Chapter fourteen attempts to describe its subject and demonstrates, deliberately, that it cannot be done.
Looked for and not seen, it is called even. Listened for and not heard, it is called rarefied. Grasped at and not held, it is called minute. Three sense modalities, three failures, three technical terms coined for the failures. The chapter then says the three cannot be prised apart and merge into one, so even the three-part analysis dissolves.
What follows continues by negation: its top is not bright, its underside is not dark, it cannot be named, and it returns to no-thing. Then the two formulas the chapter is remembered for, the shape of what has no shape and the image of no thing, each built by cancelling its own noun.
The technique is not evasion and it is not mysticism for effect. The book stated in chapter one that a way which can be spoken is not the constant way, and chapter fourteen is what an honest attempt at description looks like once that has been conceded. Every positive term is withdrawn as soon as it is offered.
A reader who wants to know what the way is will find chapter fourteen useless, and that is the chapter's own position about the question. What it offers instead is in its last lines, and it is practical.