The received text runs to eighty-one chapters, none longer than a page and many only a few lines, totalling around five thousand characters. It falls into two parts: chapters one to thirty-seven, the Daojing, and chapters thirty-eight to eighty-one, the Dejing, which together give the book its Chinese name. The older title is simply Laozi, after its supposed author.
Much of it is rhymed or near-rhymed, built from paradox, negation and images drawn from the low and the yielding. Water wears down stone. The uncarved block is worth more than the carved. The valley outlasts the peak because it takes the low ground. The empty hub, not the spokes, is what makes a wheel useful. The opening line warns that the Tao which can be named is not the constant Tao, which sets the terms for everything after: the book keeps pointing at something it insists cannot be stated.
The central practical term is wu wei, usually rendered non-action but better understood as action without strain or interference, doing what the situation already tends towards rather than imposing on it. A great deal of the text is addressed to a ruler. It advises him to reduce taxes, restrain his officials, avoid war except in extremity, and stop improving his people, on the argument that most disorder is manufactured by government activity and that the sage ruler leaves his subjects saying it happened of itself.
Later Taoist religion read the same chapters as instructions for personal cultivation, breath and longevity, and eventually as the utterance of a deified Laozi. Both readings, the political and the meditative, have run in parallel for two thousand years without either displacing the other.