The chapter opens with a fourfold account of how anything comes to be what it is. The way gives them life, power rears them, things give them form, and circumstances complete them.
The distribution of labour is careful and worth taking slowly. Origination belongs to the way. Nurture belongs to power, the term this book uses for the efficacy a thing has by being what it is. Shape comes from other things, which is to say from material and from what a thing is made among. Completion comes from circumstances, the situation and its pressures.
That is a considerably more crowded account than the book's reputation suggests. Two of the four contributions come from the ordinary world rather than from anything transcendent, and neither is treated as an obstacle or a falling away. A thing is finished by its circumstances, and the chapter says so without regret.
From this the chapter draws its explanation of a fact about religion: the ten thousand things honour the way and value power. The honour is not commanded and no one confers it. It is described as always so of itself, which is the same term chapter twenty-five puts at the top of its ladder.
That is a quiet but significant claim. Reverence is presented as a natural consequence of the relation rather than as a duty or a response to a demand, and it follows that the way requires no cult, no sacrifice and no acknowledgement. Chapter thirty-four had already said it claims no title when the work is done.