One of the chapters in Chu’s Thick Face, Black Heart affected me deeply. It was called, “Master the Distinctions Between Virtue and Vanity.” She used a parable to explain the concept: a holy man had taken a vow of honesty. He sat beneath a tree, meditating, when a man ran up. He told the holy man that he was wrongly accused of thievery and being chased by ruffians who would kill him. The holy man could see that he was, indeed, innocent. The man climbed into the tree and hid himself among the leaves. But when the ruffians came and asked the holy man if he had seen the supposed thief, the holy man ratted him out, all because of his vow of honesty. They dragged the innocent man from the tree and killed him. When the holy man died and went before judgment he was admonished for this act. God said, “It was not for the sake of virtue that you delivered the innocent man to his tormentors, it was to preserve a vain image of yourself as a virtuous person.”
In other words, in business as in life, do not adhere blindly to any dogma. Your belief in absolute truths only serves to help you gain praise from others with the same convictions. It allows you to be self-righteous about your supposed virtue and feel superior to others. Meanwhile you are living outside of the world, bringing suffering to others because of your selfish convictions as to absolute right and wrong. This belief in an absolute truth comes into play in every political election, where the various parties battle for the supremacy of one set of beliefs. Those who acknowledge that there are times to utilize each belief system appropriately are degraded as traitors, or worse: loathed “independents” with no chance to win.
Ignorance has guided the idea of virtue since time immemorial. In ancient China, a girl’s virginity was so sacred that if she was raped by soldiers in invading armies—a relatively common occurrence—she would be forced to drink poison to kill herself. When Galileo publicized his finding that the earth revolved around the sun, “virtuous” members of the Catholic Church condemned him and imprisoned him for contradicting their supposedly infallible beliefs. In the U.S., in the 1950’s, innocent citizens were impoverished and imprisoned because of senator Joseph McCarthy’s misguided obsession with capitalist “virtue.”
Chu makes the point that virtue, contrary to what most people think, is not something you wear outside of yourself for public display. Unlike the western philosophical tradition, where we try to guide our lives by absolutes such as those contained in the following aphorisms:
- Turn the other check,
- Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,
- A stitch in time saves nine,
- The squeaky wheel gets the grease,
etc. . . .
The Chinese viewpoint acknowledges that these philosophies are never absolute, but that life, and morality, require more of a person than simple adherence to law. They require moment-to-moment mediation on one’s inner convictions.
The fear of success is much more powerful than the fear of failure. So says Chu in her book on using the Asian mindset for success in business, Thick Face, Black Heart.
Not caring about the opinions of others—as is recommended by the Thick Face aspect of Chu’s Thick Face, Black Heart philosophy—means finding the courage to do what must be done without regard to what people think. It means examining the role you play in your company, your family, and your world, and freeing yourself from the domination of arbitrary ideals. This is the inner work that will make you truly a free person and a powerful person.
In Thick Face, Black Heart, Chu relates modern business to the Asian concept of Yin and Yang. This belief is that all things are composed of two forces, and that things which are thought to be opposite are more intimately related than they may at first appear. Darkness cannot exist without light, nor good without evil.
Axioms like “turn the other cheek” make us feel good. If we believe in them, it seems as if we can sum up proper human conduct in three seconds or less, then move on to more pressing matters. But in reality, human conduct, and business conduct, is never cut and dried like that. There are times to turn the other cheek, and there are times not to. Here I’m going to use Chin-Ning Chu’s book, Thick Face, Black Heart, to help sort it all out. Something she mentions quite a bit in the book is that Chinese philosophy, largely due to the way the Chinese language works, is very different from western, or Christian, philosophy. Chinese characters mean different things in different situations, and that is exactly the way the philosophy is: nothing is set in stone. Every moment is physically, financially, emotionally, and ETHICALLY unique.
