Chapter 52

The chapter builds a small procedure out of one family metaphor. The world had a beginning which may be taken as the mother of the world. Having got the mother, one knows the children. Knowing the children and going back to hold to the mother, one is in no danger to the end of life.

The sequence has three steps and the third is the one that is usually dropped in summary. Reach the source. From the source, understand what comes from it. Then return to the source, still holding what you learned about the children. It is not a movement away from the world of particulars and it is not a permanent residence at the origin; it is a circuit, and the chapter measures its success in a very ordinary currency, that of not coming to harm before you die.

The mother image is the book's standing figure for the source, used in chapter one where the named is called the mother of the ten thousand things, in chapter twenty-five where the thing born before heaven and earth might be the mother of all under heaven, and in chapter twenty where the isolated speaker says he values being fed by the mother.

What distinguishes this chapter is the pairing with children. Elsewhere the mother has no offspring named; here the derived things are given a term of their own, and the relation between origin and particulars becomes a relation a person can move along in both directions. That two-way movement is what the chapter recommends, and it is why the passage reads as practical where the other mother passages read as cosmological.

The middle of the chapter gives an instruction whose objects are never identified. Block the openings and shut the gates, and to the end of life there is no toil. Open the openings and add to the business, and to the end of life there is no help.

The same instruction appears again in chapter fifty-six, in a different setting, followed by four more clauses about blunting sharpness and settling with the dust. In neither place does the text say what the openings and gates are.

Commentators have supplied two main answers. On one reading they are the senses and the mouth, and the chapter is advising a withdrawal of attention from what comes in and goes out. On another they are the openings of the body understood physiologically, and the instruction concerns the retention of vital energies, which is how the later traditions of internal cultivation took it. The wording supports both, and the second reading is one of the main routes by which this book became a foundational text for practices it does not describe.

The chapter closes on two definitions that steady it. Seeing what is small is called clarity, and keeping to what is soft is called strength. Both invert the ordinary sense of their terms, since clarity would usually attach to seeing what is large and strength to hardness, and both are picked up in chapter thirty-three, which uses exactly these two words for the inward member of each of its couplets.

Read with those definitions, the closed gates are not an escape but a narrowing of attention onto what is too small and too soft to register otherwise.