Following and Leaving: Benevolence in an Old Astrological Text
An old portrait of wood places principled departure beside patience and compassion. Read together, they open questions about understanding, agreement and the costs of both staying and leaving.
There is a passage in an old book worth pausing over before reading on. In the "Discussion of Temperament" chapter of Zhang Guo Xingzong, when discussing the temperaments of metal, wood, water, fire, and earth, it says of wood (Jupiter in this astrological setting): "Wood is associated with benevolence among the Five Phases; its nature is upright, both yielding and firm." Then come the lines "Pull it and it advances; release it and it goes" and "When the Way aligns, follow; when it does not, leave—unwilling to extinguish the public with the private or to bend principle for sentiment." Later in the same passage it adds, "In affairs it does not shrink from trouble; in heart it harbors compassion."
This passage was originally a character assessment in an astrological manual—not what we today would call career advice, nor a guide to interpersonal relations. But placed together on the page, the words have something quietly worth pondering: pull it and it advances; release it and it goes. Borrowed into a contemporary picture of life, it calls to mind someone who steps forward when beckoned and can also let go when the hand opens. It does not explain whether the "pull" is a rope or a sleeve, nor whether the "release" is setting down or casting off—it simply gives an image of movement. Close behind comes "when the Way aligns, follow; when it does not, leave," placing the judgment of staying or going on a single word: the Way. Then follows "unwilling to extinguish the public with the private or to bend principle for sentiment," dragging behind it the weight of an older era's ethics of public and private. And then, quite suddenly, it settles back into the everyday: "In affairs it does not shrink from trouble; in heart it harbors compassion"—not fearing the tedious, keeping a little tenderness in the heart.
We like to think of staying or going as a clean multiple-choice question: either endure or leave; either loyalty or freedom. But the wood-nature in this old passage sets several things side by side: willing to step forward, and willing to draw back; not letting private feeling override public duty, yet feeling compassion for people; clever and quick, yet not disdainful of troublesome affairs. It does not take sides for any one choice, nor does it call staying noble or leaving clear-eyed. It simply says that a person of such temperament follows when aligned and leaves when not—neither dragging nor dithering between the two, yet not without feeling either.
Most of what we face today has no such clear-cut "Way." A job, a long-term project, a group we have belonged to for years, a personal relationship—when we truly try to discern whether we are willing to invest ourselves, we rarely begin by asking "do I agree with its values?" Instead we start from smaller, more scattered places. For instance: are you willing to listen to the same kind of complaint over and over for its sake? Are you willing to finish the tedious wrap-up work where no one sees you? Are you willing to say in a meeting what you have already said three times, simply because this time there is one more person who needs to understand? These moments are not heroic—they are even a little clumsy. But the four Chinese characters 事不惮烦, "does not shrink from trouble," come close to meaning just this: not fearing trouble is not the same as not fearing exhaustion; it is refusing to treat trouble as evidence that the thing is not worth it.
"Harbors compassion in heart" also deserves a second look. Compassion is not agreement. You can be incompletely in agreement with a decision and still understand the position of the person who made it; you can reject a way of doing things and still be unwilling to watch specific people suffer because of it. The old book places compassion in the same passage as "unwilling to extinguish the public with the private or to bend principle for sentiment," and there is a fine tension here: private affection exists, but it cannot be traded for the thing you have set your heart on; and conversely, being set on something does not mean you must harden your heart. Reading this today, we need not adopt wholesale the old ethical content of "public" and "private," but we can borrow it to think about one thing: understanding and agreement were never the same thing. Understanding is seeing someone's difficulty; agreement is consenting to the direction of things. Confuse the two, and a person will either—out of understanding—be slow to admit that something "does not align," or—out of disagreement—push the actual people away along with the thing.
The image "pull it and it advances; release it and it goes" is easy at first reading today to see as passivity: it moves only when pulled, and leaves when no one holds on. On second thought, not quite. Borrowed into contemporary comings and goings, it can also suggest a state of non-stickiness: both people have a part in drawing near and letting go. When you are needed, you are willing to step forward; when you are not, you do not cling. There is a sense of measure here—not coldness, but a refusal to turn staying or going into a threat. Life commonly shows us another picture: clearly out of alignment, yet unwilling to leave because too much has been invested, using "I've already given so much" as the reason to stay; or clearly still aligned, yet withdrawing over a single friction, using "I won't accept this indignity" as the only dignity. The first cannot let go of sunk costs; the second cannot let go of a wounded pride. The old book does not teach how to weigh that investment—it simply puts "aligned" and "not aligned" back at the center of judgment.
But what "aligned" actually is, the old book does not define. Nor need we invent a uniform standard for it. To one person, alignment may mean having one's way of working respected; to another, it may mean the goal itself is worthy; to a third, it may simply mean that when this group hits disagreement, they are still willing to sit down and talk it through. Different people in different circumstances recognize different "Ways," and that is entirely normal. What matters is having something in your own heart you can articulate, rather than wrapping "something feels off" in the skin of "our Ways differ." Conversely, someone else's Way differing from yours does not automatically make them a bad person. The old book's astrological character assessments did carry ethical judgments of benevolence and the noble person; borrowing it today to think about our own staying or going, we should not use it to convict others.
Staying has its costs. You may have to keep listening to what you are tired of hearing, keep grinding through the tedious, keep doing the work in hand well even when you do not fully agree. This is not asking you to suppress your feelings, still less to endure harm or trade "patience" for a promise that the future will reward you. Patience itself is not a voucher for virtue. It only says: if you judge that this thing still aligns, then those troubles are part of the investment, and you need not doubt the whole thing because of them.
Leaving has its costs too. You have to admit you once invested yourself, face others' possible incomprehension, handle the unfinished wrap-up, and perhaps spend a long time unsure whether you left too early. The old book says "release it and it goes"—the word "goes" is very light, but in real life, where to go, how to get there, and whether you will ever look back—each must be settled one by one. So there is no need to rank staying and leaving on a moral scale. Those who stay are not necessarily more loyal—they may simply not have thought it through; those who leave are not necessarily more clear-eyed—they may simply fear trouble more. And the reverse is equally true. Staying or going does not by itself prove character; it only shows that at a certain moment, a person made their own judgment about "aligned" and "not aligned."
We have gradually come to feel that the most moving thing about this passage is not that it teaches how to choose, but that it places "willing to invest" and "willing to walk away" in the same person. Willing to invest again and again, willing to listen to the end, willing to do the tedious things well—this shows a person has compassion in heart and does not fear trouble. But when agreement is gone, they will also reconsider their position, not trading private feeling for a direction they no longer recognize. These two sides are not contradictory. It is precisely because they took it seriously that leaving need not involve an acrimonious rupture; and precisely because they know they can leave that staying is not forced.
The wood in the old book has "the virtue of shaking the valley and soaring to the clouds, the merit of reaching the sky and shading the sun"—grandly said. Yet in the same passage it settles back to "in affairs it does not shrink from trouble; in heart it harbors compassion"—said on an intimate scale. The grand and the small placed together seem to remind us: whether a person is willing to invest in something can hardly be seen from grand declarations, but often can be seen from those small matters that do not fear trouble; and whether a person should leave may not require a dramatic rupture—sometimes it is just that one day you find the hand you were holding has loosened, and you no longer wish to move forward either.
Reading this old passage in today's terms is, of course, a modern reading. It originally assessed people within an astrological context; this essay today does not judge anyone's virtue from a birth chart, nor predict anyone's staying or going. But words sometimes walk out of their original room and are picked up in another era's corridor, wiped clean, and found to reflect a little of one's own shadow. How to walk after seeing that reflection is still each person's own affair.
If you have read this far and thought of something you once held and then let go, or if you feel we have made "alignment" too light or "patience" too smooth, you are welcome to hand us your counterexamples and corrections. The matter of staying and going was never something a single piece of writing could finish for anyone.
This article is based on a fixed digital transcription of Volume Eleven, "Discussion of Temperament," in Zhang Guo Xingzong, and has not yet been checked page by page against a facsimile edition.