Chapter 5

Chapter five contains the harshest image in the book. Heaven and earth are not kind, and treat the ten thousand things as straw dogs; the sage is not kind either, and treats the people as straw dogs.

The figure depends on knowing what a straw dog was. Bound out of straw for a sacrificial rite, it was handled with elaborate care while the rite required it, decorated, carried in a covered box, and then, once the ceremony was over, thrown into the road and trodden on or burnt. Nothing about the object changed. What changed was the moment.

That is the claim being made. Heaven and earth do not hold anything in special regard and do not withdraw regard either; things are used as the occasion has it, and then they are not. The word rendered as kind is the standard term for the cardinal Confucian virtue of humaneness, which makes the line a direct refusal of the position that the cosmos, or a good ruler, operates by benevolence toward particular objects of concern.

Whether the second half is bleak or liberating is a genuine interpretive fork. A sage who does not favour is a sage who does not have favourites, which for anyone outside the favoured group is the better arrangement. Read the other way, it is a licence for indifference. The chapter does not choose, and the two readings have both been current since the earliest commentaries.

The second image in chapter five is a piece of workshop equipment, and it is the book's clearest statement of how emptiness is supposed to work.

The space between heaven and earth is like a bellows: empty, and yet it does not collapse; worked, and the more it moves the more comes out. A bellows produces nothing and stores nothing. It has no contents. What it has is a void that can be compressed and released, and its entire usefulness is that void. Fill it and it is a dead box.

Placing this immediately after the straw dogs is doing something. The first image says the cosmos does not favour; the second says it is nevertheless inexhaustibly productive. The two together rule out a particular consolation, that the world provides because it cares, without denying that it provides.

The chapter closes on a line that seems unrelated and is not: much talking runs a person out, and it is better to keep to the centre. A bellows that is worked without pause overheats the forge and empties itself of purpose; speech spent freely does the same to a person. The book returns to this repeatedly, in chapter twenty-three, where a whirlwind cannot last a morning, in chapter fifty-six, where one who knows does not speak, and in chapter eighty-one, where fine words are set against trustworthy ones.