Tao Te Ching: What It Teaches and How to Read It
The Tao Te Ching is a Chinese classic of roughly 5,000 characters in 81 short chapters, attributed to Laozi, teaching wu wei - acting without forcing - and a steady preference for the soft, the empty, and the low. This guide covers its disputed authorship, the excavated manuscripts, its core vocabulary, how the major English versions differ, and how readers work through it a chapter at a time.
What is the Tao Te Ching and what does it teach?
The Tao Te Ching is a Chinese classic of roughly 5,000 characters arranged in 81 very short chapters, attributed to Laozi and foundational to Daoism. The received text splits into two halves: the Dao section, chapters 1 through 37, and the De section, chapters 38 through 81. What it teaches is compact. There is a way things move that no name captures, human beings keep working against it by forcing and accumulating and asserting, and the correction is wu wei - acting without contrivance - backed by a preference for the soft over the hard, the empty over the full, and the low place over the high. It is not a systematic philosophy. No chapter defines the terms used in the others, and there is no argument in the ordinary sense, only rhymed, compressed verse working by image and reversal. The book opens by disqualifying its own medium in chapter 1: the dao that can be spoken is not the constant dao, the name that can be named is not the constant name. It closes in chapter 81 with true words are not beautiful. Everything between those brackets carries that warning.
A large share of the Tao Te Ching is addressed to a ruler, which surprises readers who arrive expecting private mysticism. Chapter 17 ranks governments and puts at the top the ruler whose subjects barely know he exists, so that when the work is done the people say they did it themselves. Chapter 60 says governing a large state is like cooking a small fish - handle it too much and it falls apart. Chapter 80 sketches a small state where boats and carts sit unused and neighboring villages hear each other's roosters but never bother visiting. Modern readers transpose these into self-government, and the transposition works, but the political layer is not decoration. There is also a polemical layer aimed at Confucian moralism. Chapter 38 lays out a descent: lose the way and you fall back on de, lose de and you fall back on benevolence, lose benevolence and you fall back on rightness, and when rightness goes all that remains is ritual propriety, which the chapter calls the thin edge of disorder.
How long is the Tao Te Ching?
The Tao Te Ching runs to about 5,000 Chinese characters across 81 chapters, which is why it was traditionally called the Book of Five Thousand Characters. Some chapters are under thirty characters. In English it fills seventy to a hundred pages of verse, readable in an evening.
Is the Tao Te Ching a religious text?
The Tao Te Ching began as a philosophical and political text and was later canonized as scripture by organized Daoist religion, which deified Laozi as the god Taishang Laojun. The book itself names no god and prescribes no ritual, so it is scripture only within traditions that made it one.
What is the difference between Tao Te Ching and Daodejing?
Tao Te Ching and Daodejing are the same book in two romanization systems: Tao Te Ching is Wade-Giles, Daodejing is Hanyu Pinyin. The same split gives Lao Tzu and Laozi, and tao and dao. Academic writing favors pinyin; Tao Te Ching remains the common English title.
Who was Laozi, and did Laozi actually write the Tao Te Ching?
Laozi, a name meaning Old Master, is the traditional author of the Tao Te Ching, and the earliest account of him is a short biography in Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian, compiled around 100 BCE. There he is Li Er, styled Dan, an archivist in the Zhou royal library who once received a visit from Confucius and sent him away with a scolding about ambition. When Zhou declined, Laozi headed west on an ox. At the Hangu Pass the gatekeeper Yinxi refused to let him go without leaving his teaching behind, so Laozi wrote a book in two parts on the way and its power, handed it over, and departed. The revealing part is that Sima Qian openly hedged: in the same biography he floats two rival identifications - a man called Lao Laizi, and a Zhou Grand Historian named Dan who lived considerably later - and concludes that nobody can say which is correct. Doubt about Laozi is not a modern scholarly imposition; it was in the record when the record was made. Most specialists now treat the Tao Te Ching as a compiled work rather than one man's book, with Laozi standing for a lineage of sayings.
The evidence for compilation is internal as much as archaeological. The Tao Te Ching sets rhymed four-character verse next to flat prose, has chapters that argue and chapters that only chant, and repeats whole lines in two places with slight variation - chapters 52 and 56 share the same instruction about blocking the openings and shutting the gates. There are visible joins where a general maxim has been glued to an unrelated image. That pattern fits an anthology of sayings that circulated among teachers, got grouped into bundles, and were arranged into their present sequence by later editors. It does not fit an archivist writing a book in one sitting at a mountain pass. Readers who came for the author find the book uncooperative anyway: the Tao Te Ching has no narrator with a biography and no personal name inside it. The one chapter that sounds like a person is chapter 20, where a solitary voice says everyone else is bright and satisfied while I alone am muddled, drifting like the sea.
When did Laozi live?
Tradition places Laozi in the sixth century BCE as an older contemporary of Confucius, conventionally dated 551 to 479 BCE. Language and the debates the Tao Te Ching responds to point later, to the Warring States period of the fourth or third century BCE. Scholars accept a range, not a birth year.
Did Laozi meet Confucius?
The meeting between Laozi and Confucius appears in Sima Qian's biography and in several Zhuangzi passages, where Laozi gets the better of the exchange and tells Confucius to drop his arrogance. Historians read these scenes as a lineage claim by later Daoists, not a recorded event.
What happened to Laozi after he wrote the Tao Te Ching?
In Sima Qian's account Laozi rode west through the Hangu Pass and vanished from the record. Later Daoist polemic filled the gap with the huahu story - that Laozi went on into India and converted the barbarians, becoming the Buddha or his teacher. Buddhists fought that claim for centuries.
How old is the Tao Te Ching, and what did the Mawangdui and Guodian manuscripts change?
The oldest known copies of the Tao Te Ching are the Guodian bamboo slips, excavated in 1993 from a tomb near Jingmen in Hubei province and generally dated to around 300 BCE. They carry roughly a third of the material in the received book, on three separate bundles of slips, in an order matching no later arrangement. Next oldest are the Mawangdui silk manuscripts, recovered in 1973 from a Han tomb near Changsha in Hunan - two nearly complete copies, labeled A and B, from the early second century BCE. Their most striking feature is the order: in both, the De chapters come before the Dao chapters, which is why Robert Henricks called his 1989 translation the Te-Tao Ching. Before 1973, essentially every English version rested on the received recension transmitted with the commentary of Wang Bi, the Wei-dynasty philosopher who wrote it and died at twenty-three, in 249 CE. The manuscripts confirmed that the text is ancient and remarkably stable in wording. They also showed that the chapter numbering, the two-part division, and the sequence were later editorial decisions.
Two specific variants are worth knowing. First, the word chang, meaning constant or eternal, in the famous opening of chapter 1 stands where both Mawangdui copies read heng. The substitution is a naming taboo: heng was the personal name of Emperor Wen of Han, Liu Heng, so scribes replaced it. Every English rendering that says eternal Tao is translating a word installed for court protocol. Second, chapter 19 in the received text opens with a slogan against Confucian values - cut off benevolence, discard rightness. The Guodian version does not attack those virtues by name; it targets cleverness and disputation instead, which suggests the book's anti-Confucian edge was sharpened by later editors. Alongside Wang Bi, two commentaries shape how the Tao Te Ching has been read: the Heshang Gong commentary, attributed to a riverside recluse and full of physiological and longevity readings, and the Xiang'er commentary of the Celestial Masters, recovered from the Dunhuang caves, which treats the text as scripture for a religious community.
What are the Mawangdui Tao Te Ching manuscripts?
The Mawangdui manuscripts are two silk copies of the Tao Te Ching found in 1973 in a Han tomb near Changsha, Hunan, dated to the early second century BCE. Both place the De chapters first, lack chapter numbers, and preserve grammatical particles the received text dropped, making ambiguous lines easier to parse.
What are the Guodian Laozi slips?
The Guodian slips are the oldest surviving Tao Te Ching material, bamboo strips excavated in 1993 near Jingmen, Hubei, dated to roughly 300 BCE. They preserve about a third of the received text in three bundles with no overall structure, evidence the book circulated as groups of sayings first.
Which Tao Te Ching text do modern translations use?
Most English translations of the Tao Te Ching still follow the received Wang Bi recension, since that is what two thousand years of commentary attaches to. Henricks and Victor Mair translated from Mawangdui, Henricks also produced a Guodian volume, and recent editions footnote the manuscript variants.
What does wu wei mean in the Tao Te Ching?
Wu wei in the Tao Te Ching means acting without contrivance - doing what the situation calls for without forcing, straining, or adding your ego to the work. The characters help: wu means without or there is not, and wei means doing, making, working at, specifically acting with a purpose imposed on things. So wu wei is not the absence of activity but the absence of contrived activity, and the text is explicit that it produces results. Chapter 37 states that the way constantly does nothing, yet nothing is left undone. Chapter 63 gives the self-cancelling formula wei wu wei, act without acting, work without working, taste without tasting. Its partner term is ziran, literally self-so, meaning what happens of its own accord: chapter 25 ends by claiming that the dao takes ziran as its model, so even the way follows spontaneity. Chapter 48 supplies the method as subtraction - in the pursuit of learning something is gained daily, in the pursuit of the way something is dropped daily, and you drop again until you arrive at wu wei. The skill it describes is knowing which of your efforts are load-bearing and which are noise.
The standard misreading of wu wei is passivity, and the Tao Te Ching blocks it in several places. Chapter 64 is a timing manual: hold things while they are still stable, plan while they are still small, since the tree you can barely get your arms around grew from a shoot and the tower of nine stories rose from a heap of earth. That is intervention, just early and small enough to be cheap. Chapter 24 attacks the opposite failure with a physical image: a man on tiptoe cannot stand, a man taking long strides cannot walk far. Chapter 29 says the world is a sacred vessel and cannot be worked on; whoever works on it ruins it, whoever grips it loses it. Chapter 9 adds the exit rule: keep filling a vessel and it spills, keep sharpening a blade and the edge will not last, so when the work is done, withdraw. The wu wei practitioner acts early, acts small, stops at completion, and does not stay to collect credit.
Is wu wei the same as doing nothing?
No. Wu wei in the Tao Te Ching means acting without contrivance, not inaction. Chapter 37's formula - does nothing, yet nothing is left undone - only makes sense if things get accomplished. The nearest ordinary experience is a skill practiced until deliberate effort drops away.
How do you practice wu wei in daily life?
Practicing wu wei starts with subtraction, following chapter 48: find the efforts in a project that exist to prove you are trying, and remove them. Handle problems while they are small, as chapter 64 advises, stop when the work is finished, and resist announcing yourself as the cause.
How do you pronounce wu wei?
Wu wei is pronounced roughly woo-way, with wu on a level high tone and wei falling then rising. Related terms follow the same pattern of English mispronunciation: tao and dao both sound like dow rather than tay-oh, te and de sound like duh, and Laozi is closer to lao-dzuh than lay-oh-zee.
What are the core concepts of the Tao Te Ching, and which Taoism basics come from it?
The Taoism basics that come directly out of the Tao Te Ching rest on a small vocabulary, and once you hold these terms the book stops feeling random. Dao is the way - the source and pattern of things, described in chapter 25 as something formed in confusion, born before heaven and earth, which the text calls dao only because it needs a label. De is the potency that accrues to whatever lives according to its own nature. Wu wei is action without contrivance, and ziran, self-so, is the spontaneity wu wei preserves. Pu, the uncarved block, is unworked wood standing for what has not been shaped into a use. Xu is emptiness, treated as a functional property rather than a lack. Fan is return or reversal, and chapter 40 makes it the engine of the system: reversal is the movement of the dao, weakness is its function. Rou and ruo, the soft and the weak, are what the book recommends, since chapter 78 observes that nothing under heaven is softer than water and nothing surpasses it at wearing down the hard. Chapter 67 names three treasures: compassion, frugality, and not daring to be first in the world.
De deserves more attention than translations usually give it, since it supplies half the title and all of chapters 38 through 81. Rendering it as virtue imports a moral flavor the Chinese does not carry. De is closer to inherent power, efficacy, or integrity in the structural sense - the quality something has when nothing has been added to or taken from its nature. Chapter 51 pairs the terms as a division of labor: the dao gives birth to things and de rears them. Chapter 38 makes the paradox explicit - the highest de is not conscious of being de, and that is why it has de, while the lower kind never lets go of de and therefore lacks it. The same logic runs through xuan de, dark or mysterious de, in chapters 10 and 51: to produce without possessing, to act without laying claim, to guide without dominating. Softness is not a moral posture here. It is a description of what still has power in it.
What is the Tao in the Tao Te Ching?
The Tao in the Tao Te Ching is the nameless source and pattern of everything, deliberately left undefined. Chapter 1 says any dao you can state is not the constant dao. Chapter 25 calls it something undifferentiated and complete, born before heaven and earth, and admits dao is a forced label.
What is te or de in the Tao Te Ching?
Te, or de in pinyin, is the second word of the Tao Te Ching's title and means inherent power or integrity rather than moral virtue. Chapter 51 says the dao produces things and de raises them. Chapter 38 defines the highest de as the kind unaware of itself.
What is the uncarved block in the Tao Te Ching?
The uncarved block, pu, is the Tao Te Ching's image for unworked simplicity - wood before anyone cuts it into a tool. Chapter 28 tells the reader to return to the uncarved block. Chapter 32 says that although it is small, nothing under heaven can make it a servant.
What do the water, valley, and infant images in the Tao Te Ching mean?
The Tao Te Ching argues through recurring images rather than definitions, and four carry most of the weight. Water appears in chapter 8, which opens with the line that the highest good is like water: it benefits the ten thousand things without contending, and settles in the low places people find distasteful, which is why it is close to the dao. Chapter 78 returns to it - nothing is softer than water, nothing beats it at attacking what is hard. The valley is the low, empty place where things actually grow; chapter 6 calls the valley spirit undying and names it the mysterious female, the gateway from which heaven and earth issue, and chapter 28 tells the reader to become the valley of the world. The infant stands for concentrated vitality without tension: chapter 55 describes the person full of de as a newborn, with weak bones and soft sinews but a firm grip, screaming all day without going hoarse. Emptiness gets its demonstration in chapter 11, where thirty spokes share one hub and it is the hole at the center that makes the wheel work.
Chapter 11 is the clearest case of the method. Clay is worked into a pot, and the pot's usefulness lies in the space where there is no clay. Doors and windows are cut for a room, and the room's usefulness lies in the openings. Chapter 5 extends the idea upward, comparing the space between heaven and earth to a bellows: empty but never exhausted, and the more it is worked the more comes out. That same chapter holds one of the coldest lines in the book, that heaven and earth are not benevolent and treat the ten thousand things as straw dogs - the woven ritual figures honored during a ceremony and discarded afterward. Chapter 15 abandons definition entirely and offers only similes for the ancient adepts: careful as someone crossing a river in winter, watchful as a guest in a strange house, yielding as ice at the point of melting, blank as uncarved wood, murky as clouded water. Then it makes the point - muddy water, left alone, clears itself.
Why does the Tao Te Ching compare the Tao to water?
The Tao Te Ching uses water because water demonstrates the book's argument without needing one. Chapter 8 notes that water helps everything while competing with nothing and occupies the low ground people avoid. Chapter 78 adds the reversal: the softest substance is the one that cuts canyons.
What does the valley spirit never dies mean?
The line in chapter 6 of the Tao Te Ching - the valley spirit never dies, it is called the mysterious female - uses the valley as an image of fertile emptiness. A valley is defined by what is not there, receives what flows down, and is where things grow. Its gate, the chapter adds, is the root of heaven and earth.
What does chapter 11 of the Tao Te Ching say about emptiness?
Chapter 11 of the Tao Te Ching argues that usefulness lives in the empty part. The hub's hole makes the wheel turn, the hollow makes the pot hold, the cut openings make the room habitable. Its closing formula: having gives the advantage, not-having gives the use.
Which Tao Te Ching translation should a first-time reader choose?
For a first reading, choose a Tao Te Ching translation that reads well aloud, then add a closer scholarly version once the book has your attention. Ursula K. Le Guin's Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching, published by Shambhala in 1997, is the friendliest entry point: she called it a rendition rather than a translation, worked from earlier English versions with the sinologist J. P. Seaton checking her against the Chinese, and her endnotes are honest about where she chose feeling over literalism. Stephen Mitchell's 1988 version is the best-selling English Tao Te Ching by a wide margin and is genuinely beautiful, but Mitchell does not read classical Chinese; he worked from existing translations informed by Zen practice and adds, cuts, and modernizes freely. D. C. Lau's Penguin translation of 1963 is the standard plain scholarly choice, and Wing-tsit Chan's is the standard philosophical one. Red Pine's Taoteching sets each chapter beside remarks from Chinese commentators spanning two thousand years, the most useful single volume a Western reader can own. Gia-fu Feng and Jane English's 1972 edition, with Jane English's photographs, is the one many readers met first.
Tao Te Ching translations diverge as widely as they do because classical Chinese leaves out nearly everything English requires. There are no articles, no obligatory tense, no marked singular or plural, frequently no stated subject, and in the manuscripts no punctuation, so the translator supplies the grammar. Characters carry clusters of meaning, and the opening line exploits this: dao ke dao fei chang dao uses dao as a noun and then as a verb. Compare four published renderings of those same six characters. James Legge, in 1891, gave the Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao. Arthur Waley, in 1934, gave the Way that can be told of is not an Unvarying Way. Stephen Mitchell gave the tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. Ursula K. Le Guin gave the way you can go isn't the real way. Trodden, told, and go are three verbs for one character, and every English word for chang - enduring, unvarying, eternal, real - is a decision.
What is the most accurate Tao Te Ching translation?
For close accuracy to the Chinese, readers of the Tao Te Ching usually name D. C. Lau, Wing-tsit Chan, Victor Mair's 1990 Bantam version from Mawangdui, and Robert Henricks's Te-Tao Ching. Jonathan Star's edition prints a character-by-character concordance, so a reader with no Chinese sees the raw material.
Is Stephen Mitchell's Tao Te Ching a real translation?
Stephen Mitchell's Tao Te Ching is a version rather than a translation from Chinese. Mitchell worked from earlier English translations and his Zen training, and says so; it is loved for its rhythm and criticized by sinologists for lines with no counterpart in the original. Best used beside a literal edition.
Should I read the Tao Te Ching in more than one translation?
Yes, and comparing versions is standard practice with the Tao Te Ching rather than a scholarly luxury. Reading one chapter in four translations exposes which words are in the Chinese and which are the translator's. Online archives such as Terebess Asia Online collect well over a hundred English versions.
How do you read the Tao Te Ching as a daily practice?
The standard practice with the Tao Te Ching is one chapter a day for 81 days, then starting over from chapter 1. The chapters are short enough to read in a minute and dense enough to stay with you all day, and the cycle means you meet every chapter about four times a year. Four habits make the cycle work. Read the chapter aloud, since the Chinese is rhymed verse composed to be heard and memorized. Read it again in a different translation and notice where the two disagree, because the gap is usually the interesting part. Take one line into the day, unexplained, and let situations test it. In the evening, write a sentence about where that line applied and where it plainly did not. The book also contains its own sitting instructions. Chapter 16 opens with attain utmost emptiness, hold firmly to stillness, then watches the ten thousand things flourish and return to their root, calling that return stillness. Chapter 10 asks whether you can concentrate the breath until it is as supple as an infant's.
Rereading is where the Tao Te Ching does its work, because the chapters that stop you change over time. Chapter 5, with heaven and earth treating everything as straw dogs, reads as bleak until the point lands: impartiality is not cruelty, and a nature that played favorites would be far worse. Chapter 3, with its instruction to empty the people's minds and fill their bellies, weaken their ambitions and strengthen their bones, sounds like a manual for keeping a population docile until you try reading it as self-address rather than policy. Chapter 20's lonely voice - everyone else is sharp and cheerful, I alone am dull and adrift - fits badly with the serene reputation the book has. The discipline is to leave these rough passages rough. Two habits help once the cycle is established. Memorize the chapters that keep returning, which is how the text was carried for most of its history, and note the lines you disagree with, since those are usually the ones still working on you a year later.
How long does it take to read the Tao Te Ching?
Reading the Tao Te Ching straight through takes one to two hours in most English versions, since the whole book is around 5,000 Chinese characters. That speed is misleading. The practice the text supports is one chapter a day across an 81-day cycle, repeated.
Which Tao Te Ching chapter should a beginner start with?
Beginners do better starting somewhere other than chapter 1 of the Tao Te Ching, the most abstract page in the book. Chapter 8 on water, chapter 11 on emptiness, chapter 33 on knowing yourself, and chapter 76 on the soft and the stiff are concrete and immediately usable.
Can you use the Tao Te Ching for guidance on a decision?
The Tao Te Ching offers guidance on decisions as tendencies rather than answers: act early while things are small, prefer the reversible move, stop at sufficiency, and distrust any option chosen mainly to look decisive. It has no consultation procedure; readers who open it at random are borrowing a habit from divination texts.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the main message of the Tao Te Ching?
The main message of the Tao Te Ching is that things go better when you stop forcing them. The book holds that there is a way things move - the dao - that no name captures, and that most human damage comes from contriving against it: piling up possessions, sharpening cleverness, meddling with what would settle on its own. Its answer is wu wei, action without contrivance, supported by a preference for the soft over the rigid, the empty over the full, and the low position over the high. Chapter 76 puts the argument in one image: a living body is soft and supple, a dead one is stiff, so the stiff and strong are companions of death while the soft and weak are companions of life.
What does the title Tao Te Ching mean in English?
Tao Te Ching breaks into three Chinese words. Dao means way, road, or method, and by extension the way things move. De, romanized te in the older Wade-Giles system, is usually translated virtue, but it means something closer to inherent power or integrity - the potency a thing has when it lives according to its own nature. Jing means classic or canonical scripture, a status the book gained once it entered the imperial canon, so the title is roughly Classic of the Way and Its Power, which is what Arthur Waley used for his 1934 title The Way and Its Power. Before it carried the honorific jing, the book was simply called the Laozi, and also the Book of Five Thousand Characters.
Is the Tao Te Ching hard to read?
The Tao Te Ching is short and easy to get through but very hard to finish with. An English version runs to perhaps eighty pages of loose verse. The difficulty is that the chapters are compressed to the point of ambiguity, contradict each other on the surface, and refuse to define their central terms - chapter 1 opens by declaring that the dao anyone can put into words is not the constant dao. Readers who expect a system come away frustrated; readers who treat it as eighty-one separate probes into the same problem find it gets easier and stranger at once. Reading a chapter in two translations clears up most confusion, since much of what feels obscure is one translator's guess.
Do you have to be a Taoist to read the Tao Te Ching?
No. The Tao Te Ching makes no demand for belief, prescribes no worship, and names no deity to accept. It has been read for centuries by people with no connection to Daoist religion: Chinese officials read it as advice on governing, Chan and Zen Buddhists absorbed its vocabulary, and modern readers pick it up for its account of how effort backfires. It does ask something harder than belief, which is a willingness to entertain that the qualities you were trained to value - decisiveness, accumulation, visible achievement, being first - are the ones causing the trouble. Readers who take it seriously without adopting a religion treat it as a corrective rather than a creed.
What is the difference between the Tao Te Ching and the Zhuangzi?
The Tao Te Ching and the Zhuangzi are the two founding texts of philosophical Daoism, and they differ almost entirely in method. The Tao Te Ching is compressed, rhymed, aphoristic, and heavily addressed to rulers, with chapters often under fifty characters. The Zhuangzi is long prose told in stories and jokes - the butterfly dream, the cook whose blade never dulls because he cuts along the joints, the useless tree that survives because no carpenter wants it. Where the Tao Te Ching advises restraint and quiet governance, the Zhuangzi is more anarchic and more interested in the relativity of human judgments. Readers who find the Tao Te Ching too terse often warm to the Zhuangzi first, then come back and find the aphorisms have opened up.
Is the Tao Te Ching connected to the I Ching?
The Tao Te Ching and the I Ching are separate books with different jobs, though both belong to early Chinese thought and share vocabulary about change. The I Ching is a divination manual built on sixty-four hexagrams, consulted with coins or yarrow stalks to produce a reading about a specific situation. The Tao Te Ching is not a divination text: it has no procedure, no casting method, and no mechanism for answering a question you bring to it. Some readers do open the Tao Te Ching at random and take whatever chapter appears as a prompt, which is a personal habit rather than anything the book sets up. If you want an oracle, the I Ching is the one designed for it.
What is the most famous line in the Tao Te Ching?
The best-known line from the Tao Te Ching in English comes from chapter 64, usually quoted as a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. The Chinese, qian li zhi xing, shi yu zu xia, says something slightly different: a journey of a thousand li begins beneath your feet. The point in context is not motivational - the surrounding lines are about handling things while they are small, before they harden into problems. Two other lines compete for the title. Chapter 1, the dao that can be spoken is not the constant dao, is the most quoted opening, and chapter 56, those who know do not speak, those who speak do not know, is the most quoted aphorism. The Tang poet Bai Juyi needled Laozi with it: if he knew, why did he write five thousand words?
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