All things are produced by the Tao, and nourished by its outflowing operation.
They receive their forms according to the nature of each, and are completed according to the circumstances of their condition.
Therefore all things without exception honour the Tao, and exalt its outflowing operation.
This honouring of the Tao and exalting of its operation is not the result of any ordination, but always a spontaneous tribute.
Thus it is that the Tao produces all things, nourishes them, brings them to their full growth, nurses them, completes them, matures them, maintains them, and overspreads them.
It produces them and makes no claim to the possession of them; it carries them through their processes and does not vaunt its ability in doing so; it brings them to maturity and exercises no control over them;—this is called its mysterious operation.
Sit With This
Where does your care still come with strings — possession, credit, control — and what would the same care feel like with the strings cut?
A Practice
Do one nourishing thing this week with all three strings cut: no ownership, no credit, no control over the outcome. Feed something and walk away. Notice what the giving feels like when nothing comes back attached to it.
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Western Commentary
The verse describes how everything comes to be: the Tao gives life, its outflowing power nourishes, each thing takes the form its nature calls for, and circumstance completes the rest. And then it makes a point of how the resulting honour works. All things honour the Tao — but not because anything ordained it. No decree, no demand, no enforcement. The tribute is spontaneous, the way a plant turns toward light without being commanded to. Whatever genuinely nourishes is honoured freely; only what fails to nourish has to insist.
Then comes the triad the whole chapter exists to deliver: the Tao produces all things and makes no claim to possess them; it carries them through their processes and does not vaunt itself; it brings them to maturity and exercises no control over them. Give life — without owning. Do the work — without claiming. Raise to maturity — without ruling. There is a part of all of us that gives with strings quietly attached: love that keeps a ledger, help that waits for credit, care that slides into control. The verse describes a nourishing with the strings never attached at all.
Anyone who has raised anything knows how hard this triad actually is. The child is not a possession, though every instinct files them under mine. The student, the team, the work of your hands — all of it eventually asks to be released to its own nature, and the quality of your care shows most in how it ends: whether the thing you nourished leaves with your blessing or has to wrench itself free. Nourish without owning; work without claiming; mature without controlling. Each one is a separate letting-go, and most of us manage two out of three on a good day. The practice is the third one.
The verse calls this the mysterious operation — the dark, hidden virtue. Hidden because the deepest giving is invisible by design: it claims no credit, so nothing points back to it. You have almost certainly been on the receiving end of it — the steady someone whose help you only recognised years later, precisely because they never made you carry the debt. That is how the Tao gives, scaled to a human life: power that empowers and disappears. What it produces, it sets free — and that, not the producing, is the mystery worth the name.