Chapter 16

Chapter sixteen begins with an instruction and then supplies an observation to justify it. Reach the limit of emptiness, hold fast to stillness; the ten thousand things rise together, and I watch their return.

The observation is agricultural and unmysterious. Things grow, flourish and go back to where they came from, and each returns to its root. The chapter names that going back stillness, and names the stillness a return to what was allotted.

Return is one of the book's organising ideas, stated most compactly in chapter forty, where returning is called the movement of the way. It is not a doctrine of rebirth and not a cyclical cosmology of ages. It is closer to a claim about the shape of any process: what rises subsides, and the subsiding is not a failure of the rising but its completion.

The position from which this is seen matters as much as what is seen. The chapter puts the observer at the limit of emptiness and holding to stillness, which is not a vantage point that could be occupied by someone in the middle of the rising and falling. What is being described is a way of watching, and the content of what is watched is almost secondary.

Knowing that constant, the chapter says, is called clarity. Not knowing it, people act blindly and come to harm, which is the only threat the chapter makes.

The second half of chapter sixteen is a chain of seven terms, each said to follow from the one before, and it is the most systematic passage in the book.

Knowing the constant makes a person capacious. Capacious, they are impartial. Impartial, they are kingly. Kingly, they are heavenly. Heavenly, they are of the way. Of the way, they endure. And to the end of life there is no danger.

The construction is a recognisable Chinese rhetorical form, a sorites in which each term is picked up from the previous clause and carried forward, and it is used elsewhere in the book, notably in chapter fifty-nine where frugality leads by stages to possessing the state.

What is unusual is the content of the sequence, because it climbs from a cognitive state to a political one and then past it. The kingly term sits in the middle of a chain that starts in metaphysics and ends in personal safety, which places rulership inside the same continuum as knowing and enduring rather than in a separate domain of its own. That is the book's consistent position on government: it is not a special art with its own rules but the same thing as everything else, done at a larger scale.

The chain also runs the wrong way for anyone expecting a religious text. It ends not in union, not in immortality and not in transcendence, but in the absence of danger through a life.