Chapter 59

The chapter is built as a single chain in which each term becomes the subject of the next, and it is the most tightly linked argument in the book.

In governing people and serving heaven nothing is like frugality. Frugality means submitting early. Submitting early means piling up power. Piling up power means there is nothing that cannot be overcome. When there is nothing that cannot be overcome, nobody knows the limit. When nobody knows the limit, one may possess the state. And possessing the mother of the state, one may last a long time.

Seven steps from a household virtue to the endurance of a dynasty. The form is unusual here and is more characteristic of the argumentative writing of the period than of this book, which normally states patterns rather than deriving them.

The key term is the first one. The word rendered frugality means sparing use, husbanding a resource rather than doing without it, and it is the same value chapter sixty-seven lists as the second of the three treasures. It is not asceticism. It is the practice of not spending what does not need spending, applied here to the resources of a ruler, which include his authority, his interventions and his people's labour.

The chapter closes on an agricultural image that fixes the whole. This is called deep roots and a firm base, the way of long life and enduring vision. What is being described throughout is not a strategy for growth but a strategy for not being uprooted.

The chapter opens by naming two activities in one breath, governing people and serving heaven, and then says that one thing covers both. That pairing is worth stopping on, because it says something about the world the book was written into.

Serving heaven was not a metaphor. A ruler of the period held his position under a mandate and discharged obligations by sacrifice, calendar, ritual observance and the correct performance of seasonal duties. Governing people and serving heaven were two halves of a single office, and any adviser addressing a sovereign was addressing both.

What the chapter does is supply one virtue that answers to both, and it is a domestic one. Sparing use is what a household practises with grain and cloth, and the chapter proposes it as the whole of a ruler's religious and political duty at once.

That move is characteristic. The book repeatedly takes a value from the low end of the social scale and applies it at the top: the uncut block, the valley, the infant, the water that goes to the despised places, the rulers who call themselves orphaned. Here it is thrift, and the chapter treats it as sufficient for the two largest responsibilities a person could have.

The reception followed the political reading. Advice on husbanding a state's resources rather than expending them on display, campaigns and construction is what this chapter offers, and it was read that way in the centuries when the book circulated as counsel for rulers rather than as a devotional text.