Chapter fifteen sets out to describe the able practitioners of antiquity and announces at the start that it cannot: they were subtle, mysterious and too deep to be known, so all that can be done is to describe how they seemed.
What follows is seven or eight similes and no statements. Cautious, as somebody crossing a river in winter. Wary, like a man with neighbours on all sides. Formal, like a guest. Yielding, like ice about to melt. Plain, like an uncut block. Wide open, like a valley. Murky, like silt water.
Two of these are the book's standing figures, the uncut block and the valley, and they appear here inside a list of ordinary human postures. The others are all social or physical: a man testing ice, a guest observing form, someone conscious of being overlooked. The portrait that emerges is of a person who is careful, unassertive and slightly withheld, and who does not look impressive.
That is consistent with everything else the book says about the sage, and it is worth noting how thoroughly it excludes the alternative. There is no serenity here, no radiance, no visible attainment, and nothing anybody would identify across a room. Chapter twenty makes the same point in the first person, and chapter seventy says the sage wears coarse cloth with jade inside it.