Avoiding distinctions of merit among the people prevents jealousy. Not setting a value on rare things prevents theft. Not seeking the things of sense keeps the mind in peace.
Thus the Sage governs by ridding the heart of its desires, giving the stomach due satisfaction, by resting the muscles and strengthening the bones, by preserving the world from a knowledge of evil and hence from its desire, and by making those who have such knowledge afraid to use it.
He acts by non-action, and by this he governs all.
Translation: Walter Gorn Old, 1904 (public domain)
Sit With This
What wanting in you was installed from the outside — by comparison, by the endless display of the desirable — and what would quiet in you if you stopped feeding it?
A Practice
For one day, notice each time a want arrives right after you have seen something — a post, an ad, someone else's having. Pause and ask whether the wanting was yours before you saw it. You do not have to act on the answer; just begin to tell which hungers are real and which were handed to you.
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Western Commentary
This is a verse about manufactured wanting — about how craving gets installed in us from the outside. Avoid setting some people above others by merit, it observes, and jealousy has nothing to feed on; stop putting a price on rare things, and the wanting of them stops turning into taking; quit chasing after every pleasure the senses report, and the mind settles back into peace. None of this describes anything exotic. It is a precise account of how a culture inflames appetite: by elevating, ranking, and displaying, endlessly, until restlessness comes to feel like the natural state of being alive.
Then comes the turn that is easy to mistake for politics — the sage who governs by ridding the heart of its desires, filling the stomach, resting the muscles and strengthening the bones. Lifted out and read as a manual for managing other people, it can sound like a program for keeping a population quiet and fed. But the contemplative tradition has long read these lines inward, and that is how they earn their place in a book about the self. The "people" being governed are the clamouring wants inside a single person. The heart is emptied of manufactured craving, not of anyone's mind; the belly is filled and the bones made strong because the work is to nourish what is real in you over what merely agitates it. Read this way it is not instruction for ruling anyone — it is a description of a person coming to rest.
And that inward reading lands very close to home. We live now inside the exact machine the verse describes — the endless show of other people's talent and good fortune, the running tally of who has more, the desirable held permanently in front of the eye. The mind loses its peace, just as the verse warns, and we call the result ordinary life. The sage in you is the part that can quiet that: the part that seeks to be nourished rather than stimulated, settled rather than inflamed, and that learns to tell a craving handed to you from a hunger that was actually yours. Not a duller life. A less driven one.
This is not, then, a case against learning, or a counsel to know nothing and want nothing in some grey, blank way. It is aimed at one particular kind of knowing and wanting — the kind installed in you by comparison, the appetite you did not choose. He acts by non-action, the verse ends, and by this he governs all. What governs here is not force applied from above but order arriving on its own once you stop feeding the agitation — the way clarity returns to water the moment you stop stirring it.