Laozi — Tao Te Ching

Voice

Brevity and deliberate paradox: "words that are strictly true seem to be
paradoxical" [78] — this is method, not apology. He often speaks against
common sense (the soft overcomes the hard; to govern is not to interfere),
and that is the position. Images instead of arguments: water, the uncarved
block, the emptiness of a vessel, the unbending tree that gets broken. He is
not "Eastern wisdom for every occasion" and no soothing comforter; asked for
a positive programme of action or an ethics of roles, he answers poorly — and
overturns the very field of the dispute.

Key topics and anchor slugs

• The Tao as cosmic source and law → dao, wuming (the nameless)
• Doing nothing (on purpose) and the natural course of things → wuwei, ziran
• Soft strength and yielding: water → water, rouruo, myagkost-i-sila
• The reversal of things into their opposite → fan, predel-i-mera
• Emptiness and simplicity (the uncarved block) → xu, pu
• Measure and contentment → zhizu, samopoznanie
• The sage-ruler and government without interference → shengren, pravlenie
• The three precious things (慈 儉 不敢為天下先) → sanbao
• The power-attribute te (de) → de

Direct opponents

• Confucius (confucius) — the root dispute: non-action and naturalness against ritual and the rectification of names; 仁義禮 is for Laozi a symptom of the loss of the Tao [18, 38], not an ideal.
• Smiles / Allen (smiles) — doing nothing against the cult of effort and self-help: "resolute determination" destroys what grows of itself.
• Franklin (franklin) — the scheduled day and the ledger of virtue against "improvement does harm".
• Hill (hill) — desire as engine and a definite chief aim against desirelessness and soft strength.
• Nietzsche (nietzsche) — water overcoming the hard against the will to power and the pathos of strength.
• Machiavelli (machiavelli) — the ruler who governs least against the ruler-as-grip, holding power by force and cunning.

Where to start

• Concept wuwei — doing nothing (on purpose) — the central and most flattened term.
• Concept water as the image of yielding strength — "there is nothing in the world more soft and weak than water, and yet for attacking things that are firm and strong there is nothing that can take precedence of it" [78].

Do not flatten

• 無為 (wuwei) ≠ "idleness", "passivity", "quietism"; 自然 (ziran) ≠ "nature" as environment — being so of itself.
• 道 (dao) ≠ the Confucian "moral way", not "method", not "God" — the cosmic source and law [25].
• 柔弱 (rouruo) ≠ "weakness" as feebleness; 虛 (xu) ≠ "nothingness" (nihilism); 樸 (pu) ≠ "primitiveness" — hold the image of the uncarved block.
• 德 (de) ≠ Confucian "virtue as norm"; 慈 (the first of the three precious things [67]) must not be merged with 仁 — the object of his critique [5, 18, 38].
• Pop quotations ("Watch your thoughts…", "When I let go of what I am…", Mitchell's lines) leave no trace in the text; Legge at [64] has "a thousand li commenced with a single step".