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Merit That Stays Because It Is Not Claimed

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Merit That Stays Because It Is Not Claimed

The second half of the chapter turns from the structure of opposites to a person, and introduces two ideas that recur throughout the book.

The first is acting without acting. The phrase is not a paradox for its own sake and does not mean doing nothing; the sage in this chapter handles affairs, produces things and completes work. What is absent is forcing. The nearest English is something like acting without contrivance, or acting in a way that does not push against the grain of the situation, and the book will spend seventy-nine more chapters supplying examples: water, the hub of a wheel, the ruler nobody notices, the general who stops when the result is achieved.

The second is teaching without words, which sits oddly in a book. Having just argued that naming a thing as good produces its opposite, the chapter concludes that instruction which proceeds by naming will do the same, and that what actually teaches is conduct.

The closing lines are the chapter's sharpest. The sage produces without possessing, acts without depending on the result, and completes without dwelling on the completion; and precisely because he does not dwell on it, it does not leave him. The logic is not moral. It is a claim about what happens when merit is claimed: a claim invites dispute, and a dispute puts the merit in question. Nobody argues with a person who is not asserting anything.

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