Chapter 43

The chapter is four sentences long and its argument rests on a single observation about penetration. The softest thing in the world rides roughshod over the hardest, and what has no substance enters where there is no gap.

The second clause is the sharper of the two and the more literal. Water gets into stone, and it does so not by being stronger but by having no fixed shape to be stopped. Air and light do the same. The claim is not that soft defeats hard in a contest, which would still be a contest; it is that something without substance is not subject to the barrier at all, because a barrier works by contact and there is nothing for it to contact.

From that the chapter draws its conclusion in one line: by this I know the benefit of doing nothing. The inference is compressed and worth spelling out. A hard object trying to get through a wall must overcome it. Something insubstantial arrives on the other side without an act of overcoming having occurred anywhere. Non-action is being presented as the mode of operation that has no point of resistance to generate.

The chapter closes by naming the two things it has been describing and admitting how rare they are: teaching without words and the benefit of doing nothing are matched by few in the world. Both phrases are picked up from chapter two, and putting them together here identifies them as the same practice in two settings, one instructional and one general.

This chapter is one station in the book's most sustained image, and the image is worth following as a whole because no single chapter carries it.

Chapter eight says the highest good is like water, which benefits everything without contending and occupies the places people despise. Chapter thirty-two compares the way to rivers and seas receiving the streams. Chapter thirty-four has the great way flooding out on both sides. Chapter sixty-one makes a great state a low-lying estuary. Chapter sixty-six explains that rivers and seas are kings of the valleys because they lie below them. Chapter seventy-eight says nothing is softer than water and nothing surpasses it for attacking the hard.

Six chapters, and the properties they draw on are not the same. Three are about position, that water goes to the low place and gathers what comes down. Two are about softness overcoming hardness. One, this chapter, is about entry without resistance. The image is doing several jobs and the book does not reduce them to one.

What holds them together is that none of the properties is an achievement. Water does not decide to seek the low ground or to wear through stone; it does what it is, and the results follow. That is precisely the relation between power and the way set out in chapter twenty-one, and it is why water rather than an animal or a craftsman is the book's central figure.

The one property never claimed for it is purity, which is what a modern reader is most likely to supply.