The second half of the chapter applies the five images of effortless skill to people, and it is the most explicitly inclusive passage in the book. The sage is always good at saving people and abandons nobody. He is always good at saving things and abandons nothing.
The reasoning is not compassionate in the usual sense and does not appeal to obligation. It is an argument from waste. If a good binder needs no rope, then a person who has to discard the difficult material has simply not reached the standard the chapter is describing. Abandoning someone is evidence about the abandoner.
The lines that follow make that structural. The good is the teacher of the not good, and the not good is the material of the good. The two are locked together as a pair of roles, and the chapter warns that failing to value the teacher or to care for the material is a great confusion however clever a person is. Cleverness is named and dismissed in the same breath, which is unusual: elsewhere the book tends to leave the alternative unnamed.
The phrase used for what results from this practice, rendered as inherited clarity or handed-down illumination, is one of the genuinely obscure expressions in the text. Commentators have taken it as brightness passed on from the ancients, as insight carried within, and as a state of doubled clarity, and the recensions do not agree on the second character. It is a place where an English version has to commit to a reading that the Chinese does not obviously make.