Chapter 23

The chapter makes its case from a single observation about storms. A whirlwind does not last a whole morning and a downpour does not last a whole day. Who produces them? Heaven and earth. If even heaven and earth cannot make a violent thing last, a human being certainly cannot.

The argument is unusually explicit for this book. It has a premise drawn from ordinary experience, an identification of the most powerful agent available, and a conclusion drawn a fortiori. Most of the text states patterns and lets the reader assemble the inference; here the inference is laid out.

What it argues against is force, and specifically against the assumption that intensity produces duration. The examples are the two most forceful things in the weather and both are chosen because they are brief. That pairing of violence with brevity runs through the book: chapter thirty says that things which grow strong then grow old, chapter seventy-six lists the firm and strong among the companions of death, and chapter twenty-four has already said that a person taking long strides does not walk far.

The chapter opens with a line that sets the tone for all of it, that nature says little. The phrase is literally about sparse speech, and it connects the weather argument to the book's recurring suspicion of language: the model being recommended is a heaven and earth that act without announcing, and that do not sustain their loudest actions for long.

The middle of the chapter sets out a rule about identification that is stated three times with only the object changed. One who follows the way is at one with the way. One who follows power is at one with power. One who follows loss is at one with loss.

The third clause is the one that makes the passage bite. Having named two desirable things, the pattern is extended to an undesirable one and continues to hold. Loss is not presented as a punishment for the person who pursues it but as the natural consequence of the same mechanism that delivers the way to the person who pursues the way. Whatever you take as your standard, you get, and the text offers no exemption for those who happen to have chosen badly.

Some recensions extend the parallel further, adding that the way is also glad to receive the one who is at one with it, and so on down the list. Whether those lines are original or a later expansion by symmetry is a standard question about this chapter, and it is the kind of question the recovered manuscripts are useful for, since a copyist completing a pattern is one of the ordinary ways an early text grows.

The chapter closes on a line that appears in chapter seventeen as well, that where trust is insufficient there is a want of trust. It reads as a fragment of political advice landing in the middle of a metaphysical passage, and the abruptness is a fair sample of how this text is put together: units of a few lines, joined by association rather than by argument, with the joins left visible.