Chapter 21

The chapter attempts a description of the way itself, and the method is stranger than the content. Four times it says the way is elusive and vague, dim and dark, and four times it says that something is nonetheless in there: an image, a thing, an essence, something that can be relied on. Denial, then assertion, repeated until the reader stops expecting the denial to be the last word.

That structure carries the argument. A flat claim that the way contains an essence would invite the question of how anybody knows. A flat refusal to say anything would end the book at chapter one. What the chapter does instead is decline to resolve, and the refusal is the point: whatever is there is available to be relied on and not available to be inspected.

The vocabulary is worth watching, because it later acquires weight it does not carry here. The word rendered essence is jing, which in Chinese medicine and in later self-cultivation becomes a technical term for a vital substance. The word rendered genuine is zhen, which becomes the standard term for a realised person in the Daoist religion. Reading those later senses back into this chapter is the commonest way of making the passage say considerably more than it does.

The closing sentence changes the subject from description to access. The name has not gone away from antiquity to the present, and by it the beginning of all things is surveyed. Whatever is being described is not a distant object that has been glimpsed; it is what makes the looking possible.

The chapter opens with a line doing a quite different job from the rest of it: the form of great power follows the way and nothing else. That single sentence is the clearest statement in the book of how its two governing terms are related, and it is easy to walk past on the way to the more famous vague and elusive passage.

De, the word usually rendered power or virtue, is not an ethical quality here. It is nearer to what a thing is able to do because of what it is, the efficacy that follows from having a particular nature. Read that way the line says that the efficacy of anything is a function of its conformity to the way, and that it has no second source: not training, not effort, not accumulated merit.

That claim is what makes the whole second half of the book possible. Chapters thirty-eight to eighty-one in the received arrangement are largely about how rulers, generals and sages behave, and every one of them assumes that effectiveness comes from alignment rather than from force. Chapter thirty-eight states it negatively, that the highest power is not powerful and so has power. Chapter fifty-one states it developmentally, that the way gives things life and power rears them.

The placement is one small reason readers have doubted that the eighty-one chapter arrangement preserves any original order. By subject this chapter belongs with the material on power, which the received text does not begin for another seventeen chapters. The division into chapters is an editorial layer, and the manuscripts recovered in the twentieth century do not carry it.