Tao Te Ching — Chapter 65

The ancients who were good at practicing the Way did not use it to make people clever, but to keep them simple. People are hard to govern when they have too much cleverness. So to govern a state through cleverness is to rob the state; to govern a state without it is the state's good fortune. To understand these two is to grasp the enduring pattern. To know this pattern always is called the Mysterious Virtue. The Mysterious Virtue is deep and far-reaching; it runs opposite to things, and only then arrives at the Great Accord.

James Legge (1891)

The ancients who showed their skill in practising the Tao did so, not to enlighten the people, but rather to make them simple and ignorant. The difficulty in governing the people arises from their having much knowledge. He who (tries to) govern a state by his wisdom is a scourge to it; while he who does not (try to) do so is a blessing. He who knows these two things finds in them also his model and rule. Ability to know this model and rule constitutes what we call the mysterious excellence (of a governor). Deep and far-reaching is such mysterious excellence, showing indeed its possessor as opposite to others, but leading them to a great conformity to him.

Dwight Goddard (1919)

In the olden days those who obeyed the spirit of Tao did not enlighten the people but kept them simple hearted. The reason people are difficult to govern is because of their smartness; likewise to govern a people with guile is a curse; and to govern them with simplicity is a blessing. He who remembers these two things is a model ruler. Always to follow this standard and rule is teh, the profound. Profound teh is deep indeed and far reaching. The very opposite of common things, but by it one obtains obedient subjects.

This is among the Tao Te Ching's most easily misread chapters, and the reading matters. On its surface it appears to advocate keeping people ignorant — jiang yi yu zhi, "to make them simple/foolish." But the word yu here, and the zhi (cleverness, calculation) it opposes, are loaded. The zhi Lao Tzu warns against throughout the book is not knowledge or wisdom but cunning, scheming, the clever manipulation that breeds competition, deceit, and the restless dissatisfaction seen in earlier chapters. And yu — usually "foolish" — is here closer to the prized Taoist quality of unspoiled simplicity, the "uncarved block," the genuine and unguileful heart. The ancients, the chapter says, used the Way not to sharpen people into clever calculators but to keep them whole and sincere.

The political consequence follows: people grown clever in the scheming sense are hard to govern, because cleverness multiplies cunning, evasion, and conflict. To rule by zhi — by craft and manipulation — is to be a zei, a robber or scourge to the state; to rule without it is the state's good fortune. The ruler who grasps this knows the ji shi — the enduring standard or pattern. Holding this constantly is xuan de, the Mysterious Virtue, here described as deep, far-reaching, and crucially yu wu fan — moving in the opposite direction to ordinary things. It runs counter to the conventional drive toward more cleverness and more control. And only by this reversal does one finally reach da shun, the Great Accord — the deep harmony in which things flow according to their nature.

The prizing of genuine simplicity over calculating cleverness echoes the Gospel's "unless you become like little children" and Paul's reversal that "the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God," along with his counsel to be "wise as to what is good and innocent as to what is evil." The traditions repeatedly distinguish a sincere, unguileful heart from the corrosive cleverness that schemes and divides.

The Mysterious Virtue that "runs opposite to things" before reaching the Great Accord describes the via negativa common to the mystics — the path that reverses the ordinary direction of grasping and self-assertion, seeming backward by worldly standards, yet arriving at a harmony the worldly road never reaches. It is the same counter-current the Beatitudes trace, where the meek and the poor in spirit, not the clever and the assertive, inherit.

There is a difference between wisdom and mere cleverness, and the calculating, scheming kind of cleverness corrodes trust and breeds the very conflict and difficulty it claims to manage. Genuine, unguileful simplicity is more governable and more whole. The deepest virtue often runs directly counter to the conventional drive toward more cunning and more control — and only by reversing that current does one reach a true and lasting harmony.

Read carefully, this chapter is not a brief for ignorance but a warning about a particular kind of intelligence: the cunning, gaming, manipulative cleverness that treats every system as something to be outwitted. Where that mindset dominates — in institutions run by spin and maneuver, in cultures of perpetual angle-playing — trust erodes and everything becomes harder to hold together. The counterintuitive remedy is a return to sincerity and simplicity, which "runs opposite" to the prevailing drive toward ever-cleverer control. The leader who governs without guile, and the person who meets life without scheming, are doing something that looks naïve by conventional standards but arrives at a harmony the clever never find.