Those of yore who have succeeded in becoming masters are subtile, spiritual, profound, and penetrating. On account of their profundity they cannot be understood. Because they cannot be understood, therefore I endeavor to make them intelligible.
How they are cautious! Like men in winter crossing a river. How reluctant! Like men fearing in the four quarters their neighbors. How reserved! They behave like guests. How elusive! They resemble ice when melting. How simple! They resemble unseasoned wood. How empty! They resemble the valley. How obscure! They resemble troubled waters.
Who by quieting can gradually render muddy waters clear? Who by stirring can gradually quicken the still?
He who keeps this Tao is not anxious to be filled. Since he is not filled, therefore he can grow old and need not be newly fashioned.
Translation: Paul Carus, 1898 (public domain); "Tao" substituted for Carus's "Reason"
Sit With This
When your mind is stirred and cloudy, what would it be like to stop stirring it — to set the glass down and let the silt settle of its own accord, in its own time?
A Practice
Fill a clear glass with water and stir in a pinch of soil. Set it where you can see it and watch — without touching it — as the silt sinks and the water slowly clears. Let it stand for your own mind learning to settle.
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Western Commentary
Lao Tzu says at the start that the old masters of the Way cannot really be known — and then describes them anyway, which is its own kind of teaching. The descriptions all circle one quality: a person who moves cautiously, yields easily, stays plain and unassuming. But the image the whole verse turns on is the last and least expected — murky, like muddied water. Not clear, not composed — murky. The master is allowed to be unsettled.
Because the next line is the question everything has been moving toward: who can make muddy water clear? And the answer, unspoken, is that no one can — not by trying. You cannot stir water into clarity. You let it stand, and the silt sinks on its own, and the clearness that was always there returns. Anyone who has lain awake trying to force calm onto a churning mind knows the lesson in the body already: the effort to settle is itself more stirring. The harder you reach for stillness, the muddier the water gets.
So the verse offers a different instruction than calm down: stop stirring. Set the glass on the table. Let the agitation be there without adding the second agitation of fighting it, and trust that settling is something the mind knows how to do by itself, given a little time and no interference. As you have read these lines, your own breathing may already have slowed a half-step — that is the water beginning to clear. And if the churn is more than a restless evening, if it stays clouded for a long stretch no matter how patiently you wait, that is worth taking seriously, and reaching for real support is its own kind of stillness.
It would be easy to file this under doing nothing, but stillness here is not idleness — it is the one move that lets what is murky come clear. The masters, the verse ends, did not crave to be full; and because they were never quite full, there was always room in them to be worn down and made new again. Clarity, it turns out, is not something you achieve. It is what is left when you finally stop disturbing the water.