Chapter 67

This is the only chapter in which the book gives a numbered list of things to hold, and the list has been remembered ever since. I have three treasures which I hold and keep: the first is compassion, the second is frugality, the third is not daring to be ahead of the world.

Each is then given the capacity it produces. Being compassionate one can be courageous. Being frugal one can be generous. Not daring to be ahead one can be the leader of the vessels. In every case the treasure is the source of something that looks like its opposite, and the chapter is explicit that the derived quality cannot be had directly.

That is the argument of the next sentence, which is the sternest in the passage. To be courageous without compassion, generous without frugality, in front without holding back, is death. Courage detached from what produces it is recklessness. Generosity without husbandry is a store that runs out. Precedence without restraint is the exposed position the whole book warns against.

The first treasure is the one that has attracted most attention, because the word covers maternal love, pity and care, and it is an unusually warm term for a text that generally argues from structure. The chapter puts it first and returns to it at the close, saying that compassion wins a battle and holds a defence, and that heaven sets up and guards with it.

That closing claim is not sentimental. It is the same position as chapter sixty-nine, where the side that grieves for the fighting is the side that wins.

The chapter opens with a complaint that reads like a report of an actual reception. Everyone says my way is great and resembles nothing.

The reply accepts both halves. It is precisely because it is great that it resembles nothing, and had it resembled anything, it would long since have been trivial. The argument is the one chapter forty-one makes with its great square that has no corners: the marks by which a thing is recognised are the marks of ordinary instances, so the largest instance is unrecognisable, and anything immediately classifiable is thereby shown to be small.

What is unusual here is the frame. The chapter reports what people say about the teaching, in their words, and answers them. The book does this rarely, and the other instances cluster in the same part of the text: chapter forty-one describes three grades of hearer and the laughter of the worst, chapter seventy says nobody understands, and chapter seventy-eight ends by conceding that straight words seem to say the opposite.

The phrase rendered leader of the vessels or chief of the implements in the third treasure picks up the vocabulary of chapter twenty-eight, where the uncut block cut into implements yields a sage who becomes chief of officials. Vessels are made things with a defined use, and to be their leader without having become one of them is the position the chapter recommends.

Placed after the opening exchange, the three treasures read as an answer to the complaint. Asked what this shapeless great thing amounts to in practice, the chapter names three things a person can actually hold.