Abandon the show of saintliness and relinquish excessive prudence, then people will benefit a hundredfold. Abandon ostentatious benevolence and conspicuous righteousness, then people will return to the primal virtues of filial piety and parental affection. Abandon cleverness and relinquish gains, then thieves and robbers will disappear.
Here are three fundamentals on which to depend, wherein culture is insufficient. Therefore let all men hold to that which is reliable, namely, recognize simplicity, cherish purity, reduce one's possessions, diminish one's desires.
Translation: Dwight Goddard, 1919 (public domain)
Sit With This
Where are you reaching for the clever version — the impressive take, the elaborate solution, the wise-sounding word — when the plain and obvious one was right there the whole time?
A Practice
Find one thing today you would normally make more clever or more impressive than it needs to be — an answer, an email, a plan. Do the plain version instead: the obvious, straight, uncarved one. Notice the small pull to dress it up, and what it feels like to leave it simple.
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Western Commentary
Few verses state the book's distrust of cleverness as bluntly as this one. Its instruction is a string of renunciations — give up the performances of saintliness, of cleverness, of calculated virtue — with an almost scandalous promise attached: do that, the verse says, and the people are better off a hundredfold. It sounds like a renunciation of everything we are taught to prize. And it is aimed, very precisely, at the thing we are usually proudest of.
Because there is a part of all of us that loves to be clever. The sharp take, the wise-sounding word, the analysis that impresses the room — it feels like competence, sometimes even like goodness, and it is genuinely satisfying to be the one who sees more and says it well. The verse does not call any of that wicked. It just quietly notices that the cleverness we most enjoy displaying is often the very layer between us and the plain truth of a thing — that the performance of wisdom and the having of it are not the same, and the first can crowd out the second without our ever noticing the swap.
You can feel the difference in something small. The problem that had an obvious answer, until someone clever — maybe you — improved it into something elaborate and worse. The honest sentence you reached for, then dressed up until it no longer quite meant anything. The kindness that would have been simple, had it not been turned into a strategy. The verse's alternative is almost embarrassingly plain — drop the contrivance, want less, and the straight thing is usually right there, where it was the whole time, waiting for you to stop being clever at it.
This is not a brief against intelligence, or a romance about ignorance — it is not asking you to know nothing or think poorly. The target is narrower and sharper than that: cleverness as performance, wisdom worn as a costume, the artful complication of things that were simple. What it offers in place of all that is the uncarved block — plainness, directness, the courses that are true because they are not bent into shape to serve some end. The deepest competence, the verse hints, often looks like nothing special at all. It is just someone who has stopped needing to be seen being wise, and can finally afford to be plain.