Chapter 63

The chapter contains the book's most usable single piece of advice and it is not paradoxical at all. Plan for the difficult while it is easy, and do the great while it is small, because the world's difficult things are certainly done while they are easy and its great things are certainly done while they are small.

Stated that way it is a claim about timing, and it is the practical counterpart of the doctrine of non-action. A problem addressed at its onset requires almost nothing, and the same problem addressed later requires force. The person who acts early appears to have done nothing, because there was nothing visible to do, which is why chapter seventeen says the people credit themselves and chapter twenty-seven says the good traveller leaves no tracks.

The chapter draws the conclusion explicitly: the sage never does anything great and is therefore able to accomplish greatness. That is not modesty. It is a description of what a life of early intervention looks like from outside, which is a life with no great deeds in it.

The opening lines are stranger and set the register. Act without acting, work at not working, taste the tasteless. Treat the small as great and the few as many, and repay bitterness with power.

That last clause is a moral instruction of a kind the book rarely gives, and it was noticed early. Repaying resentment with power, or with virtue, is a position on how to answer injury, and it was taken up and argued with in the later Chinese tradition, where the competing view held that injury should be answered with straightness and only kindness with kindness.

The chapter ends on a warning that reads like a comment on its own advice. Easy promises are bound to be little trusted, and much easiness is bound to bring much difficulty; so the sage treats things as difficult and ends with no difficulty.

That appears to contradict everything before it. The chapter has just argued that great things are done while they are small and difficult things while they are easy, and now it says that easiness produces difficulty and that the sage regards matters as hard.

The two are compatible and the resolution is in who is doing the estimating. The earlier advice concerns when to act, and says the moment is early. The closing warning concerns how to assess, and says the estimate should be pessimistic. A person who acts at the right moment because he has taken the matter seriously is doing both. A person who defers because the matter looks easy is doing neither, and will meet it later at full size.

The clause about promises makes the same point in a social register. An undertaking given lightly is discounted by whoever receives it, which is a claim about how commitments are read rather than about whether they are kept.

Chapter sixty-four continues the argument in the next breath and supplies the images: the tree from a shoot, the terrace from a basket of earth, the journey beginning underfoot. The two chapters are close enough in subject that they read as a continuous treatment of beginnings split by a chapter division, which is one more instance of the divisions being an editorial layer.