Chapter 6

Chapter six is six lines and among the most quoted in the book. The spirit of the valley does not die, and is called the dark female; the gate of the dark female is called the root of heaven and earth; barely there, it goes on, and using it never wears it out.

The valley is the book's standing figure for what is low, empty and receptive, and it is always a compliment. A valley is defined by the hills that are not there. It collects what runs down and gives rise to what grows, without doing anything at all, and rivers and seas rule the hundred valleys in chapter sixty-six by the same logic, because they lie below them.

The gate is a generative image and the text does not soften it. What is being described is a source that produces continuously, that is not depleted by producing, and that is characterised by yielding rather than by force. The last line repeats the promise made about the vessel in chapter four and the bellows in chapter five, that use does not exhaust it, and the three chapters together establish a single idea in three images.

Later Daoist practice took this chapter in directions the text does not obviously authorise, reading the valley, the gate and the unfailing breath as internal anatomy in traditions of physiological cultivation. That reading is a real part of the chapter's history and it belongs to those traditions rather than to the text.

The dark female of chapter six is not an isolated image. The Tao Te Ching reaches consistently for the female, the maternal, the low, the yielding, the watery and the infant, and against the male, the high, the hard and the assertive, and the pattern is systematic enough to count as a position.

The mother appears in chapter one as the named source of the ten thousand things, in chapter twenty as what the speaker values while everyone else is at the feast, in chapter twenty-five as what the nameless thing might be called, and in chapter fifty-two as what to hold to after knowing the children. Chapter twenty-eight instructs a reader to know the male but keep to the female. Chapter sixty-one describes a great state as the female of the world and says the female overcomes the male by stillness. Chapter seventy-six argues from the fact that the living are soft and the dead are rigid.

Two cautions are worth stating. The book is not describing women; it is using a gendered pair of terms as an analytical vocabulary, in a culture where that pair was already a standard way of sorting qualities. And the preference is not sentimental. The claim throughout is strategic rather than tender: the yielding term wins. Water wears down stone, the supple tree survives the storm, the state that lowers itself takes the other one.

That is why the imagery cannot simply be extracted as a philosophy of gentleness. It is an argument about what actually prevails.