Chapter 27

The chapter opens with five parallel clauses about competence, and every one of them defines skill as the absence of the equipment the job is supposed to need. A good traveller leaves no tracks. A good speaker no flaws. A good reckoner needs no counting sticks. A good closer needs no bolt, and yet nothing can be opened. A good binder needs no rope, and yet nothing can be untied.

The first two are about not leaving residue and the last three are about not requiring apparatus, and the shift between them is where the argument is. Counting sticks, bolts and cord are all technologies, and each is a real answer to a real problem. The chapter does not say they fail. It says that at the top of a skill they become unnecessary, because what they supply externally has become part of how the practitioner works.

That is a claim about mastery rather than about primitivism, and it distinguishes this chapter from the ones that are genuinely suspicious of contrivance, such as fifty-seven and eighty. Nothing here says the counting sticks should be thrown away by people who need them.

It also supplies the book with one of its recurring standards for good action, which is that good action is not detectable as action. Chapter seventeen said the best ruler is one the people barely know is there. Chapter forty-three says teaching without words is matched by few in the world. This chapter puts the same standard on five ordinary trades, which is what makes it the most concrete statement of it.

The second half of the chapter applies the five images of effortless skill to people, and it is the most explicitly inclusive passage in the book. The sage is always good at saving people and abandons nobody. He is always good at saving things and abandons nothing.

The reasoning is not compassionate in the usual sense and does not appeal to obligation. It is an argument from waste. If a good binder needs no rope, then a person who has to discard the difficult material has simply not reached the standard the chapter is describing. Abandoning someone is evidence about the abandoner.

The lines that follow make that structural. The good is the teacher of the not good, and the not good is the material of the good. The two are locked together as a pair of roles, and the chapter warns that failing to value the teacher or to care for the material is a great confusion however clever a person is. Cleverness is named and dismissed in the same breath, which is unusual: elsewhere the book tends to leave the alternative unnamed.

The phrase used for what results from this practice, rendered as inherited clarity or handed-down illumination, is one of the genuinely obscure expressions in the text. Commentators have taken it as brightness passed on from the ancients, as insight carried within, and as a state of doubled clarity, and the recensions do not agree on the second character. It is a place where an English version has to commit to a reading that the Chinese does not obviously make.