The book's water teaching reaches its final form: nothing in the world is as soft and yielding as water, yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible, nothing surpasses it. The canyon is the argument; the stone loses to the stream every time. The soft overcomes the hard; the yielding overcomes the rigid — and then the sentence that indicts us all: everyone in the world knows this, yet no one is able to practise it. The gap between knowing and living is nowhere wider than here.
What would practising it look like? The chapter's answer turns political and priestly at once: one who bears the nation's disgrace is called master of the altars; one who bears the nation's misfortunes is called king of the world. True sovereignty is absorbency — the greatest leader is the one who takes in the community's shame and calamity the way water takes the low ground. The closing line knows how all this sounds and owns it: true words seem paradoxical.
Key verses
Nothing in the world is as soft and yielding as water. Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible, nothing surpasses it. The soft overcomes the hard; the yielding overcomes the rigid — everyone in the world knows this, yet no one is able to practise it. Therefore the sage declares: one who bears the nation's disgrace is called the master of the altars; one who bears the nation's misfortunes is called the king of the world. True words seem paradoxical.
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