The way gives them life.
Virtue rears them.
Things give them shape.
Circumstances bring them to maturity.
Therefore the myriad creatures all revere the way and honor virtue. Yet the way is revered and virtue honored not because this is decreed by any authority but because it is natural for them to be treated so.
Thus the way gives them life and rears them,
brings them up and nurses them,
brings them to fruition and maturity,
feeds and shelters them.
It gives them life yet claims no possession;
it benefits them yet exacts no gratitude;
it is the steward yet exercises no authority.
Such is called the mysterious virtue.
Has the old man gone mad? After convincing us that the people have separated themselves from the way and scorn virtue, clinging instead to rituals as a sorry substitute for what is natural and institutionalized paths as concrete encasements for dancing air, he now claims that everyone reveres the way! And that they do this naturally!
Listen to what the people love!— They love to possess no one or thing. They expect no gratitude when they help others. They take care of the earth, things, and people without establishing themselves as superior to the earth, things, and people. This is what the people love!
Yet the people are not natural. Scared of nature’s perpetual indifference, peculiar order, and ecstatic randomness, they surround themselves with artifice then become artifice themselves by absorbing what they have surrounded themselves with; they become their fear and, having become it, do not see it.
Yet surely the old man is mad; he dreams of that mythical golden age in which the people are perfectly aligned with an idealized nature; consciousness is not a breach but an integration; the illusions, catastrophes, petty victories, and follies of ambition are seen by all and laughed aside. He lies in a field of poppies, outrageously fantasizing about a world far removed from the one we know.
Yet the people are awed by the way and honor virtue—though often posthumously, distantly, and incomprehensibly. The way and virtue, these forces beyond the people’s gods and grasping, are aloof, mysterious, numinous, and strange.
The sage, naturally, knows that the way encompasses all things yet still is only the way and virtue’s just virtue and so continues bumbling along her path, avoiding arrogance and humility, reverence and shame, honor and disgrace. Everything that can be named is beautiful, transient, and forgettable; nothing that can be named is honored or revered.
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