Two lines in chapter three have caused more trouble than anything else in the book. The sage is said to empty the people's minds and fill their bellies, and to keep them free of knowing and of craving.
Read at its harshest, this is a recipe for keeping a population ignorant so that it stays governable, and chapter sixty-five, which says the ancients used the way not to enlighten the people but to keep them simple, is usually cited alongside it. The reading has a long history and it is not a modern misunderstanding; it was available to readers in the classical period and some of them took it.
The defence turns on what the word rendered as knowledge means here. Elsewhere in the book the same term is used for cleverness, contrivance and the calculating intelligence that sees an advantage and takes it, and it is consistently distinguished from the clarity that the book does commend. On that reading the chapter is not against understanding; it is against a particular acquisitive shrewdness, and emptying the mind means emptying it of scheming rather than of learning.
The atlas does not settle this. What is worth recording is that the argument is old, that both readings have serious defenders, and that the text will support either. A reader who has met only the sympathetic reading has met half of the chapter's reception, and a reader who has met only the hostile one has met the other half.