When the intelligent and animal souls are held together in one embrace, they can be kept from separating.
When one gives undivided attention to the vital breath, and brings it to the utmost degree of pliancy, he can become as a tender babe.
When he has cleansed away the most mysterious sights of his imagination, he can become without a flaw.
In loving the people and ruling the state, cannot he proceed without any purpose of action?
In the opening and shutting of his gates of heaven, cannot he do so as a female bird?
While his intelligence reaches in every direction, cannot he appear to be without knowledge?
The Tao produces all things and nourishes them; it produces them and does not claim them as its own;
it does all, and yet does not boast of it; it presides over all, and yet does not control them.
This is what is called 'The mysterious Quality' of the Tao.
Sit With This
Which of this verse's questions — to hold together without splitting, to soften, to lead without controlling, to know without needing to show it — touches the place in you that most needs attention right now?
A Practice
Choose one of the verse's questions and carry it, unanswered, through your day — for instance: can I do this without needing to control how it turns out? Do not try to solve it. Just let it ask, and notice where it catches.
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Western Commentary
Notice what kind of verse this is before you notice what it says: it is almost entirely questions. Can you hold body and soul in a single embrace and not let them split? Can you make your breath soft, become supple as a newborn child? Can you cleanse the inner eye until it is without a flaw? Lao Tzu is not handing out instructions here. He is asking — and the questions are not rhetorical. They are the kind that do their work slowly, by being lived with rather than answered.
We are trained to want the answer, the method, the five steps. So a verse that only asks can feel almost withholding, as if it is keeping the technique to itself. But there is a part of all of us that already suspects the real things cannot be handed over as instructions — that you cannot be told how to become supple, or trusting, or clear, any more than you can be told how to fall asleep. You can only be asked, and then turn the question over until something in you answers. The verse trusts that process. It would rather leave you with a living question than a dead answer.
So take just one of them and let it sit. Can you love the people and lead them without forcing? Can you open and close the gates of your own attention as gently as a bird? Can your intelligence reach everywhere and still not need to show how much it knows? Each is a small mirror, and each tends to find a real place — the relationship you have been managing too tightly, the situation you keep gripping for control, the part of you that cannot resist proving its competence. You do not pass or fail these. You just let them keep asking, and notice, over time, what loosens.
The verse closes by quietly naming what all the questions have been circling: to give birth to things and nourish them, and then not claim them as your own; to do the work and not boast of it; to lead and not dominate. This, it says, is the mysterious virtue — and notice that even here it is not described as a feat to achieve but as a quality to grow into. The questions never really close. That is not the verse failing to conclude. It is the verse handing you something better than a conclusion: a set of doors you can keep walking through for the rest of your life.