Chapter 60

The chapter opens with the most quoted piece of practical advice in the book. Governing a large state is like cooking a small fish.

Nothing in the sentence explains itself, and the explanation is not in the text. What makes it work is that anyone who has cooked one knows: a small fish falls apart if it is turned, poked or fussed with, and the technique consists almost entirely of leaving it alone over the right heat. The analogy carries the whole of the book's political doctrine in one domestic image, and it carries it to a reader who has never encountered the word non-action.

Two details of the comparison are doing work. The fish is small and the state is large, so the analogy runs against scale rather than with it, which denies that a bigger problem needs more handling. And cooking is an activity. The sentence does not say that governing a large state is like leaving a fish in a bucket; there is heat, there is timing, and there is a result somebody is responsible for.

The line had a long career as counsel to rulers and was quoted in Chinese political writing for centuries, usually as an argument against frequent changes of law and personnel. It survives in English as a proverb about not meddling, often with the source forgotten.

It is also the clearest example of the book's preferred method of instruction. A principle stated abstractly invites disagreement. An image from the kitchen, offered without commentary, is either recognised or not.

The second half of the chapter is the book's only sustained treatment of spirits, and its position is careful enough to be worth setting out step by step.

When the world is approached by way of the way, its ghosts have no spiritual power. Then an immediate correction: not that they have no power, but that their power does not harm people. Then a second extension: and not only does their power not harm people, but the sage does not harm them either. And the conclusion, that since neither harms the other, power accrues to both.

The correction in the middle is the important part. The chapter declines to say that the spirits are absent, powerless or unreal, which is what a sceptical text would say, and instead adjusts the claim twice to keep them in existence with their capacities intact. What changes under good government is not the inventory of the world but a relation within it.

The final move is the surprising one. Having secured the people from harm, the chapter turns and secures the spirits from the sage, and treats the resulting non-aggression as productive for both sides. There is no exorcism here and no suppression of local cults, which were live options in the period and were practised by states that wanted religious uniformity.

That is consistent with the book's treatment of everything else. It does not propose eliminating what is troublesome, whether that is the not good in chapter twenty-seven, the enemy in chapter sixty-nine or the spirits here. It proposes removing the friction that makes the trouble.