Chapter 79

The chapter opens with an observation about disputes that is unusually cold. When a great bitterness is settled, some bitterness is bound to remain, so how can that count as good?

The claim is that settlement is not resolution. A quarrel large enough to require settling has produced a state of feeling that the settlement does not remove, and whatever the terms, one party has conceded and remembers it. The chapter therefore refuses to treat successful arbitration as a good outcome, which sets it against the ordinary assumption that the job of government is to resolve disputes well.

What it recommends instead is prevention by non-enforcement, and it uses a piece of everyday commercial practice to say so. The sage holds the left half of the tally and does not press his claim on the other party.

A tally was a contract: a piece of wood or bamboo inscribed and then split, with each party keeping a half that matched only the other. Producing your half was how an obligation was proved. Commentators do not agree about which half the creditor kept, and the chapter has been read both as saying the sage holds the claim and declines to use it and as saying he holds the debtor's half, so the two readings differ on whether he is forgiving a debt or acknowledging one. What both agree on is the next line: one who has power attends to the tally, and one without power attends to collecting.

The chapter ends on a sentence that had a long career in Chinese literature: the way of heaven has no favourites and is constantly with the good.

Its most famous appearance outside this book is in the great historical record compiled by Sima Qian in the Han period. In the account of Bo Yi and Shu Qi, two brothers who refused to serve a new dynasty they judged illegitimate and starved on a mountain rather than eat its grain, the historian quotes this line and then asks whether it can be true. Men of the highest conduct died of hunger, and men of no scruple lived long and prosperous lives, and he says plainly that he is perplexed and wonders whether what is called the way of heaven is right or not.

That is one of the most direct challenges to a religious proposition in early Chinese writing, and it is put by quoting this chapter against itself.

The line is also in tension with chapter five of this book, which says heaven and earth are not humane and treat the ten thousand things as straw dogs, the figures made for a ritual and discarded once it is over. A heaven with no favourites that is nonetheless constantly with the good is not obviously the same heaven that is indifferent.

The book contains both statements and reconciles neither. Readers who want a moral order have this chapter, readers who want an impersonal one have chapter five, and the two have been set against each other for as long as the text has been read.