is a difference of degree, not of kind: here is the first ground for holding 鄙薄貪懦 to be a possibility of every person.

Yi Je-ma structures this variability through two sources:

浩然之氣出於肺脾肝腎也 浩然之理出於心也 The flood-like ki (浩然之氣) issues from the lungs, spleen, liver, and kidneys; the flood-like principle (浩然之理) issues from the mind.

When the ki of the four viscera—benevolence, rightness, propriety, wisdom (仁義禮智)—is expanded and filled out (擴充), the flood-like ki issues from the viscera; when the desire of the single mind that is 鄙薄貪懦 is clearly discerned (明而辨之, myeong-i byeonji—to discern it clearly), the flood-like principle issues from the mind. The problem of 鄙薄貪懦 belongs not to the visceral dimension but to the dimension of mind, and its remedy lies not in altering the viscera but in seeing the desire of one mind clearly. This 明而辨之 becomes the key that later unlocks the sealing.

3. How 局 Hardens — The Deviant Mind and the Indolent Mind

By what mechanism does the mind-will tilt toward turbidity? In the language of the fluid ontology: how does a 局 that originally flowed harden into a solid? The Seongmyeong-ron (性命論, “Discourse on Nature and Destiny”) divides the person into four strata and assigns the lower two to the offices of knowing (知) and doing (行). The 頷臆臍腹 (jaw, chest, navel, abdomen) is the place that enacts knowing, directed toward broad penetration (博通); the 頭肩腰臀 (head, shoulders, waist, buttocks) is the place that enacts doing, directed toward solitary right conduct (正行·獨行). In each place lurks a mind that ruins it.

人之頷臆臍腹邪心無雙也 人之頭肩腰臀怠心無雙也 In a person’s jaw-chest-navel-abdomen the deviant mind (邪心) is without equal; in the head-shoulders-waist-buttocks the indolent mind (怠心) is without equal.

In the 頷臆臍腹 reside the deviant minds (邪心, sasim)—arrogance, conceit, boastfulness, ostentation (驕·矜·伐·夸); in the 頭肩腰臀 reside the indolent minds (怠心, taesim)—seizing, extravagance, sloth, theft (奪·侈·懶·竊). The way these two minds ruin their native capacities Yi Je-ma records in exact parallel:

頷臆臍腹之中 自有不息之知 如切如磋 而 驕矜伐夸之私心卒然敗之 則自棄其知而不能博通也 頭肩腰臀之下 自有不息之行 赫兮晅兮 而 奪侈懶竊之慾心卒然陷之 則自棄其行而不能正行也 Within the jaw-chest-navel-abdomen there is of itself an unceasing knowing, as if cut and polished; yet when the private mind of arrogance-conceit-boastfulness-ostentation abruptly defeats it, one discards one’s own knowing and cannot broadly penetrate. Beneath the head-shoulders-waist-buttocks there is of itself an unceasing doing, radiant and bright; yet when the desiring mind of seizing-extravagance-sloth-theft abruptly engulfs it, one discards one’s own doing and cannot rightly act.

The unceasing knowing (不息之知) collapses under the deviant mind, so that one discards one’s own knowing (自棄其知) and cannot penetrate broadly; the unceasing doing (不息之行) collapses under the indolent mind, so that one discards one’s own doing (自棄其行) and cannot act rightly. Here too the decisive verb is again 棄, to discard. A 局 hardens not because something is taken from it but because it throws something away itself: the same hand that discarded a virtue in §1 here discards its own knowing and doing. The 全好 (jeonho—wholly favoring one disposition so that its opposite withers) structure of the Hwakchung-ron (擴充論) accelerates this hardening. The 局 that flowed becomes a solid.

Here one pairing may be set down in advance. That the Dokhaeng-pyeon pairs 鄙薄貪懦 with 忠信廉解 (chungsin-yeomhae—loyalty, trust, integrity, discernment) in a relation of mutual constitution (互爲, howi) is because the two are not separate persons but two states of one 局. Loosened and flowing, it is 忠信廉解; hardened and halted, it is 鄙薄貪懦—a question of which way the same 局 hardens. How a hardened 局 strikes a flowing one—the actual workings of that 互爲—belongs to 〔面〕.

4. The Essence — Failing to See One’s Own Mind-Will

Now to the essence. Is the core of 鄙薄貪懦 the magnitude of desire? No. The core is the sealing that fails to see that desire. The Yuryak (儒略) records the way the four minds occlude cognition in a fourfold correspondence:

私心昧也 慾心闇也 放心窒也 逸心罔也 昧心昧學也 闇心闇辨也 窒心窒問也 罔心罔思也 The private mind is dim (昧), the desiring mind dark (闇), the dissolute mind blocked (窒), the idle mind ensnared (罔). The dim mind dims learning (昧學); the dark mind darkens discernment (闇辨); the blocked mind blocks inquiry (窒問); the ensnared mind ensnares thought (罔思).

The private mind is dim, the desiring mind dark, the dissolute mind blocked, the idle mind ensnared; and that darkness occludes, in turn, learning, discernment, inquiry, and thought (學·辨·問·思). 學辨問思 are precisely the four roads of the investigation of things and the extension of knowledge (格物致知, gyeongmul-chiji); the mind of 鄙薄貪懦 seals all four gates to knowing at once. The pattern of the sealing converges uniformly upon the self (自己): it slights the affairs of the world and weighs only its own; it covets the world’s things and holds its own cheap; it takes willful overreach (橫行) as the mind’s pleasure and self-abandonment as the body’s ease.

The decisive point is that this sealing does not occlude only the outside. The flood-like principle, as seen above, “issues when the desire of one mind is clearly discerned (明而辨之).” Yet one item in the Yuryak’s sealing is precisely the sealing of that discernment—闇辨, the darkening of discernment. The 鄙薄貪懦 person cannot clearly discern even the direction of his own mind-will, even the identity of his own desire. This is the essence of 鄙薄貪懦: not that desire is large, but that the eye that would see the desire has been closed by that very desire. When a 局 hardens into a solid, the first thing to harden is the gaze that sees oneself.

In Closing — And Yet, 希聖

But the sealing is a state, not a fate. The Sadan-ron leaves a single road through the midst of the ten-thousand differences:

太少陰陽之短長變化一同之中有四偏 聖人所以希天也 鄙薄貪懦之淸濁濶狹萬殊之中有一同 衆人所以希聖也 In the one-sameness of the changing long-and-short of the four types there are four partialities; this is why the sage aspires to Heaven (希天). In the ten-thousand differences of the clarity-turbidity and breadth-narrowness of 鄙薄貪懦 there is one sameness; this is why the common man aspires to sagehood (希聖).

As the sage aspires to Heaven (希天), the common man aspires to sagehood (希聖, huiseong) through the one sameness (一同) that lies within the ten-thousand differences of 鄙薄貪懦. Even to the one standing at the far end of those differences, at the most turbid position, that gate does not close. As the Seongmyeong-ron insists again and again, to escape foolishness (免愚) and to escape unworthiness (免不肖) rests wholly with oneself (在我).

The 局 has hardened, yet in the end it has not closed. The sealing is a state, not a nature; 鄙薄貪懦 is not a separate species of other but one state of every person who has discarded even his constitutionally weakest virtue. This is the whole of 鄙薄貪懦 seen from where 〔局〕 stands.

But a hardened 局 does not live alone. So long as its definition is the relational term of discarding propriety, rightness, wisdom, and benevolence (棄禮·棄義·棄智·棄仁), the moment a 局 stands it must touch someone. The next part, 〔面〕, examines the contact membrane this hardened 局 produces—the place where, once 局 stands, it must touch and must strike.

Supplementary Note · The Confusion of Graphs (字形) — The Limits of Lim Byeong-hak’s (2022) 怠心 Fixation

Stepping aside from the 局 argument of the main text, one prior study concerning the constitutional attribution of 鄙薄貪懦 deserves separate treatment. It bears no weight on the argument of 局 itself, but it is a knot worth settling while 鄙薄貪懦 is under discussion.

The Dokhaeng-pyeon, the earliest-composed text of the Gyeokchigo, records the minds of the 鄙薄貪懦 persons thus:

鄙者之事功 懦悝而無禮之奪心 無時無也 懦者之材力 卑劣而無義之僭心 無時無也 貪者之用心 陋醜而不仁之橫心 無時無也 薄者之行身 苛小而不智之驕心 無時無也 In the mean man’s accomplishment there is, at all times, the seizing-mind (奪心) of imprudence and impropriety; in the cowardly man’s capacity, the usurping-mind (僭心) of meanness and unrightness; in the greedy man’s intent, the overbearing-mind (橫心) of vileness and unbenevolence; in the shallow man’s conduct, the arrogant-mind (驕心) of pettiness and unwisdom.

That is, the mean man (太陽人) always bears the seizing-mind (奪心) of impropriety; the cowardly man (少陰人) the usurping-mind (僭心) of unrightness; the greedy man (太陰人) the overbearing-mind (橫心) of unbenevolence; the shallow man (少陽人) the arrogant-mind (驕心) of unwisdom. Lim Byeong-hak (2022) holds that these four minds “were later expanded and fixed as the 怠心 of the Dongui Suse Bowon (東醫壽世保元).” He himself, however, appends the caveat that the Dokhaeng-pyeon’s constitutional assignment (鄙 = 太陽人, and so on) “differs” from the 怠心 assignment in the Dongui Suse Bowon, where the 太陽人 takes 竊心, the 少陽人 懶心, the 少陰人 奪心, and the 太陰人 侈心. The present essay holds that this difference is not a mere caveat but undoes the developmental fixation itself, on two grounds.

First, the collation of the characters does not match. The four characters of the Dokhaeng-pyeon are 奪·僭·橫·驕, whereas the 怠心 as systematized in the Dongui Suse Bowon is 奪·侈·懶·竊 and the 邪心 is 驕·矜·伐·夸. Set the four against the 怠心 and only one—奪—appears there at all. The 僭 of the cowardly man and the 橫 of the greedy man vanish altogether, present in neither the 怠心 nor the 邪心, and the 驕 of the shallow man belongs not to the 怠心 but to the 邪心—whose 驕心 is the 太陰人’s, so that it is constitutionally at odds with the Dokhaeng-pyeon’s shallow man (少陽人) as well. Even the sole shared character, 奪, splits by constitution: the 奪 of the Dokhaeng-pyeon belongs to the mean man (太陽人), but the 奪心 of the 怠心 belongs to the 少陰人—and this very mismatch is the one Lim himself noted in flagging the “difference.” If three of the four characters drop out of the 怠心 and the remaining one splits by constitution, the mapping “the four minds of the Dokhaeng-pyeon were fixed as the 怠心” already fails at the level of the graph.

Second, even the same 奪 points to a different dimension. The Dongui Suse Bowon places the 怠心 in the 行其行 of the 頭肩腰臀—that is, in the dimension of 獨行 (destiny, 命)—and pairs the 奪心 with insight (識見), defining it as the corruption thereof: a mind that bends received knowledge to its own intent and conceals its sources so as to seize others’ insight and repute. The 奪心 of the Dokhaeng-pyeon, by contrast, is the 奪 of impropriety lodged in the mean man’s accomplishment—the 奪 issuing from 棄禮, the discarding of propriety. The 奪 that seizes insight in the seat of knowing and the 奪 that hijacks an undertaking in the seat where propriety has been discarded share only the graph; their provenance differs. That the Dokhaeng-pyeon wrote 奪心 for the mean man is a borrowing of the graph 奪心 for the modality of 棄禮, not a transposition of the insight-dimension 奪心 intact onto the mean man.

In short, the discrepancy between the four minds of the Dokhaeng-pyeon and the 邪心·怠心 of the Dongui Suse Bowon is not the trace of a text refined through development, but the overlap of an identical graph (字形) used across different dimensions. Lim Byeong-hak saw the 怠心 mismatch precisely and wrote that it “differs,” yet he left that difference as a caveat while retaining the conclusion of “developmental fixation”—reading the identity of the graph as an identity of lineage and concept. The present essay reads that difference not as a footnote propping up the fixation but as the signal that dismantles it. This, however, is a criticism confined to a single attribution of 鄙薄貪懦, and does not negate his larger scheme (Lim, 2022) of reading the Gyeokchigo as the blueprint and the Dongui Suse Bowon as the completed house.

Prior scholarship also points this way. Yun Deok-yeong and Go Byeong-hui (1996) found the correspondence between 鄙薄貪懦 and 仁義禮智 (忠信廉解) to diverge across the Dokhaeng-pyeon, Sadan-ron, and Yuryak, and concluded that so long as the 仁義禮智 four beginnings are taken as human nature their application shifts with time and circumstance and so should not be fixed. The 仁義禮智 of the three texts, they argued, follow different modes of application and thus cannot be reconciled at all, and even the constitutional attribution (太陽人 as the mean man) “has some tendency but is mistaken.” The present essay sets alongside Lim (2022) this observation, made twenty-eight years earlier, that the very premise of fixing attributions to draw a lineage is itself subject to review.

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