Chapter 55

The infant is the book's most frequent human image, appearing in chapters ten, twenty, twenty-eight and here, and this is the only chapter that describes one in detail rather than invoking it.

The description is deliberately physical and slightly startling. Its bones are weak and its sinews soft, and yet its grip is firm. It knows nothing of union, and yet its member stirs. It howls all day without going hoarse. Poisonous insects do not sting it, wild beasts do not seize it, birds of prey do not carry it off.

Each observation is chosen to show capacity without the usual basis for it. Grip without muscle. Sexual response without desire or knowledge. Sustained volume without strain. The chapter names the reason in the last two cases: the essence is at its height, and the harmony is at its height. Neither is an achievement and neither was worked for.

That is what makes the infant a better figure for this book than a sage would be. It is not a model of innocence to be recovered morally, and nothing here is about purity or gentleness. It is an instance of the general claim that efficacy comes from a condition rather than from effort, and the newborn is simply the clearest case available.

The claim about insects and beasts belongs with chapter fifty, where the rhinoceros finds nowhere to put its horn. In both places invulnerability is asserted, and in both it is offered as a consequence of the subject's condition rather than as protection from outside.

The second half of the chapter turns from description to warning, and the warning is aimed at people who have taken the description as a target.

Knowing harmony is the constant and knowing the constant is clarity. Then: to add to life is called ill omened, and to force the breath with the mind is called violence. And the standing formula, that a thing which grows strong then grows old.

Two of those phrases became technical terms in traditions that came long after. Adding to life names the attempt to increase vitality, and forcing the breath with the mind names the deliberate direction of the breath by intention. Both are recognisable descriptions of practices that later Chinese cultivation traditions developed in great detail, and this chapter condemns both in the strongest words available to it, calling one ill omened and the other violent.

That is a genuine tension in the reception of the book. The Daoist religion and the later internal arts drew on this text extensively and read chapters like fifty-two and ten as instructions for breath work, and this chapter appears to rule out the forcing of breath in particular. Practitioners were aware of the passage and read it as a warning against coercive technique rather than against practice as such, which is a coherent reading and is a reading.

What the chapter itself asserts is narrower. The infant's capacities came from a condition it was in, not from an effort it made, and any attempt to reproduce them by effort is the addition of strength to something whose whole advantage was softness.