The second half of chapter sixteen is a chain of seven terms, each said to follow from the one before, and it is the most systematic passage in the book.
Knowing the constant makes a person capacious. Capacious, they are impartial. Impartial, they are kingly. Kingly, they are heavenly. Heavenly, they are of the way. Of the way, they endure. And to the end of life there is no danger.
The construction is a recognisable Chinese rhetorical form, a sorites in which each term is picked up from the previous clause and carried forward, and it is used elsewhere in the book, notably in chapter fifty-nine where frugality leads by stages to possessing the state.
What is unusual is the content of the sequence, because it climbs from a cognitive state to a political one and then past it. The kingly term sits in the middle of a chain that starts in metaphysics and ends in personal safety, which places rulership inside the same continuum as knowing and enduring rather than in a separate domain of its own. That is the book's consistent position on government: it is not a special art with its own rules but the same thing as everything else, done at a larger scale.
The chain also runs the wrong way for anyone expecting a religious text. It ends not in union, not in immortality and not in transcendence, but in the absence of danger through a life.