Equally fear favor and disgrace.
Regard a great calamity as you do your own body.
What is meant by "Equally fear favor and disgrace?" Favor should be disparaged. Gained or lost it arouses apprehension. Hence it is said "Equally fear favor and disgrace."
What is meant by "Regard a great calamity as you do your own body?" Why have I any sense of misfortune? Because I am conscious of myself. Were I not conscious of my body, what distresses should I have?
Therefore, it is only they who value their persons because of their obligations, who may be entrusted with the empire. It is only they who love themselves on account of their responsibilities, who may be charged with the care of the state.
Translation: C. Spurgeon Medhurst, 1905 (public domain)
Sit With This
Recall one piece of praise and one piece of criticism from this week. Can you feel how both knocked at the same door — and that you remain, unchanged underneath, now that each has passed?
A Practice
Tonight, write down one compliment and one slight from the day. Set them side by side, notice they touched the same place in you, then set the page down — and let yourself be the part that stays after both have faded.
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Western Commentary
The verse opens with something most of us feel constantly and rarely examine: that praise and criticism both land as a kind of shock. Favour lifts you; disgrace drops you; and the verse notices that you are jolted either way — startled to win it, startled to lose it — because in both cases your footing was never quite your own. Then Lao Tzu turns the question one layer deeper and asks where the whole trouble comes from. His answer is disarmingly plain: the reason I have such trouble is that I have a self to defend.
There is a part of all of us that runs a quiet, continuous scan for how we are landing with other people. It is not vanity, exactly; it is more like weather-sense. You send the message and re-read it once it is gone. A passing slight from someone whose opinion you would swear you do not care about lodges somewhere and hums for an afternoon. A bit of praise warms you more than it should, and then quietly raises the cost of the next moment that might take it away. None of this makes anyone shallow. It is just how much of our steadiness we have, without noticing, handed to the room to hold.
Set the praise and the criticism of this week side by side and something becomes visible: they knocked at the same door. The compliment and the slight both went looking for the same tender, managed place — the self that is forever being graded — and you are still here, underneath, now that each has come and gone. The verse is not asking you to stop caring what anyone thinks. It is offering the lightness that comes from holding the self a little less tightly, so that favour and disgrace can pass through you instead of rearranging you each time they visit.
It would be easy to mishear this as a call to erase yourself, to go cold or stop caring. The closing lines say the opposite. The one who can hold the whole world as gently as he holds his own person, the verse says, is exactly the one who can be trusted to care for it. Loosening the grip on the self is not the same as having none. It is what finally frees up the hands — for the world, and for the people in it.