Chapter 54

The chapter takes a single practice and runs it up five levels of social organisation. Cultivate it in the person and the power will be genuine. In the family and the power will be more than enough. In the village and it will last. In the state and it will be abundant. In the world and it will be everywhere.

The list is not a hierarchy of importance and it does not say that the larger units matter more. What it says is that the same operation applies at every scale and that its yield scales with the unit, which quietly denies that private cultivation and public government are different activities.

That is a strong claim and it is the reason this chapter is often set beside the graded sequence of self, family, state and world that Confucian writing of the period also uses. The units are the same, the direction is the same, and the disagreement is about what is being cultivated: there a set of moral relations learned and practised, here something the book calls power and refuses to define as a virtue.

The second half turns the list into a method of observation. Look at a person through the person, a family through the family, a village through the village, a state through the state, the world through the world. Each level is to be assessed by its own kind and not by a standard imported from another, which is a rule against exactly the sort of analogy the chapter has just made.

It closes with a question and an answer that explains nothing. How do I know the world is like this? By this. The same formula appears in chapter twenty-one and chapter fifty-seven.

The chapter opens with two images of stability and then names a consequence that is startling in this book. What is well planted cannot be pulled up. What is well held cannot be taken. And so sons and grandsons will not stop offering the sacrifices.

That last clause assumes the ancestral cult, the regular offerings a lineage makes to its dead, and it treats the continuation of those offerings as the measure of a thing well founded. An unbroken line of descendants performing the rites was the standard early Chinese image of a family that had lasted, and its opposite, a line extinguished and the sacrifices ended, was the standard image of ruin.

What makes the clause unexpected is the book's general attitude to ritual. Chapter thirty-eight places ritual at the bottom of a staircase of decline and calls it the thinning of loyalty and trust and the head of disorder. Chapter nineteen, on the received wording, asks for the abandonment of things that the ritual tradition holds central.

Here the sacrifices are used without any of that criticism attached, as a plain measure of endurance. The chapter is not recommending the cult and it is not attacking it; it is borrowing the most familiar available sign that something has held.

The tension is real and it is one of the reasons the book resists being read as a single consistent argument. Different chapters draw on the ordinary religious and social vocabulary of their world in different registers, sometimes to reject it, as in chapter thirty-eight, sometimes to use it, as in the sweet dew omen of chapter thirty-two, and here simply to say that a well planted thing keeps going.