Chapter 25

This is the chapter in which the book explains where the word way came from, and it does so by insisting that it is not a name.

Something is formed out of confusion and born before heaven and earth. It is silent and empty, stands alone without changing, and goes everywhere without tiring. It might, the text says, be the mother of all under heaven. Then: I do not know its name, and I call it the way; pressed for a name, I would call it great.

Two things are happening in that admission. The first is that the term is being introduced as a makeshift, chosen because something had to be said, which is the same position chapter one takes when it warns that the way that can be spoken is not the constant way. The second is that the speaker appears, in the first person, to take responsibility for the choice. The book almost never does this. Chapter twenty is the other place, and there the first person is used to describe isolation rather than to make a decision.

The word chosen, dao, was not invented for the purpose and was already in general philosophical use for a doctrine, a method or the correct course, which is what makes it a modest choice rather than a grand one. The alternative offered, great, is then immediately unfolded into a sequence: great means going, going means far, far means returning. The word is not left as a superlative. It is turned into a description of movement that comes back, which is the same claim chapter forty makes in four characters when it says that returning is how the way moves.

The chapter closes on the most quoted sequence in the book after the opening of chapter one: man takes his rule from earth, earth from heaven, heaven from the way, and the way from what is so of itself.

The last step is the one that matters. Every rung until then hands authority upward to something larger, and a reader following the pattern expects the way to hand it upward again, to a highest term. Instead the sequence stops by naming ziran, which means what is so of itself, or the spontaneous, or the way a thing is when nothing is imposed on it. The way does not defer to a higher authority; it defers to there being no imposition. The ladder ends by declining to have a top.

That single term does an enormous amount of later work. Ziran becomes one of the two or three central words of Daoist thought, paired with non-action as the description of how the way operates, and it is the reason the tradition resists being read as theism. Nothing in this sequence is a will, and the highest thing named is not a being but a manner.

The chapter also inserts the king into the list of four great things alongside the way, heaven and earth. That inclusion has been read as evidence that the book is addressed to rulers throughout rather than to private readers, and some recensions read man rather than king in that position, which changes the claim considerably. The variant is old, the two readings support quite different books, and neither can be dismissed as a simple error.