It is very easy to comprehend my teachings and to put them into practice. Yet there is no one in the world who is able either to comprehend, or to practise them.
There is an originating principle for speech, an authoritative law for conduct, but because this knowledge is lacking I am unknown. Those who know Me are few; those who imitate Me are worthy. Hence the Holy Man wears coarse garments, but carries a jewel in his bosom.
Translation: C. Spurgeon Medhurst, 1905 (public domain)
Sit With This
Which simple teaching have you been circling for years — easy to know, easy to do — that you keep researching instead of practising?
A Practice
Pick one plain instruction you already believe — sleep more, reach out first, stop arguing online — and practise it for seven days without reading another word about it. Wear the haircloth; let the jade do its work unseen.
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Western Commentary
Seventy chapters in, the author pauses to say something almost heartbroken about his own book: my words are very easy to understand and very easy to practise — and no one understands them, and no one practises them. Notice what he is not saying. He is not saying the teaching is too profound, too subtle, reserved for the gifted few. He is saying the opposite: it is easy, and that is exactly the problem. Yield. Soften. Stop early. Want less. Give without keeping score. There is nothing here a child could not understand — and almost nothing a grown adult will actually do. There is an originating principle behind the speech, he says, and a single law behind the conduct: it all hangs together from one simple root. The difficulty was never comprehension. It was acceptance.
Why do we refuse the easy? Partly because simplicity offends the part of us that wanted the answer to be impressive. If the secret of a calmer life is to go to bed, apologise first, and stop arguing with strangers, then there is nothing left to research, no system to master, no further book to buy — nothing between us and just doing it. So we manufacture complexity as a delay. There is a part of all of us that would honestly rather keep seeking than be caught practising something so plain; seeking photographs better. The verse has met us before we arrived: easy to know, easy to do, it says — and watch how few will.
Then the consolation, easy to misread as elitism: those who know him are few, and the ones who actually imitate him are the worthy ones. This is not exclusivity; it is the simple economics of anything that runs against the current. The book has already said it of the Tao itself — coarse-looking stone, laughed at by the clever — and chapter 41 made the laughter a credential: if it were not laughed at, it would not be the Way. What is rare is not access to the teaching. The whole text is public, and short. What is rare is the willingness to live something unspectacular. That willingness has always been the scarcest commodity in the world, and the most quietly valuable.
The chapter closes on the image the title carries: the sage wears coarse garments, and carries a jewel in his bosom — haircloth outside, jade within. The treasure is real, and it is hidden on purpose — not dressed up, not displayed, not converted into reputation. You know these people. The plain coat in the room that turns out to hold the deepest competence; the unremarkable neighbour who turns out to be the one everyone calls at midnight. And the image is an instruction as much as a portrait: carry your jade quietly. Let the haircloth disappoint the people who judge by cloth. What is carried in the bosom does not need the world's appraisal to keep its worth — that is precisely what makes it jade.