Chapter 81

The last chapter of the received text opens with three pairs, and all three are about the gap between a quality and its appearance. Trustworthy words are not fine, and fine words are not trustworthy. One who is good does not argue, and one who argues is not good. One who knows is not learned, and one who is learned does not know.

Each is stated in both directions, which makes them exclusions rather than tendencies, and each concerns a way of performing a virtue rather than the virtue itself. Fine words are eloquence, argument is contention conducted verbally, and learning is accumulated breadth. The chapter treats all three as the visible substitutes people accept for reliability, goodness and understanding.

The last pair restates chapter forty-eight's distinction between adding every day and dropping every day, and the second pair restates the book's repeated preference for not contending, which appears at the end of chapters twenty-two and sixty-six.

Whether these are a fitting close depends on which arrangement of the book you are reading, since the silk manuscripts from Mawangdui place this material in the first half and end the whole text at what the received arrangement numbers as chapter thirty-seven. In the received order it reads as a valediction, and its subject, the unreliability of eloquence, is a pointed thing for a book of five thousand characters to end on.

The second half of the chapter states the book's economics of generosity, and it does so in a form that is easy to read as sentimental and is not.

The sage does not hoard: the more he does for others the more he has, and the more he gives to others the more he possesses.

The claim only works because of what the book means by possessing. Nothing here suggests that goods given away return in kind. What accumulates is the thing the text calls power, the efficacy a person has by being what they are, and chapter thirty-eight has already established that this cannot be held on to: the highest power is not powerful and so has power, and the lowest never lets go and so has none. On that account a store is precisely what reduces the holding, and giving is what leaves the position clear.

The chapter closes with two parallel clauses that are as close as the book comes to a summary. The way of heaven benefits and does not harm. The way of the sage acts and does not contend.

They are worth reading as a pair. The first describes a pattern in the world and denies that it costs anything to anybody. The second describes a person and denies not that he acts but that he competes, which is the distinction the whole text turns on. Non-action was never inactivity, and the last sentence of the book says so plainly after eighty chapters of paradox.