Tao Te Ching — Chapter 13

Favor and disgrace are both alarming; honor and great trouble cling to the self. What does it mean that favor and disgrace are alarming? Favor is a lowly thing: to gain it is alarming, to lose it is alarming — this is what is meant. What does it mean that great trouble clings to the self? The reason I have great trouble is that I have a self; if I had no self, what trouble could I have? Therefore one who values the world as much as his own body may be entrusted with the world; one who loves the world as he loves his own body may be given the world to hold.

James Legge (1891)

Favour and disgrace would seem equally to be feared; honour and great calamity, to be regarded as personal conditions (of the same kind). What is meant by speaking thus of favour and disgrace? Disgrace is being in a low position (after the enjoyment of favour). The getting that (favour) leads to the apprehension (of losing it), and the losing it leads to the fear of (still greater calamity):—this is what is meant by saying that favour and disgrace would seem equally to be feared. And what is meant by saying that honour and great calamity are to be (similarly) regarded as personal conditions? What makes me liable to great calamity is my having the body (which I call myself); if I had not the body, what great calamity could come to me? Therefore he who would administer the kingdom, honouring it as he honours his own person, may be employed to govern it, and he who would administer it with the love which he bears to his own person may be entrusted with it.

Dwight Goddard (1919)

Favor and disgrace are alike to be feared, just as too great care or anxiety are bad for the body. Why are favor and disgrace alike to be feared? To be favored is humiliating; to obtain it is as much to be dreaded as to lose it. To lose favor is to be in disgrace and of course is to be dreaded. Why are excessive care and great anxiety alike bad for one? The very reason I have anxiety is because I have a body. If I have not body why would I be anxious? Therefore if he who administers the empire esteems it as his own body, then he is worthy to be trusted with the empire.

This chapter probes the root of human anxiety. Its first surprising claim is that favor and disgrace are both alarming — we naturally think favor is good and disgrace bad, but Laozi sees them as twin agitations of the same restless ego. To receive favor is destabilizing because now there is something to lose; to lose it is obviously distressing. Both keep the self in a state of jīng, alarm or startled fear. The pursuit of esteem traps us in oscillation.

The deeper diagnosis follows: the source of "great trouble" is simply having a self — shēn, the body-self that must be defended, fed, esteemed, and preserved. "If I had no self, what trouble could I have?" This is not a call to literal self-destruction but a recognition that the anxious, grasping self is the very thing that generates suffering. The chapter then makes an unexpected turn: the one fit to be entrusted with the world is precisely the one who loves and values the whole world as his own body — who has extended the boundary of self until caring for the world and caring for oneself become the same act. Self-concern is not destroyed but enlarged until it ceases to be selfish.

The teaching that the self is the root of suffering is the very heart of Buddhism — anattā, the insight that clinging to a fixed self generates dukkha. Laozi reaches a strikingly similar point: "if I had no self, what trouble could I have?" The two traditions, developing independently, converge on the ego as the seat of disturbance.

The chapter's resolution — loving the world as one's own body — parallels the Gospel command to "love your neighbor as yourself," and the Hindu vision of the realized sage who sees the same Self in all beings and so cares for all as for the body. The cure for the anxious small self is not its annihilation but its expansion into identification with the whole.

Both praise and blame keep us off balance when our peace depends on others' regard. Underneath lies the anxious self that must be constantly defended. The way through is not to crush the self but to widen its boundaries — to care for the larger whole as naturally as we care for our own body, until the line between self-interest and care for the world dissolves.

Anyone caught in the cycle of seeking approval and dreading criticism knows the truth of "favor and disgrace are both alarming." The chapter locates the trap in the fragile, defended self — and points past it: the person who can be trusted with great responsibility is the one whose sense of self has grown large enough to genuinely include others. In leadership and in love, the antidote to status-anxiety is not indifference but a self enlarged until caring for the whole feels like caring for oneself.