Living well on an unstable earth

A path that will not stay safe

Imagine carrying a pot of soup across a rough footbridge to a neighbor. Keeping your balance takes attention: you shift your weight, slow down and watch where the boards give way. Standing rigidly in the posture that worked a moment ago may make you fall.

Now imagine a sudden flood carrying the bridge away. Your care mattered, but it could not guarantee a safe crossing. The two scenes raise two questions: how should we live amid instability, and how much protection can good judgment offer?

The previous lesson separated character from worldly success. Here we approach a related problem through one Nahua discourse, a formal speech of advice preserved in a colonial manuscript from central Mexico. The name Nahua refers to peoples associated with the Nahuatl language, not to all Indigenous peoples of the Americas. [3]

The discourse and its makers

Our manuscript witness, the surviving written version we can inspect, is the Florentine Codex, completed in 1577. The Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún worked on it with Nahua elders, scholars, scribes and artists, and contributors such as Antonio Valeriano helped produce it; calling it simply a Spaniard’s report would obscure their labor. [3]

Yet the collaboration took place under colonial rule, and Sahagún wanted knowledge that could assist Christian conversion. The Spanish column often abbreviates, adds to or interprets the Nahuatl beside it, so the two columns are related accounts rather than interchangeable copies. As a primary source, the manuscript shows how knowledge was preserved and taught within this colonial project; recovering an earlier speaker’s exact words would require further evidence.

Book 6, chapter 19 presents a mother advising her daughter after the father has spoken. Its heading recommends adapting the discourse for instruction, and the Spanish heading explicitly mentions preaching. The chapter presents advice through the voices of a family. We cannot take it for a transcript of an actual conversation between a particular mother and daughter. [1]

A mother’s narrow path

The mother recalls advice handed down by elder women: life is like travel along a mountain peak, with a dangerous drop on either side, and the daughter must keep to the middle. The mother asks her to carry this counsel within her as a light for living. [1]

The image belongs to practical instruction about clothing, speech, walking and relationships. The daughter should neither rush nor move with ostentatious slowness, yet she may go quickly when the situation requires it. Discretion matters: the advice itself leaves room for circumstances to change the right pace.

Keeping to the middle, then, need not mean splitting the difference between any two proposed actions. On the footbridge, a useful adjustment depends on the load and the shifting boards, and a fixed compromise between haste and delay could be exactly wrong when a board begins to break.

Balance takes practice

James Maffie reads such advice through nepantla, the middle or being between, which he makes central to his reconstruction of Aztec philosophy. On his account, good living means continually bringing feelings, thoughts, actions and relationships into balance within a changing world. Balance has to be renewed again and again; no one secures it once and for all. [2]

This is a specialist’s interpretation that draws many kinds of evidence together. The mother’s discourse supports a concern with moderation and situational judgment, but by itself it does not establish every part of Maffie’s broader account of reality, or show that all Nahua people accepted one philosophical system.

It does give us a philosophical question: how can someone stay dependable while responding to change? On this reading, reliability might itself require adjustment. Someone keeping a promise to bring food may need to change the route; the purpose persists while the action changes.

Whose good life?

The appealing mountain image should not erase the rest of the discourse. The daughter is explicitly addressed as noble, and her dress, demeanor and sexuality are tied to her family’s standing. The warning against adultery includes threatened execution and divine punishment. [1] This is advice within a religious and unequal social order, and it makes severe demands on a woman’s conduct.

We can understand the appeal of stability and restraint while still asking who must bear their costs. Does a rule help people live together, protect a family’s reputation or preserve someone else’s power? Those purposes can overlap without being the same.

The two columns can also lead readers in different directions. Near the discourse’s close, the Nahuatl-based English translation names a destination as the land of the dead; the Spanish-based translation names hell. [1] That is a reason to identify which account we are reading, though it does not let us label every stern demand either purely Indigenous or purely Christian: establishing how a particular formulation developed would require further comparison. Our selected witness shows what this version teaches. It does not tell us what every woman thought or how every household lived.

The world is not a verdict

Suppose the careful traveler loses the soup when the flood takes the bridge, and a neighbor says the loss proves the traveler lacked balance. That conclusion confuses a way of responding to danger with control over every danger.

Maffie’s account makes instability part of the human condition, and our example tests one consequence. If good conduct works within such a world, failure need not refute its value, and misfortune alone does not identify a moral fault. As with the question of mortality in lesson 5, what we manage to do can matter even when we cannot overcome every limit.

Readers who are still here

Nahua people also read and interpret this inheritance. In published accounts of the digital codex project, the Nahua educators Sabina Cruz de la Cruz and Eduardo de la Cruz Cruz describe work that supports language learning in their communities. Eduardo de la Cruz Cruz argues that scholarship should connect historical research with living Nahuatl-speaking communities. [4] [5]

Their concern with whom scholarship serves reminds us to ask who gets to read, teach and interpret this inheritance. These statements do not endorse our reading of this particular speech. Neither a modern educator nor a colonial document speaks for every Nahua person.

Try the crossing case

A reader says: “The mother recommends the middle. That means always compromising. Someone who suffers must have ignored this rule, and the codex proves every Indigenous society agreed.” Identify three problems with this reading. This exercise is optional.

Read a possible response

Each step of the reading fails. The discourse allows a quick pace when circumstances require it, so its counsel does not reduce to a fixed compromise. The flood shows why careful conduct need not guarantee success: a bad outcome alone cannot establish bad judgment. And one colonial-era discourse cannot prove agreement across many peoples; we need to distinguish its particular teaching, its recording and translation, and a modern interpreter’s reconstruction. Appreciating the mother’s account of balance also does not require accepting every rule it serves, since her advice belongs to a hierarchy with coercive demands.

Carry this forward

Ask what balance requires in a particular situation, whose relationships it sustains and what remains beyond anyone’s control. The next lesson, Law, relationship and collective responsibility, examines the Onondaga Nation’s public account of deliberation and of leaders’ duties. Placing it beside this one assumes neither a single Indigenous outlook nor a line of influence between the two peoples.

Sources and limits

[1] Sahagún and Nahua collaborators, Florentine Codex, Book 6, chapter 19, completed 1577 (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, Ms. Mediceo Palatino 218–20), consulted in Getty’s Digital Florentine Codex (2023), for the mother’s discourse.

• The chapter: folios 80r–85v.
• Pace and discretion: 82r.
• The mountain path: 83v.

A folio is a leaf: r is its front and v its back. The complete chapter and displayed notes were read in two translations: Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble’s from the Nahuatl, which the platform labels as the 1953–1982 translation series, and León García Garagarza’s 2023 translation from the Spanish. No manuscript images or independent Nahuatl or Spanish collation were examined. The manuscript’s completion date does not date the origin of every speech it contains.

[2] James Maffie, Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion, University Press of Colorado, 2014, ebook ISBN 9781607322238, for his interpretation of nepantla. The lesson uses it as an interpretation, not as unmediated Nahua testimony.

• Read in full: “Conclusion: Nepantla and Aztec Philosophy,” including its sixteen notes.
• Interpretive method: the main text of Introduction §0.3.
• Scope and limits of his terminology: the §0.1 paragraph beginning “I aim to approximate Nahua views…”

The folio citations above identify the passage directly; no print pagination was checked. No whole book was read. Works cited by Maffie were not independently read.

[3] Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, “Introducing the Florentine Codex (1575–77) and Its Three Narratives”, Getty, 2023, for the collaboration, its colonial purpose and the relationship between the columns. The complete essay and displayed notes were read. The lesson does not attempt the essay’s fuller method of reading texts together with manuscript images.

[4] Lyra Kilston, “Living Languages”, Getty, 9 November 2023, for Eduardo de la Cruz Cruz’s published statement about scholarship and living communities. The complete “Nahuatl” section was read.

[5] Kim N. Richter, “Revitalizing an Endangered Indigenous Language”, Getty, 12 November 2021, for statements by Sabina Cruz de la Cruz and Eduardo de la Cruz Cruz, from communities near Chicontepec, Veracruz. The complete article body was read; linked scholarship and audio were not examined. These reported perspectives inform our approach, but they are not community review of this lesson.

The crossing, flood and neighbor’s argument are original examples. No independent specialist review, community consultation, learner testing or measured reading time is claimed. The lesson offers no judgment about a reader’s religious beliefs and discloses no restricted ceremonial practice.