Tao Te Ching Chapter 50: Valuing Life

Going out is life; coming in is death — and between the two, the chapter takes a census: three in ten are followers of life; three in ten are followers of death; and three in ten, meaning to live, move toward death by clinging too intensely to living. That third group is the chapter's discovery: the health-anxious, safety-obsessed, mortality-haunted — whose very grip on life wears it out. Why? Because they cling too intensely to living.

Then the strange, unforgettable figure: one who truly knows how to sustain life walks the land without meeting rhinoceros or tiger, enters battle without being touched by weapons — the rhinoceros finds no place to thrust its horn, the tiger no place for its claws, the blade no place to enter. Because such a person has no place for death to enter. Read plainly rather than magically: what death seizes is the clenched, defended self — and where clinging has dissolved, there is nothing for the horn to catch. Fearlessness, in this chapter, is not courage; it is the absence of the target.