Chapter 10

Chapter ten is unusual in form. It is a series of questions, and nobody is said to answer them.

Can you hold the body and the spirit together and not let them part? Can you concentrate the breath until it is as soft as an infant's? Can you clean the dark mirror until there is no flaw in it? Can you love the people and govern the state without contrivance? Can the gates of heaven open and close, and you be the female? Can your clarity reach everywhere without your knowing anything?

The interrogative form changes what the chapter is doing. A statement would be a doctrine; a question is a test, and the reader is invited to notice that they cannot answer yes. Several of the questions describe conditions that the rest of the book treats as characteristic of the sage, so the chapter functions as a measure of distance rather than as instruction.

The content points toward a discipline of some kind. Holding body and spirit together, softening the breath and cleaning the mirror are the vocabulary of practice rather than of argument, and this chapter, with chapters six, fifty-two and fifty-five, is where the later Daoist traditions of physiological and meditative cultivation found their scriptural footing.

The atlas describes that and does not extend it. What the chapter actually prescribes, in what tradition and by what method, is not recoverable from six questions, and the practices built on it belong to living lineages with teachers.

Chapter ten ends with a formula that recurs twice more in the book, in chapters fifty-one and sixty-five, and which is one of its few pieces of fixed terminology.

To give life to things and rear them; to produce without possessing; to act without depending on the result; to bring up without ruling: this is called the dark power. The word rendered dark is the same one used of the female in chapter six and of the identity in chapter fifty-six, and it carries the sense of something deep, obscure and not brought into the light rather than something sinister.

The four clauses define de, the power that gives the second part of the book its name, by what it withholds. It produces and does not own. It does what it does and does not make the outcome the reason. It brings a thing up and does not govern it. Every clause names an ordinary further step, taken almost automatically by anyone who has produced, acted or raised something, and declines it.

That definition is worth setting beside the usual translation of de as virtue. There is nothing moral in these four clauses. What is being described is a mode of relation to what one has made, and its opposite is not vice but ownership.

Chapter fifty-one repeats the formula word for word and attributes it to the way itself rather than to a person, which makes the human version an imitation of how things already work rather than an achievement added on top of them.