Chapter 70

Original Text

吾言甚易知。甚易行。天下莫能知。莫能行。言有宗。事有君。夫惟無知。是以不我知也。知我者希。則我者貴。是以聖人被褐懷玉。

Translation

My words are very easy to understand, very easy to practice. Yet none in all under Heaven can understand them, none can practice them. Words have an ancestor. Affairs have a sovereign. It is only because of ignorance that they do not understand me. Those who understand me are rare; those who follow me are honored. Therefore the Sage is clad in rough cloth, cradling jade within.

Word Notes

• 褐 — "rough cloth": A coarse, broad garment of woven animal hair. The kind worn by lowly people.

Chapter Explanation

My words are very easy to understand, very easy to practice. Yet none in all under Heaven can understand them, none can practice them. The words I speak have an ultimate tenet. The affairs I speak of have a master and sovereign. It is precisely because no one has understood my tenet, my sovereign principle, that they do not understand me. Those who understand me are few, and so my Dao is all the more honored. For this reason, the Sage wears coarse cloth — the garb of a lowly person — on the outside, yet cradles a disc of jade within his breast. How hard it is for people to perceive this!

Discourse

Laozi's words, in their broad purport, simply urge reverence for Dao and De, abhorrence of war and battle, and the practice of clarity, stillness, and non-contention. These are the most level, the most ordinary of principles — easy to understand and easy to practice. Yet people of the world either dismiss them as pedantic and useless, or exalt them as something mystically extraordinary; or they apply them narrowly, treating them merely as a technique for personal cultivation; or they look at them askance, branding them outright as heterodox teachings. All of these people see only the tattered clothes on the outside and fail to see the fine jade held within.

Whether the people of the world understand Laozi or not is of no great consequence in itself — it is a matter of the gravest consequence for the whole world. If there were truly someone who understood his genuine tenet of revering Dao and De and abhorring war and battle — and understood that it is not pedantic and useless, but contains real principle — and took it up and put it to the test, it would truly be a blessing for every nation on the globe.