The Way

Once we have built the gate, we can pass through it to the practice of the timeless way.

18. Now we shall begin to see in detail how the rich and complex order of a town can grow from thousands of creative acts. For once we have a comon pattern language in our town, we shall all have the power to make our streets an buildings live, through our most ordinary acts. The language, like a seed, is the genetic system which gives our millions of small acts the power to form a whole.

19. Within this process, every individual act of building is a process in which space gets differentiated. It is not a process of addition, in which preformed parts are combined to create a whole, but a process of unfolding, like the evolution of an embryo, in which the whole precedes the parts, and actualy gives birth to then, by splitting.

20. The process of unfolding goes step by step, one pattern at a time. Each step brings just one pattern to life; and the intensity of the result depends on the intensity of each ond of these individual steps.

21. From a sequence of these individual patterns, whole buildings with the character of nature will form themselves within your thoughts, as easily as sentences.

22. In the same way, groups of people can conceive their larger public buildings, on the ground, by following a common pattern language, almost as if they had a single mind.

23. Once the buildings are conceived like this, they can be built, directly, from a few simple marks made in the ground--again within a common language, but directly, and without the use of drawings.

24. Next, several acts of building, each one done to repair and magnify the product of the previous acts, will slowly generate a larger and more complex whole than any single act can generate.

25. Finaly, within the framework of a common language, millions of individual acts of building will together generate a town which is alive, and whole, and unpredictable, without control. this is the slow emergence of the quality without a name, as if from nothing.

26. And as the whole emerges, we shall see it take that ageless character which gives the timeless way its name. This character is a specific, morphological character, sharp and precise, which must come into being any time a building or a town becomes alive: it is the physical embodiment, in buildings, of the quality without a name.