The chapter opens with a flat prediction. Anyone who wants to take hold of the world and act on it, I see will not manage it.
The reason given is a category claim rather than a practical one. The world is a sacred vessel and is not something to be acted on. Act on it and you spoil it; hold it and you lose it. The word rendered sacred vessel names an object used in ritual, the sort of thing that has a proper handling and that ordinary handling damages. The claim is not that the task is difficult but that the thing is of the wrong kind to be treated that way.
This is the book's sharpest statement against reform by design, and it was written in a period full of it. The Warring States produced repeated programmes for reorganising states from the top, with new law codes, land systems, ranks and registers, and several of them worked. The chapter is not addressed to a quiet world.
What it offers instead of a programme is a list of the ways things vary: sometimes leading and sometimes following, sometimes breathing gently and sometimes hard, sometimes strong and sometimes weak, sometimes rising and sometimes falling. The list is an argument that any single policy will be wrong for part of what it is applied to, because the material is not uniform and does not hold still.
The conclusion follows from that. The sage discards the extreme, the extravagant and the grand: three words for going too far, aimed at a ruler who has the power to.