Chapter 42

The chapter opens with the book's only sequence of generation, and it is stated in four steps with nothing explained. The way gives birth to one. One gives birth to two. Two gives birth to three. Three gives birth to the ten thousand things.

None of the numbers is glossed. Commentators have supplied identifications for all of them, most often taking one as undifferentiated breath or the whole, two as yin and yang, and three as the pair together with what arises from their interaction, and the next sentence supports that direction by saying that the ten thousand things carry yin on their backs and hold yang in their arms and blend these breaths into harmony. But the chapter itself supplies no key, and readings that make the three a specific triad are additions.

What the sequence does say, without any gloss at all, is that generation proceeds by increase of number and that it does not stop at a small figure. Each stage produces the next and the last stage produces indefinitely many. There is no point at which the series is completed and no suggestion that the ten thousand things are a falling away from the one.

The passage became load-bearing in later Daoist cosmology and in the internal traditions that read the book as a manual, where the numbered stages were given detailed content. That development is well outside what these four clauses assert. The chapter is a good example of a text whose reticence was later treated as an invitation, and reading the later systems back into it makes it say a great deal it does not.

The second half of the chapter abandons cosmology and ends somewhere nobody reading the first half would predict.

It repeats the three humiliating titles rulers use of themselves, orphaned, widowed and unworthy, which chapter thirty-nine also cites, and draws the general rule that a thing is sometimes added to by being reduced and reduced by being added to. That much is the book's standard argument about diminishment.

Then the speaker says something in the first person: what others teach, I teach too. The violent and overbearing do not die a natural death. And I take this as the father of my teaching.

Three features of that are unusual. The book almost never acknowledges agreement with anyone else, and here it explicitly aligns itself with received wisdom rather than against it. It states a single proposition and calls it the origin of everything else it says, which no other chapter does. And the proposition chosen is a piece of ordinary moral folklore about bullies coming to bad ends, not a paradox and not a metaphysical claim.

The word rendered father, or in some readings the ancestor and origin of the teaching, has been read both as naming a source the teaching descends from and as naming its foundation. Either way the chapter is claiming that the whole apparatus of the way, non-action, softness and return is grounded in an observation anybody might make.

That is a plainer self-account than the book gives anywhere else, and it sits directly after its most obscure sequence, in the same chapter, with no transition between them.