The Dao Gives Life, Virtue Nurtures

Reading it step by step

For several pages we have been reading about the Dao: before heaven and earth, unfolding as yin and yang, the place everything returns to. But if the Dao is so far beyond us, what does it have to do with this cat, this tree, or me? Chapter 51 answers with one word: 德, virtue.

First: 德 means 得, “what is gained.” What each thing receives from the Dao is its virtue: its built-in nature and gifts. A flower has a flower's virtue, a tree a tree's, a person a person's. Before it means good conduct, 德 means “what you are.” There's an old tale of a lion cub raised by sheep. It drinks their milk and copies them grazing, yet it never turns into a sheep. Its lion-ness was there from birth.

Third: “they command nothing, and let things be so of themselves.” Why are the Dao and virtue honoured? Not because they give orders, but precisely because they never do. No one in a forest decides how tall each tree should grow, yet the forest finds its balance. That balance is virtue's masterpiece. Among all things only humans have freedom, and so only humans can upset the balance. There's a report of a village that heard frogs sold well elsewhere, caught every frog it had and sold them. The next year mosquitoes swarmed, malaria spread, and many fell ill. When people meddle out of cleverness, everything else pays. Humans can also go against their own virtue: forcing, imitating, comparing.

So the practical question on this page is: what was your gift? Some people are made for quiet research yet push themselves to be the top salesperson. Some are wonderful at caring for others yet think “that's not a real skill.” Zhuangzi tells of a young man who went to the city of Handan to learn how people walked there. He never mastered their stride, forgot his own, and had to crawl home. Know your own nature, live it well, and a great deal of needless pressure simply falls away. The same goes for raising children. Before trying to make them like someone else's kid, look at who they already are.

Sooner or later, the lion cub among the sheep remembers who it is.