Chapter 48

The chapter opens with the cleanest contrast in the book, and it is a contrast between two operations rather than between two subjects. In the pursuit of learning something is added every day. In the pursuit of the way something is dropped every day.

Neither clause disparages the other activity. Learning genuinely does work by addition, and the sentence describes it accurately. What the chapter claims is that the way is not another subject to be added to the pile but a different procedure altogether, and that the procedure is removal.

The next line pushes the removal to its end. Dropped and dropped again until one reaches doing nothing, and doing nothing, nothing is left undone. That is the formula of chapter thirty-seven, arrived at here by a described process rather than asserted about the way itself. Non-action is presented as a terminus reached by subtraction, which is as close as the book comes to describing a practice with stages.

What is being subtracted is not stated and the chapter is careful about that. It does not say knowledge is dropped, or desires, or possessions, or opinions, though later traditions have supplied all four. The verb is left without an object, which keeps the instruction general.

The chapter then makes an abrupt turn to government, and the turn is the standard one: winning the world is always a matter of not meddling, and one who meddles is not fit to win it. The private discipline and the public policy are given the same form, and the book does this so consistently that the two are hard to separate.

Most of this book describes conditions rather than procedures. It says what the way is like, how a sage behaves, what happens to the violent and what a good government looks like from underneath, and it very rarely tells anyone what to do first.

This chapter is the exception, and it is worth noticing how little it still says. There is one operation, subtraction. It is repeated. It has a stopping point, which is reached rather than chosen. And the result is stated as a paradox rather than as a benefit.

Compare the alternatives elsewhere. Chapter ten asks a series of questions about holding the breath softly, cleansing the dark mirror and keeping to the female, and every one is a question rather than an instruction, so it prescribes nothing. Chapter sixteen describes reaching emptiness and holding to stillness and then immediately shifts to what is observed from there. Chapter fifty-two gives an instruction to block the openings and shut the gates, and leaves the referents unexplained.

Those passages were read as practical directions by the later traditions of breath cultivation and inner alchemy, and much of the Daoist religion's use of this book proceeds from them. That reading requires supplying a great deal, and the supplying was done by later texts and by teachers, not here.

What this chapter offers instead is a description of direction. Whatever the practice is, it removes rather than acquires, and any account of it that ends with the practitioner holding more than they started with has misidentified the exercise.