The chapter ends on an image that became proverbial in Chinese and remains in use: heaven's net is vast, and though its mesh is wide, nothing slips through it.
The picture is precise. A net with a wide mesh looks like a poor net, because the obvious way to catch more is to weave tighter. The claim is that this one misses nothing anyway, and the reader is left to work out why. The answer implied by the rest of the chapter is that the net is not catching things; things arrive in it, in the same way that heaven does not summon and yet things come of themselves.
The phrase entered ordinary Chinese as a saying about justice being inescapable, usually invoked about a criminal who thinks he has got away, and in that popular use it means something much closer to divine surveillance than the chapter supports. Nothing here says heaven is watching, and the book elsewhere denies that it has favourites: chapter seventy-nine says the way of heaven has no partiality and is constantly with the good, and chapter five says heaven and earth are not humane and treat the ten thousand things as straw dogs.
The gap between what the line says in place and what it came to mean is one of the clearest examples of how this book has travelled. Its images are strong enough to detach from their chapters and go into general circulation, and once detached they acquire the meanings the culture around them needs, which are often not the ones the surrounding argument would allow.