Chapter 61

This is the book's chapter on foreign relations, and it is unusually specific about a problem its readers actually had: how a large state and a small one should deal with each other.

The answer is the same for both, which is what makes the chapter interesting. A great state that lowers itself before a small state takes the small state. A small state that lowers itself before a great state is taken in by the great state. One lowers itself in order to take and one lowers itself in order to be taken, and both get what they want when the great one takes the lower place.

The asymmetry is named honestly. The two parties want different things, and the chapter says what those are: what a great state wants is to gather people, and what a small state wants is a place to serve. Neither wish is criticised and neither is dressed up. This is a description of how absorption and clientage actually worked among the competing states of the period.

What the chapter adds is that the burden falls on the stronger party. The closing clause specifies that it is the great state that must take the lower position, because the small one is already there and lowering itself costs it nothing.

The image behind all of it is hydraulic. A great state is a low-lying estuary, the meeting place of the world, and everything drains toward it because it is beneath everything. Chapter sixty-six makes the same argument about rivers and the valleys they are kings of, and chapter thirty-two about streams running to the sea.

The chapter states a general rule in the middle of its diplomacy and the rule is one of the book's most discussed lines. The female always overcomes the male by stillness, and by being still she takes the lower position.

The book uses the female as a positive term repeatedly. Chapter six has the spirit of the valley and the dark female whose gate is the root of heaven and earth. Chapter ten asks whether one can play the female part. Chapter twenty-eight instructs the reader to know the male but keep to the female. Chapter fifty-two and chapter twenty use the mother. Taken together they make this book unusual in the philosophical literature of its period, which mostly does not reach for such imagery at all.

Two cautions belong with that observation. The first is that the terms are used for a pattern of behaviour, stillness, receptivity and the lower position, and the chapter attaches them to states rather than to persons. Nothing here is an account of women, and the book contains no women.

The second is that the pattern is recommended as effective, not as good. The verb is overcomes, and this chapter is about one state absorbing another. The female position is presented as the winning position in a contest, which is a very different thing from a celebration of yielding for its own sake, and it is the same structure as chapter thirty-six, where the soft and weak overcome the hard and strong.

That combination, a real preference for the receptive term and a strictly practical case for it, is what makes the imagery difficult to summarise in either direction.