Who knows his manhood's strength,
Yet still his female feebleness maintains;
As to one channel flow the many drains,
All come to him, yea, all beneath the sky.
Thus he the constant excellence retains;
The simple child again, free from all stains.
Who knows how white attracts,
Yet always keeps himself within black's shade,
The pattern of humility displayed,
Displayed in view of all beneath the sky;
He in the unchanging excellence arrayed,
Endless return to man's first state has made.
Who knows how glory shines,
Yet loves disgrace, nor e'er for it is pale;
Behold his presence in a spacious vale,
To which men come from all beneath the sky.
The unchanging excellence completes its tale;
The simple infant man in him we hail.
The unwrought material, when divided and distributed, forms vessels.
The sage, when employed, becomes the Head of all the Officers of government;
and in his greatest regulations he employs no violent measures.
Sit With This
In which pair — strong and soft, bright and obscure, glory and lowliness — are you living only on the prized side, and what would it be like to know your strength there and yet rest, for once, in the quiet half?
A Practice
Pick one place today where you usually perform the strong, bright, winning version of yourself. Knowing full well you could, choose the low road instead — yield the point, stay in the background, take the unglamorous task. Notice the relief, underneath the resistance, of not having to be impressive.
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Western Commentary
The verse moves in a steady, almost hypnotic rhythm, the same shape three times. Know the masculine — the strong, the assertive, the forward — and yet keep to the feminine, the yielding and receptive. Know the bright and the white, and yet keep to the dark and the obscure. Know what glory is, and yet be content to rest in the lowly, the disgraced, the overlooked. Each time, you are told to be fully aware of the prized half and then to dwell, deliberately, in the unprized one. And each time the reward is the same strange phrase: you return to the uncarved block, to the simple infant, to what you were before.
There is a part of all of us that wants to live entirely on the bright side of every pair — to be all strength and no softness, all shine and no shadow, all winning and no low place. We treat the yielding, the quiet, the unglamorous as conditions to escape as fast as we can. The verse does not ask you to give up your strength; notice that each line begins by knowing it. It asks something subtler: to hold the strength and its opposite at once, and then to make your home in the humble side. Wholeness, it turns out, is not picking the impressive half. It is being large enough to contain both, and unbothered enough to live in the quiet one.
You can feel the cost of the other way — the exhaustion of having to be strong, bright, and winning at all times, of never being allowed to occupy the low ground. The verse points to the relief on the far side of that performance. Knowing you could assert yourself, and choosing not to. Knowing you could shine, and letting someone else. Becoming the spacious valley that everything quietly flows down into, precisely because it is willing to be low. There is an older, simpler self underneath the roles you have been carved into — the one you were before the world told you which half of every pair to want. This verse is a path back to it.
It would be easy to misread this as a counsel of weakness or self-erasure, as if you were being told to be feeble and dim and disgraced. But look again at how each line opens: know your manhood's strength; know how white attracts; know how glory shines. The power is fully acknowledged — you are not being asked to lack it, only to be free of the need to constantly display it. The uncarved block is not a lesser thing than the finished vessel; it is the whole, original material that every vessel was cut down from. To return to it is not to become less. It is to become, again, all of yourself — and from that wholeness, the verse notes, a person leads gently, with no need for force at all.