Tao Te Ching — Chapter 19

Cut off sageliness, discard cleverness, and the people benefit a hundredfold. Cut off benevolence, discard righteousness, and the people return to filial love. Cut off contrivance, discard profit-seeking, and there will be no thieves or robbers. These three are mere ornaments and not enough on their own. So give people something to hold to: see the plain and embrace the uncarved block; lessen the self and reduce desire.

James Legge (1891)

If we could renounce our sageness and discard our wisdom, it would be better for the people a hundredfold. If we could renounce our benevolence and discard our righteousness, the people would again become filial and kindly. If we could renounce our artful contrivances and discard our (scheming for) gain, there would be no thieves nor robbers. Those three methods (of government) Thought olden ways in elegance did fail And made these names their want of worth to veil; But simple views, and courses plain and true Would selfish ends and many lusts eschew.

Dwight Goddard (1919)

Abandon the show of saintliness and relinquish excessive prudence, then people will benefit a hundredfold. Abandon ostentatious benevolence and conspicuous righteousness, then people will return to the primal virtues of filial piety and parental affection. Abandon cleverness and relinquish gains, then thieves and robbers will disappear. Here are three fundamentals on which to depend, wherein culture is insufficient. Therefore let all men hold to that which is reliable, namely, recognize simplicity, cherish purity, reduce one's possessions, diminish one's desires.

This chapter follows directly from chapter 18 and sharpens its critique into a prescription. If the explicit virtues are symptoms of lost harmony, then the cure is not more virtue-promotion but the abandonment of the whole apparatus of cleverness, moralism, and contrivance. The three radical "cuttings-off" — renounce sageliness and cleverness, benevolence and righteousness, contrivance and profit — are deliberately shocking, attacking the very things Confucian and statecraft thinkers held sacred. The claim is that removing these artificial overlays lets natural goodness re-emerge: people return to spontaneous filial love, and theft disappears when the manufactured scramble for gain is dropped.

But Laozi then guards against being misread as merely negative. These three renunciations, he says, are wén bù zú — not sufficient as mere external policy or "culture." Something positive must be given to hold to. And here come three of the book's most beloved phrases: jiàn sù, see the plain (undyed silk); bào pǔ, embrace the uncarved block (raw, unworked wood); and shǎo sī guǎ yù, lessen the self and reduce desire. The pǔ, the uncarved block, is Laozi's great symbol of original, unspoiled simplicity — full of potential precisely because it has not yet been cut into a particular shape. The path is not toward more sophistication but back toward this rooted plainness.

The counsel to return to undyed silk and uncarved wood — to original simplicity — parallels the spiritual call across traditions to recover a primordial innocence: the Gospel's "become like little children," the Hindu and Buddhist purification of the heart back toward its original clarity, the monastic stripping-away of possessions and complications. The "uncarved block" is unspoiled potential, much like the Zen "original face" one had before being shaped by the world.

The reduction of self and desire (shǎo sī guǎ yù) is the shared discipline of every contemplative path — the Stoic limiting of wants, the Buddhist loosening of craving, the Christian poverty of spirit. Across all of them, simplicity and fewer desires are treated not as deprivation but as the doorway to freedom.

Sometimes the way forward is to strip away rather than to add. Layers of cleverness, moralizing, and the scramble for advantage can smother the natural goodness they claim to cultivate. Recovering plainness — fewer wants, less self-display, a return to the unworked and essential — restores what elaboration had buried.

In a culture that solves problems by adding — more systems, more rules, more optimization, more wanting — this chapter argues for subtraction. Much human frustration eases not through acquiring more but through dropping the contrivances and reducing desire. "See the plain, embrace the uncarved block, lessen the self, reduce desire" reads almost as a manifesto for simplicity and minimalism, though its aim is inner: to clear away the artificial so that one's natural, unspoiled nature has room to act.