In a small country with few people let there be officers over tens and hundreds but not to exercise power.
Let the people be not afraid of death, nor desire to move to a distance.
Then though there be ships and carriages, they will have no occasion to use them. Though there be armor and weapons there will be no occasion for donning them.
The people can return to knotted cords for their records, they can delight in their food, be proud of their clothes, be content with their dwellings, rejoice in their customs.
Other states may be close neighbors, their cocks and dogs may be mutually heard, people will come to old age and die but will have no desire to go or come.
Translation: Dwight Goddard, 1919 (public domain)
Sit With This
With every neighbouring kingdom streaming into your hands all day, what would it take for your own food to taste sweet again — your clothes, your dwelling, your ordinary days?
A Practice
For one week, shrink the state: mute the comparison feeds — the neighbouring kingdoms — and once a day deliberately taste something you already have: the meal, the room, one ordinary custom of your house. Notice when the escape vehicles begin, peacefully, to rust.
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Western Commentary
Just before the book says goodbye, it dreams. This chapter is a pastoral — a deliberately small idyll set down in an age of expanding empires, total mobilization, and clever machinery, which is exactly what gives it its quiet defiance. Imagine, it says, a little land with few people, where the labour-saving devices exist and sit unused, where the ships and carriages have nowhere they need to go, where the armour and weapons are owned and never once taken down from the wall. Even the knotted cords — the old pre-writing way of keeping records — belong to the dream's direction of travel: back toward the simple, before cleverness made everything urgent. It is not a policy proposal, and the book knows it; nothing here is a program for any state, ancient or modern. It is a poem about the condition in which capability finally gets to rest: the condition of nothing missing.
The heart of the chapter is a four-clause portrait of contentment — the people delighting in the plain food, clothes, homes, and customs they already have. Read it carefully: nothing was upgraded. The food is still coarse; the dwelling is still poor; what changed is the tasting. Contentment, the dream insists, is not a purchasing level. It is a faculty — the recovered ability to actually taste what is already on the table — and like any faculty it atrophies, mostly under one specific poison: comparison. The five flavours, an early chapter warned, deaden the palate. This late chapter shows the palate healed.
Then the strangest, loveliest image: the neighbouring land is within sight — its roosters and dogs are audible across the way — and the people grow old and die with no desire to go or come. Modern ears flinch (no travel? no exchange?) until you notice what the image actually describes: not walls, not prohibition — absence of itch. The other life is fully visible and the visibility has lost its pull. We live with every neighbouring kingdom streaming into our hands all day; the feed is precisely the sound of other people's roosters, and entire lives are spent commuting toward it. The dream is not that the neighbour vanishes. It is that you can hear the whole bright noise of elsewhere and remain, gladly, where your supper is. And the unused ships say the same of escape: when the days themselves are sweet, the getaway vehicles rust — peacefully.
Why a small state? Because small is the scale at which a life can actually be lived. Empire is an appetite — more reach, more speed, more elsewhere — and the book has spent eighty chapters watching that appetite eat its hosts. The dream-land's dimensions are a table, a street, a handful of people, an evening where everything that matters is within earshot. That much, unlike empire, is achievable — not by running history backward to knotted cords, but by moving in the dream's direction: smaller, nearer, sweeter. It is the book's last full image before the farewell verse, and it is no accident that after all the mist and metaphysics, the final picture is supper, lamplight, and a village quieting toward night. The Way was never leading anywhere grander. This — tasted at last — was the destination.