Chapter 41

The chapter opens by sorting hearers into three grades and describing what each does. The best sort practises the way diligently. The middling sort half keeps it and half loses it. The poorest sort laughs out loud.

Then the line that makes the passage famous: if he did not laugh, it would not be fit to be the way.

That is a remarkable thing for a teaching to say about itself. It converts the worst available reception into a criterion, and it does so without contempt for the person laughing, whose reaction is treated as accurate given what he can see. The argument is that a way anybody could immediately recognise as sound would be operating within the standards people already hold, and the whole book is about a way that inverts them.

The move is a risky one and the book uses it sparingly. Chapter seventy says nobody in the world is able to understand these words, and adds that this is why the sage wears coarse cloth with jade inside it. Chapter thirty-five admits that the teaching put into words is bland. Chapter seventy-eight ends by saying that straight words seem to say the opposite.

Taken together those passages amount to a standing account of why the text is not persuasive, offered by the text. It is not a claim to esoteric status and there is no suggestion of a hidden doctrine reserved for initiates. What is being said is simpler and harder: the content is available, it is stated plainly, and its plain statement will read as absurd to most people who encounter it.

The middle of the chapter is introduced with a formula meaning that there are established sayings on this, and what follows is a run of short paradoxes in a fixed pattern: the bright way seems dark, the way forward seems to retreat, the level way seems rough, the highest power seems a valley, great whiteness seems soiled, ample power seems insufficient, the great square has no corners, the great vessel is finished late, the great note is barely audible, the great image has no shape.

The chapter is therefore explicit about being an anthology at this point. It is not composing these lines; it is citing them, and it says so. That is rare and useful, because it shows that a stock of such formulae was already in circulation and that the book draws on it rather than inventing the genre.

The sayings themselves divide into two kinds. The first group pairs a quality with its apparent contrary, and the operative word is seems, which keeps the appearance and the reality distinct. The second group, from the great square onward, does something different: it says that a quality carried to its extreme loses the feature that identifies it. A square large enough has no visible corners. A note deep enough passes below hearing.

That second pattern is a specific argument rather than a paradox, and it is the one that carries the most weight. It says that the marks by which we recognise a thing are marks of moderate instances of it, so the greatest instance will be unrecognisable, which is precisely why the poorest sort of hearer laughs.