Chapter 66

The chapter opens with an observation about drainage and turns it into a rule for holding office. The reason rivers and seas are able to be kings of the hundred valleys is that they are good at lying below them.

The word kings is not decoration. In the geography the image assumes, every stream in a range runs down to the same river, and the river receives all of them without summoning any. That is a real relation of dominance produced entirely by position, and the chapter treats it as a model of authority rather than as a metaphor for humility.

The rule drawn from it is stated twice, once for speech and once for position. One who wants to be above the people must in speech put himself below them. One who wants to be in front of the people must put himself behind them.

The two clauses are not the same instruction. The first concerns how a ruler talks, which connects to chapter thirty-nine and the titles by which rulers call themselves orphaned and unworthy. The second concerns where he stands in an order of precedence, and it is the harder of the two.

The results are stated in terms of what the people do not feel: he is above and they are not weighed down, in front and they are not harmed. That is a distinctive measure of good government. The chapter does not claim the people are grateful or prosperous, only that the weight of being governed is not registering, which is the same standard chapter seventeen sets when the best ruler is barely known to exist.

The last sentence of this chapter is also the last sentence of chapter twenty-two, in almost identical words: because he does not contend, nobody in the world can contend with him.

The repetition is not an oversight and it is not the only one. The four propositions about not showing oneself appear in both chapter twenty-two and chapter twenty-four. The instruction to block the openings and shut the gates appears in chapters fifty-two and fifty-six. The three titles rulers use of themselves appear in chapters thirty-nine and forty-two. Chapters two, ten, thirty-four and fifty-one all carry some version of giving life without possessing.

A text with that pattern of repetition is a compilation, and the repeated units are the pieces it was compiled from. A closing formula that can be attached to a chapter about being bent and kept whole and equally to a chapter about river drainage is a formula in circulation rather than a conclusion derived from either argument.

That has a practical consequence for reading. A repeated line should be read for what it does in the chapter it is in, not treated as a fixed doctrine that the two chapters are both illustrating. Here the formula caps an argument about the position of a ruler among his people, and its force is political: a sovereign who is not competing for precedence has no rival, because rivalry requires two parties who both want the same place.

In chapter twenty-two the same words cap an argument about personal conduct, and they mean something quieter.