Tao gives life to all creatures; teh feeds them; materiality shapes them; energy completes them.
Therefore among all things there is none that does not honor Tao and esteem teh. Honor for Tao and esteem for teh is never compelled, it is always spontaneous. Therefore Tao gives life to them, but teh nurses them, raises them, nurtures, completes, matures, rears, protects them.
Tao gives life to them but makes no claim of ownership; teh forms them but makes no claim upon them, raises them but does not rule them. This is profound vitality (teh).
Translation: Dwight Goddard, 1919 (public domain)
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 — given life by the Tao, fed and shaped and finished by the powers beneath it — and then makes a point of how the resulting honour works. All things honour the Tao, it says, but nothing ordained it: the tribute is never commanded, it simply rises, the way a plant turns toward light without being told to. Whatever genuinely nourishes is honoured freely; only what fails to nourish has to insist.
Then comes the line the whole chapter exists to deliver — the distinction between nourishing and possessing. The Tao gives without owning, works without claiming, guides 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 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. Owning, claiming, controlling — each 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 names this profound vitality — teh in its deepest form, the dark and 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 vitality worth the name.