Chapter 37

The chapter states the book's central formula in its shortest form. The way is constantly without action, and yet nothing is left undone.

Every word of that is contested. Some recensions read the first clause as saying the way does nothing, others as saying it does not act and there is nothing it does not do, and the recovered manuscripts do not all agree with the received wording. What is not in doubt is the shape: a denial of activity followed immediately by a claim of complete result.

The line is the closest thing the text has to a thesis, and it explains why non-action is not passivity. If nothing is left undone, then the state being described is not an absence of outcomes. It is an absence of a particular kind of effort, the kind that pushes, contrives and forces, and the chapter's claim is that the outcomes arrive anyway and arrive more completely.

The rest of the chapter turns this into a political scenario with an unusual feature: it anticipates its own failure. If lords and kings could hold to it, the ten thousand things would transform of themselves. And if, in transforming, desire arose, the chapter says it would be settled with the namelessness of the uncut block.

That second step is what distinguishes the passage from wishful thinking. The programme is expected to generate a problem, since transformation stirs appetite, and a remedy is named for it, which is a return to the unnamed rather than a new rule. The chapter ends on the result: still and without craving, the world settles of itself.

In the received arrangement of the text, chapter thirty-seven is the last chapter of the Dao section, and chapter thirty-eight opens the De section. That two-part division gives the book the title by which it is best known, and it is the division this atlas records as the two portions Dao Jing and De Jing.

The silk manuscripts recovered from a Han tomb at Mawangdui in 1973 carry the two halves in the opposite order. The material corresponding to chapters thirty-eight to eighty-one comes first, and the material corresponding to chapters one to thirty-seven follows it. In those manuscripts this chapter is therefore not the hinge in the middle of the book but its final chapter, and the book ends on the world settling of itself rather than on the sage who acts and does not contend.

Two things follow from that. The first is that the familiar name of the book, which puts the way before power, records one arrangement out of at least two that circulated, and some modern editions accordingly reverse the order and use the alternative title. The second is that the position of a chapter is a fact about a particular edition rather than about the text, and arguments that depend on a chapter opening or closing a section have to say which edition they mean.

The chapter divisions themselves are an editorial layer, added in the course of transmission, and the eighty-one chapters became standard because the received recensions used them. They are a genuinely useful apparatus for reference, which is why this atlas records them, and they are not a feature of the earliest material.