Tao Te Ching — Chapter 49

The sage has no fixed mind of their own; they take the mind of the people as their mind. To the good I am good; to the bad I am also good — and so goodness is attained. To the trustworthy I give trust; to the untrustworthy I also give trust — and so trust is attained. In the world the sage draws everything in, blending their mind with the world's. The people all turn their eyes and ears toward the sage, and the sage receives them all as their own children.

James Legge (1891)

The sage has no invariable mind of his own; he makes the mind of the people his mind. To those who are good (to me), I am good; and to those who are not good (to me), I am also good;—and thus (all) get to be good. To those who are sincere (with me), I am sincere; and to those who are not sincere (with me), I am also sincere;—and thus (all) get to be sincere. The sage has in the world an appearance of indecision, and keeps his mind in a state of indifference to all. The people all keep their eyes and ears directed to him, and he deals with them all as his children.

Dwight Goddard (1919)

The wise man has no fixed heart; in the hearts of the people he finds his own. The good he treats with goodness; the not-good he also treats with goodness, for teh is goodness. The faithful ones he treats with good faith; the unfaithful he also treats with good faith, for teh is good faith. The wise man lives in the world but he lives cautiously, dealing with the world cautiously. He universalizes his heart; the people give him their eyes and ears, but he treats them as his children.

Sheng ren wu chang xin — the sage has no fixed mind. This is not emptiness or indecision but the absence of a rigid private agenda; instead, yi bai xing xin wei xin, the sage takes the heart of the common people as their own heart. The ideal ruler does not impose a will from above but becomes porous to those they serve. From this flows the chapter's great ethical move: goodness is extended to the good and the bad alike, trust to the trustworthy and the untrustworthy alike. Treating only the good with goodness merely rewards; treating all with goodness is how goodness actually propagates — de shan, goodness is attained, made real in the world rather than merely transacted.

The phrase de here is the same de (virtue, power) of the book's title, and the wordplay is deliberate: by meeting all with goodness, the sage embodies the de of goodness itself. Translators diverge on the difficult middle of the final passage. The graph xi xi is read by Legge as "an appearance of indecision" and "indifference," by Goddard as living "cautiously"; the older sense is closer to drawing-in, gathering, becoming undivided — hun qi xin, blending or merging one's mind with the world's. The closing image is unambiguous and tender: the sage treats all the people as their own children.

"To the bad I am also good" is the Taoist form of the radical ethic Jesus taught — "love your enemies, do good to those who hate you... for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good." Both refuse the logic of reciprocity, extending goodness as a quality of the giver rather than a reward for the deserving.

The sage who has no fixed mind and merges with the people recalls the Bodhisattva of Mahayana Buddhism, whose own enlightenment is poured out indiscriminately for all beings, and the Confucian and biblical figure of the ruler as parent — though the Tao Te Ching strips away the hierarchy's sternness, leaving only the parental tenderness of receiving everyone, deserving or not, as one's own.

To lead or serve well is to set aside one's fixed agenda and become responsive to those one serves. The deepest goodness is unconditional — extended to the difficult and the disappointing as much as to the agreeable — because that is how goodness actually spreads rather than merely being traded. Met with steady good faith, people tend to grow toward it.

This is a portrait of leadership and care without ego — the manager, teacher, or parent who holds no rigid script but stays genuinely attuned to the people in front of them. Its hardest teaching is the refusal of conditional regard: to keep extending good faith even to those who have not earned it, on the wager that trust and goodness are more contagious than punishment. Not naïveté — the sage is clear-eyed — but the recognition that meeting hostility with steady goodness changes the field in a way that retaliation never can.