Chapter 29

The chapter opens with a flat prediction. Anyone who wants to take hold of the world and act on it, I see will not manage it.

The reason given is a category claim rather than a practical one. The world is a sacred vessel and is not something to be acted on. Act on it and you spoil it; hold it and you lose it. The word rendered sacred vessel names an object used in ritual, the sort of thing that has a proper handling and that ordinary handling damages. The claim is not that the task is difficult but that the thing is of the wrong kind to be treated that way.

This is the book's sharpest statement against reform by design, and it was written in a period full of it. The Warring States produced repeated programmes for reorganising states from the top, with new law codes, land systems, ranks and registers, and several of them worked. The chapter is not addressed to a quiet world.

What it offers instead of a programme is a list of the ways things vary: sometimes leading and sometimes following, sometimes breathing gently and sometimes hard, sometimes strong and sometimes weak, sometimes rising and sometimes falling. The list is an argument that any single policy will be wrong for part of what it is applied to, because the material is not uniform and does not hold still.

The conclusion follows from that. The sage discards the extreme, the extravagant and the grand: three words for going too far, aimed at a ruler who has the power to.

This chapter is one of the places where the doctrine of wu wei, acting without acting, is most likely to be misread, and it is worth setting out what it does not say.

It does not say that a ruler should do nothing. The sage of this chapter discards three things, which is an action, and the chapters around it have him governing, warring reluctantly, feeding people and holding a state together. Chapter three has him ordering a society, chapter fifty-seven has him governing by not meddling and getting results he clearly wanted, and chapter sixty compares governing a large state to cooking a small fish, which is an activity with a technique.

Nor does it say that the world will improve if left alone. The chapter makes no promise about outcomes at all. It says that a particular relation to the world, that of grasping and working on it, destroys the thing it is applied to.

The distinction the text is drawing is between acting on and acting with. What is prohibited is the stance of an artisan facing raw material, which assumes the material has no direction of its own. What is recommended is the stance of a person joining something already in motion, which is why so many of the book's images are of water, weather, growth and traffic: things that are going somewhere without you.

The vocabulary here supports that. The verb translated act on carries a sense of working, making and contriving, and its negation in this book is not inactivity but the absence of contrivance.