Chapter 64

The most famous sentence in the book is in this chapter and it is usually misquoted. It says that a journey of a thousand li begins beneath your feet, not that it begins with a single step.

The difference matters. A single step is an act of will, and the popular version turns the line into an exhortation to get started, which is how it is printed on posters. Beneath your feet is a location. The line sits between a tree that grew from a downy shoot and a nine-storey terrace that rose from a basket of earth, and all three images are about the smallness and nearness of a beginning rather than about resolve.

Read in place, the sequence is doing the same work as chapter sixty-three: great things are already under way in a form too small to notice, which is both an encouragement and a warning. The chapter takes it as a warning first. What is at rest is easy to hold, what has not yet shown is easy to plan for, what is brittle is easy to break, what is fine is easy to scatter. Act on it before it comes to be; order it before it is in disorder.

The chapter then reverses itself in the standard way: one who acts on it spoils it, and one who holds it loses it, which is chapter twenty-nine word for word. The two halves are only compatible if early attention and forceful handling are different things, which is the distinction the whole book turns on.

It closes with the observation that people usually spoil things when they are nearly finished, and the instruction to be as careful at the end as at the beginning.

Material corresponding to this chapter appears twice in the bamboo slip manuscripts recovered in 1993 from a tomb at Guodian, in Hubei, and the two occurrences are not in the same bundle and do not read identically. That makes chapter sixty-four one of the most useful passages in the book for anyone asking what kind of text this is.

The Guodian slips are the oldest witnesses to this material known, from a tomb dated to around the end of the fourth century before the common era. They contain roughly a third of what the received text has, distributed across separate bundles, with no division into a Dao part and a De part and nothing corresponding to the eighty-one chapters.

Finding the same passage in two bundles, with variation between them, tells against the picture of a single book being copied and tells for a picture of circulating units of material that different collections drew on. The received chapter is then a compilation of such units, and the differences between the two Guodian versions are not errors by a careless scribe but evidence that more than one version was in use at once.

That does not make the received text unreliable. It makes it what it is: a late and remarkably stable arrangement of older material, and the stability is real, since what the slips contain is recognisably the same sayings.

It does mean that questions about the original wording of a line are often the wrong questions, because for some passages there may never have been a single original wording to recover.