Tao Te Ching — Chapter 40

Returning is the movement of the Tao; yielding is the way the Tao works. All things in the world are born of being, and being is born of non-being.

James Legge (1891)

The movement of the Tao / By contraries proceeds; / And weakness marks the course / Of Tao's mighty deeds. / All things under heaven sprang from It as existing (and named); that existence sprang from It as non-existent (and not named).

Dwight Goddard (1919)

Retirement is characteristic of Tao just as weakness appears to be a characteristic of its activity. Heaven and earth and everything are produced from existence, but existence comes from non-existence.

This is the shortest chapter in the book, and one of the most concentrated — two lines that distill the entire Taoist vision into a handful of words. The first line gives the two fundamental characteristics of how the Tao operates. Fǎn zhě dào zhī dòng — "returning (or reversal) is the movement of the Tao." The Tao's basic motion is cyclical and reverting: everything moves out and then comes back, rises and then returns to its root, turns into its opposite. This is the principle behind so many earlier chapters — the storm that blows out, the strength that turns to weakness, the things that return to stillness. Movement, for the Tao, is fundamentally a movement of return.

The second characteristic: ruò zhě dào zhī yòng — "yielding (weakness, softness) is the use of the Tao." The Tao accomplishes its work not through force but through softness, the way water wears stone. The chapter then closes with a compressed cosmology that completes the thought of chapter 1: "All things are born of being (yǒu), and being is born of non-being (wú)." The manifest world of distinct things arises from undifferentiated being, and being itself arises from the nameless emptiness that precedes it. Non-being is not a barren void but the fertile ground of all that exists — the deepest source, from which being and then the ten thousand things unfold. In four lines, the chapter captures return, yielding, and the emergence of all things from emptiness.

The teaching that being arises from non-being parallels the most daring statements of mystical cosmology — the Kabbalistic emergence of all existence from Ein Sof, the limitless no-thing; the Christian creatio ex nihilo; the Vedantic unmanifest from which the manifest unfolds. Across these, the ultimate source is paradoxically a kind of nothing — not empty barrenness but a fullness beyond all particular forms.

The principle that "returning is the movement of the Tao" is the cyclical cosmology shared with Hindu and Buddhist thought — the eternal rhythm of arising and dissolving — and with Heraclitus's flux in which all things flow into their opposites and back. The exaltation of yielding as the Tao's mode of working is the book's signature inversion of the cult of force.

The deepest pattern of reality is return — everything that goes out comes back, everything turns toward its opposite and recovers its root. And the Tao works through yielding, not force. At the very foundation, all the somethings of the world arise from a fertile emptiness, the no-thing that is the source of every thing.

"Returning is the movement of the Tao" is deeply consoling and orienting: difficulties tend to reverse, extremes swing back, and what departs often comes around again — the cycle, not the straight line, is the deeper truth. "Yielding is the way the Tao works" reminds us that softness and flexibility, not force, accomplish the most durable results. And "being is born of non-being" speaks to the creative person and the contemplative alike: the richest things emerge from emptiness, silence, and the open space where nothing yet is. To make room for the void is to make room for what will be born from it.