Tao Te Ching — Chapter 10

Can you hold body and soul in one embrace and not let them part? Can you gather your breath and grow as supple as a newborn child? Can you cleanse your inner vision until it is without flaw? Can you love the people and govern the state without cleverness? Can the gates of heaven open and close while you keep to the feminine? Can your understanding reach in all directions while you seem to know nothing? To give life and to nourish, to give life without possessing, to act without presuming, to lead without ruling — this is called mysterious virtue.

James Legge (1891)

When the intelligent and animal souls are held together in one embrace, they can be kept from separating. When one gives undivided attention to the (vital) breath, and brings it to the utmost degree of pliancy, he can become as a (tender) babe. When he has cleansed away the most mysterious sights (of his imagination), he can become without a flaw. In loving the people and ruling the state, cannot he proceed without any (purpose of) action? In the opening and shutting of his gates of heaven, cannot he do so as a female bird? While his intelligence reaches in every direction, cannot he (appear to) be without knowledge? (The Dao) produces (all things) and nourishes them; it produces them and does not claim them as its own; it does all, and yet does not boast of it; it presides over all, and yet does not control them. This is what is called 'The mysterious Quality' (of the Dao).

Dwight Goddard (1919)

By patience the animal spirits can be disciplined. By self-control one can unify the character. By close attention to the will, compelling gentleness, one can become like a little child. By purifying the subconscious desires one may be without fault. In ruling his country, if the wise magistrate loves his people, he can avoid compulsion. In measuring out rewards, the wise magistrate will act like a mother bird. While sharply penetrating into every corner, he may appear to be unsuspecting. While quickening and feeding his people, he will be producing but without pride of ownership. He will benefit but without claim of reward. He will persuade, but not compel. This is teh, the profoundest virtue.

This dense and somewhat technical chapter is a series of questions about inner cultivation, each describing a discipline that unites apparent opposites. Can you hold ying and pò — often read as the spiritual and bodily souls — together as one? Can you concentrate the qì (vital breath) into the softness of an infant? Can you cleanse the xuán lǎn, the dark inner mirror or deep vision, until it is spotless? These are among the earliest references in Chinese literature to what would become breath-practice and inner alchemy.

The questions move from the personal to the governing: can one love and govern without scheming, keep to the cí (the feminine, receptive) even as the "gates of heaven" open and close, understand everything yet appear to know nothing? The chapter then closes with the book's classic formula for xuán dé, "mysterious virtue": to give life without possessing, act without presuming, lead without dominating. This same triad recurs in chapter 51, marking it as a core statement of the Taoist ideal. Notice that Legge keeps the original's open questions, while Goddard recasts them as assertions about disciplines — a real interpretive choice, since the questioning form leaves the practices as aspirations rather than achievements.

The discipline of "gathering the breath" until one is supple as a newborn is a striking early cousin to the breath-centered practices of yoga's prāṇāyāma and to the role of breath in Hesychast and Sufi prayer. The infant as image of perfected suppleness parallels the Gospel's "unless you become like little children" and the Hindu reverence for the child-sage who has not yet hardened into ego.

The closing formula — create without owning, act without claiming, lead without controlling — describes a non-grasping mode of power that the Bhagavad Gita calls acting without attachment to results, and that Christian mysticism approaches as the self-emptying through which divine action flows without the ego appropriating it.

Mature competence is marked by a paradox: full capacity held without domination. To care for people, projects, or children well is to nourish them and then release them — to give without owning, to guide without controlling. The supple, unhardened, infant-like quality is not naivety but the openness that rigidity has lost.

Read as a description of healthy leadership and parenting, this chapter is remarkably current: the best mentors, managers, and parents create the conditions for others to flourish and then resist the urge to possess or control the result. The questions also describe a kind of integrated presence — body and mind unified, breath soft, attention clear — that contemplative practice still aims at today. The recurring move is from control to cultivation: to make things grow without making them yours.