Chapter 73

The chapter opens by splitting courage into two kinds and giving them opposite outcomes. One who is brave in daring is killed. One who is brave in not daring lives.

The construction insists that both are courage. Restraint is not being contrasted with bravery here; it is being described as a second kind of it, which requires its own nerve, and the chapter does not pretend the two are easy to tell apart from outside.

Then a hesitation that is rare in this book. Of these two, one is beneficial and one is harmful, and who knows the reason for what heaven dislikes? Having stated a rule, the chapter immediately admits it cannot account for the preference behind it. Chapter fifty-eight does something similar when it asks who knows where the reversal of fortune and calamity ends.

The middle of the chapter describes how heaven operates, in four clauses that are all denials of method. It does not contend and yet is good at winning. Does not speak and yet is good at answering. Does not summon and yet things come of themselves. Is unhurried and yet good at laying plans.

The last of those is the most interesting, because planning is exactly the activity the book distrusts in human beings. Applied to heaven it is qualified by slackness, which is to say a scheme with no urgency in it, and the difference between that and human contrivance is the difference the whole text is about.

The chapter ends on an image that became proverbial in Chinese and remains in use: heaven's net is vast, and though its mesh is wide, nothing slips through it.

The picture is precise. A net with a wide mesh looks like a poor net, because the obvious way to catch more is to weave tighter. The claim is that this one misses nothing anyway, and the reader is left to work out why. The answer implied by the rest of the chapter is that the net is not catching things; things arrive in it, in the same way that heaven does not summon and yet things come of themselves.

The phrase entered ordinary Chinese as a saying about justice being inescapable, usually invoked about a criminal who thinks he has got away, and in that popular use it means something much closer to divine surveillance than the chapter supports. Nothing here says heaven is watching, and the book elsewhere denies that it has favourites: chapter seventy-nine says the way of heaven has no partiality and is constantly with the good, and chapter five says heaven and earth are not humane and treat the ten thousand things as straw dogs.

The gap between what the line says in place and what it came to mean is one of the clearest examples of how this book has travelled. Its images are strong enough to detach from their chapters and go into general circulation, and once detached they acquire the meanings the culture around them needs, which are often not the ones the surrounding argument would allow.