Chapter 70

The chapter is the book's most direct statement about its own reception, and it is made without any claim to be difficult. My words are very easy to understand and very easy to put into practice, and nobody in the world is able to understand them or put them into practice.

That is not the standard complaint of an esoteric teaching. An esoteric teaching says its content is hard, reserved, or available only to those prepared for it. This one insists the content is simple and available, and locates the failure elsewhere.

Where, it says next: my words have an ancestor and my affairs have a ruler, and it is because people do not understand this that they do not understand me. The two terms name a source and a governing principle, and the claim is that the sayings are consequences of something. A reader who takes them one at a time is collecting results without the thing that produces them, which is exactly why they can be easy to understand individually and impossible to act on.

That diagnosis fits the book's form. It is a collection of short units, and the units are memorable enough to circulate on their own, which they have done for two thousand years. The chapter is warning against the very thing that has kept it alive.

The closing image is unexpectedly personal. Those who understand me are few, and one who takes me as a model is honoured; so the sage wears coarse cloth over his shoulders and carries jade in his breast. Something valuable, carried where nobody sees it, under clothes that invite no attention.

The chapter is in the first person throughout, and the identity of the speaker is one of the standing questions about the book.

Tradition assigns the work to Laozi, an older contemporary of Confucius who served as an archivist and wrote the book at a frontier pass on his way out of the country. The earliest sustained account of him, in the Han historian Sima Qian's great record, is itself uncertain: it offers more than one candidate for who he was, admits that nobody knew what became of him, and gives conflicting information about his dates. A historian writing in the second or first century before the common era was already unable to settle the question.

Modern scholarship has not settled it either, and the manuscript evidence pushes in a different direction. Material corresponding to this text appears in bamboo slips from a tomb at Guodian in bundles that carry no author, no frontier pass and no Dao and De division, and the repetition of formulae across chapters is what a compilation looks like rather than what a single composition looks like.

Which makes the first person here worth reading carefully. Whoever assembled these sayings gave them a voice, and the voice is consistent: isolated in chapter twenty, teaching in chapter forty-two, complained about in chapter sixty-seven, and here unread. It is a persona and it may be more than one person's.

The atlas records the book's traditional attribution because that attribution is itself a historical fact about how the text has been received, and records the doubt alongside it.