Chapter 35

The chapter contains the book's frankest admission about its own appeal, and it makes it with an image from the road.

Music and food will make a passing traveller stop. But the way, put into words, is bland and without flavour. Look at it and there is not enough to see; listen and there is not enough to hear; use it and it cannot be used up.

The comparison is with an inn. Something audible and something edible will halt a person on a journey, immediately and reliably, and the way will not. The chapter concedes that in plain terms rather than arguing around it, and then puts the compensation in the last clause: what stops the traveller is finite, and what does not stop him is inexhaustible.

The word rendered bland is the ordinary word for the taste of water or of unseasoned food. Blandness later became a positive term in Chinese aesthetics, a quality prized in painting, poetry and music, and this chapter is among the passages that stand behind that development. Here it is not yet a compliment. It is an honest description of why the teaching does not attract.

The chapter opens on a different note, with an instruction to hold to the great image, after which the world will come, and coming, it will not be harmed but will be at peace and at ease. The great image is a phrase chapter forty-one uses for something that has no shape. Placed at the head of this chapter it produces a deliberate contrast: the thing that draws the whole world is the thing with nothing to look at.

Three clauses at the end of this chapter say that the way cannot be seen enough, cannot be heard enough and cannot be exhausted, and they are a compressed restatement of a passage the book has already given in full.

Chapter fourteen sets out the same three terms at length: looked at and not seen, listened to and not heard, reached for and not grasped, and it names each of the three failures. Chapter thirty-five reduces the whole apparatus to a single line and adds the fourth term, that use does not use it up.

That addition is the point of the repetition. Chapter fourteen is about the limits of perception and leaves the matter there. This chapter uses the same limits to make a claim about supply. Everything the senses can register is finite, because a thing that can be exhausted by looking is a thing with an edge, and the traveller's music and food are exactly that kind of thing. What has nothing to register has nothing to run out.

The argument only works if imperceptibility is treated as evidence rather than as an excuse, and the book is aware of the difficulty. Chapter forty-one lists the way among things that seem to be their own opposites and says plainly that the poorest sort of person laughs at it. Chapter seventy says nobody in the world understands it. The text does not pretend that an invisible, tasteless and inaudible thing is an easy proposal, and it repeatedly names the reaction it expects.

What it offers instead of evidence is the practical test in the last clause: use it, and see whether it runs out.