Chapter 51

The chapter opens with a fourfold account of how anything comes to be what it is. The way gives them life, power rears them, things give them form, and circumstances complete them.

The distribution of labour is careful and worth taking slowly. Origination belongs to the way. Nurture belongs to power, the term this book uses for the efficacy a thing has by being what it is. Shape comes from other things, which is to say from material and from what a thing is made among. Completion comes from circumstances, the situation and its pressures.

That is a considerably more crowded account than the book's reputation suggests. Two of the four contributions come from the ordinary world rather than from anything transcendent, and neither is treated as an obstacle or a falling away. A thing is finished by its circumstances, and the chapter says so without regret.

From this the chapter draws its explanation of a fact about religion: the ten thousand things honour the way and value power. The honour is not commanded and no one confers it. It is described as always so of itself, which is the same term chapter twenty-five puts at the top of its ladder.

That is a quiet but significant claim. Reverence is presented as a natural consequence of the relation rather than as a duty or a response to a demand, and it follows that the way requires no cult, no sacrifice and no acknowledgement. Chapter thirty-four had already said it claims no title when the work is done.

The chapter ends with a run of verbs and then names what they add up to. The way gives them life and rears them, brings them up and nurses them, settles and steadies them, feeds and shelters them; and it gives life without possessing, acts without depending, rears without ruling. This, the chapter says, is called the dark power.

Two things are being defined at once. The first is a relation of complete provision with no ownership attached, which chapters two, ten and thirty-four state in almost identical words and which is the book's most repeated formula. The second is the term itself.

The word rendered dark is the same one that closes chapter one, where it is applied to the gateway of everything subtle, and it carries the sense of a deep obscure colour rather than of evil or of secrecy. Dark power is therefore not power exercised in the dark. It is efficacy of a kind that cannot be inspected, which is the same quality chapter twenty-one attributes to the way when it says the essence in it is genuine and can be relied on.

The term recurs in chapter sixty-five, where it is applied to a ruler who governs without knowledge and is said to be deep and far reaching and to turn back with all things, and in chapter ten, in the same formulaic company as here.

The accumulation of verbs before the definition is doing rhetorical work. Eight acts of care are listed, and only then are the three refusals attached, so the reader has the full weight of what is given before being told that nothing is claimed for it.