Chapter 22

The chapter opens with six short clauses that all have the same shape: a deficiency, and then the advantage that follows from it. Bent, and so kept whole. Twisted, and so straightened. Hollow, and so filled. Worn out, and so renewed. Having little, and so gaining. Having much, and so confused.

Five of the six run from lack to gain and the sixth reverses, which stops the list being a formula. The reversal is also the one that names the failure mode the rest of the book keeps returning to: abundance produces confusion, and the person who has most is least able to choose.

The images are not decorative. A bent tree survives the axe because it is useless as timber, a point the Zhuangzi develops at length. A hollow vessel is a vessel; a full one is a lump. Being worn out is presented as an advantage over being finished, because what is finished can only be replaced, and chapter fifteen makes the same move when it says the practitioner does not want to be full.

What the list is not is a recommendation to seek damage. Nothing here says to break yourself in order to be whole. The claim is about which state is capable of change, and it is stated as an observation about how things behave rather than as advice about what to do. The advice arrives in the next sentence, where the sage holds to the one, and it is advice about attention rather than about self-injury.

The second half of this chapter and the whole of chapter twenty-four are the same four propositions, once in the positive and once in the negative, and the pairing is close enough that some readers treat them as a single unit split by the chapter divisions.

Here: he does not show himself and is therefore seen, does not consider himself right and is therefore distinguished, does not boast and therefore has merit, does not take pride and therefore lasts. There: one who shows himself is not seen, who thinks himself right is not distinguished, who boasts has no merit, who is proud does not last.

The four terms are identical and the order is identical. What differs is the frame. This chapter puts them under the sage who holds to the one and ends on the standing formula that because he does not contend, nobody in the world can contend with him. Chapter twenty-four puts them under two images of physical overreaching, standing on tiptoe and taking long strides, and ends by calling the behaviour leftover food and a tumour of an action.

The doubling tells you something about how the text was assembled. Repeated formulae, near duplicate passages and stock closing lines are what a collection of transmitted sayings looks like, not what a single continuous composition looks like. The final line of this chapter appears again almost word for word at the end of chapter sixty-six, in a completely different setting about rivers and valleys.

The chapter closes by defending the six opening clauses against the charge of being merely clever: what the ancients said about the bent being kept whole was not an empty phrase. That defensiveness is unusual and suggests the sayings were already old, and already being dismissed, when the chapter was put together.