Chapter 36

Four parallel lines open the chapter and they are the most morally uncomfortable passage in the book. To shrink something you must first stretch it. To weaken it you must first strengthen it. To discard it you must first raise it. To take from it you must first give to it.

Read as description, they state a natural pattern the text asserts everywhere else: what is stretched contracts, what grows strong grows old, what rises falls. On that reading the chapter is observing that things reach their limit and reverse, and that the reversal is built into the extension.

Read as instruction, they are a manual for entrapment. Build your enemy up so that his collapse is complete. Give in order to be in a position to take. The grammar of the Chinese supports this reading as easily as the other, and the chapter names it subtle clarity, which sounds a great deal more like a technique than like a law of nature.

Both readings are old. The text was read as statecraft from early on, and a well-known strand of Warring States and Han political writing quotes and expounds this book in exactly that register, treating its paradoxes as advice a ruler can act on. It is not a distortion imposed by hostile readers; the chapter's closing lines are about not letting the sharp instruments of a state be seen, which is advice about concealment addressed to a government.

Whether the book as a whole is a work of political cunning or a work about the grain of things that some readers have put to cunning use is one of the standing questions about it, and this chapter is where the question is hardest to avoid.

The chapter ends on two sentences that have nothing obvious to do with each other or with what precedes them. Fish should not be taken out of the deep. The sharp instruments of a state should not be shown to anyone.

The fish line reads as a proverb, and it works in two directions. A fish is safe while it stays where it cannot be reached, so it is advice about staying hidden. A fish out of water dies, so it is also a statement that a thing removed from its element loses whatever made it formidable. Both senses are live and the chapter does not choose.

The second line is unambiguous and is the reason this chapter is read as statecraft. The phrase rendered sharp instruments covers the effective apparatus of a government, its weapons and also its means of reward and punishment, and the instruction is that these should not be displayed. Deterrence by visible force is being rejected in favour of capability nobody has measured.

Between them the two sentences supply the practical content of the opening four lines. What the soft and weak overcome is not the hard and strong in general; it is the hard and strong that have been drawn out and shown. Chapter thirty makes the same point about armies, chapter fifty-eight about government that is searching rather than dull, and chapter seventy-two about a ruler who displays himself.

It is also a fair illustration of how the chapters are assembled. Two proverbs, a four-line pattern and a single named term are set side by side with the connections left for the reader, and different readers have drawn them differently for two thousand years.