This chapter belongs to a small group that describes the way in terms of what a parent or a farmer does, and reading them together shows how carefully the book keeps that language from becoming theology.
Here the way clothes and feeds the ten thousand things and does not lord it over them. Chapter fifty-one is the fullest version: the way gives them life, brings them up, nurses them, settles them, feeds and shelters them, and then gives life without possessing, acts without depending, rears without ruling. Chapter two applies the same three refusals to the sage. Chapter ten repeats them almost word for word.
The pattern is consistent. Every one of these passages pairs an act of provision with a denial of the ownership that would normally follow it. Producing does not make the producer a proprietor. Rearing does not make the rearer a master. The refusal is repeated so often, and in such similar words, that it looks like a formula the tradition had settled on rather than a fresh observation.
What it rules out is the natural next step. A source that feeds everything and asks nothing is very close to a god, and the book keeps closing that door: the way has no name it chose, no preferences, no favourites in chapter seventy-nine, and here no title even after the work is done. It is described entirely in verbs and never given a will.
The consequence for practice is drawn elsewhere. A ruler who has provided is in the same position, and chapters two, seventy-seven and eighty-one all say that the way to keep what you have accomplished is not to stand on it.