Chapter 38

The chapter sets out a sequence of decline that is the book's most systematic attack on the moral vocabulary of its rivals. When the way is lost there is power. When power is lost there is benevolence. When benevolence is lost there is rightness. When rightness is lost there is ritual. And ritual is the thinning of loyalty and trust, and the head of disorder.

Benevolence, rightness and ritual are the central terms of the Confucian tradition, and they are named here in order, each one presented as the residue of the failure of the one above it. The claim is not that they are bad. It is that the need for them is a symptom, and that a society which has to teach benevolence has already lost something that made benevolence unnecessary.

The image given for the last stage is the sharpest thing in the chapter. The highest ritual acts, and when nobody responds it rolls up its sleeves and drags them into line. Ritual is supposed to work by voluntary participation, and the picture offered is of ritual resorting to force when participation fails, which is exactly the condition the chapter says produces disorder.

The chapter opens on the paradox that gives it its reputation. The highest power is not powerful, and so has power; the lowest power never lets go of power, and so has none. Read with the staircase that follows, it is a test rather than a riddle: whatever has to hold on to its own standing is already at the wrong level, and this applies to virtues as much as to rulers.

Chapter thirty-eight opens the De section of the received text, and in the silk manuscripts recovered from a Han tomb at Mawangdui in 1973 it opens the whole book, because those copies place the De material before the Dao material.

That gives the chapter an importance that the received arrangement obscures. On the Mawangdui ordering, a reader of the book meets no cosmology at all to begin with. The first thing said is that the highest power is not powerful, and the first sustained argument is the descent from the way through benevolence and rightness to ritual, which is a polemic about what a society runs on. The metaphysical chapters arrive in the second half.

The early reception supports that emphasis. The Han Feizi, a Warring States collection associated with the tradition of statecraft that later Chinese bibliography grouped as Legalist, contains a chapter of explanations of the Laozi which begins by expounding the opening of this very chapter. Whatever the book was originally, one of its earliest surviving readers took it up as political and started here.

Two further consequences are worth noting. Editions that follow the manuscript order also reverse the familiar title, putting power before way. And arguments about the structure of the book, including the common claim that it moves from the abstract to the practical, depend entirely on which arrangement is being read, since on the other one it moves the opposite way.