Chapter 4

Chapter four is four lines about a container. The way is empty, and using it never fills it; bottomless, it seems to be the ancestor of the ten thousand things.

The image is precise and easily misread. An empty vessel that cannot be filled is not the same as an infinite one. What is being described is something whose emptiness is its capacity, so that drawing on it does not diminish it and pouring into it does not exhaust the space. Chapter five gives the same idea a mechanism, the bellows that yields more the more it is worked, and chapter eleven gives it three household examples.

The middle of the chapter contains four actions that reappear word for word in chapter fifty-six: blunting what is sharp, untying what is knotted, softening what glares, settling into the dust. The repetition is one of the small pieces of evidence in the argument about how the book was assembled, since a phrase occurring identically in two places, in two different contexts, is easier to explain as a saying in circulation than as a deliberate cross-reference.

The chapter ends by saying that whose child this is nobody knows, and that it appears to come before the ancestral gods. That is a strong claim quietly made. It places the subject of the book prior to the entire apparatus of ancestral religion, without arguing against any of it.

The last line of chapter four does something the book does very rarely, which is to locate itself against the religion of its surroundings.

The state religion of the period rested on ancestral sacrifice and on a high god of the ruling house. Cosmological authority ran back through a lineage to a first ancestor, and the ancestor was where explanation stopped. To say that this nameless thing appears to precede the ancestral god is to put something impersonal, unnamed and without will at a point earlier than the lineage.

The claim is made in a single clause and not developed, which is characteristic. The book does not attack the sacrifices, does not deny the gods and does not propose a replacement cult. Chapter sixty says that when the world is approached by way of the way, its ghosts have no power to harm, which is a truce rather than a denial. Chapter thirty-nine lists spirits among the things that attained the one, which places them inside the scheme rather than outside it.

What the position rules out is a personal source. Nothing in the book decides, intends, commands or is addressed, and there is no prayer in it. The way does not choose, and chapter five says explicitly that heaven and earth are not kind. Later Daoist religion developed an enormous pantheon and a liturgy, and it did so on top of a text that gives it nothing to work with in this respect, which is one of the standing puzzles of the tradition's history.