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Tao Te Ching · 70 of 81

Chapter 70

My words are very easy to know, and very easy to practise; but there is no one in the world who is able to know and able to practise them.

There is an originating and all-comprehending (principle) in my words, and an authoritative law for the things (which I enforce). It is because they do not know these, that men do not know me.

They who know me are few, and I am on that account (the more) to be prized. It is thus that the sage wears (a poor garb of) hair cloth, while he carries his (signet of) jade in his bosom.

Asked of Guide

If Lao Tzu says his words are easy to know and practise, why do so few actually know and practise them?

Lao Tzu says the teaching seems simple—“very easy to know, and very easy to practise”—but most people miss the originating, all-comprehending principle behind the words, so they never grasp the law that gives the teaching force. The sage’s poverty of outward garb and inner jade—“hair cloth” and a “signet of jade in his bosom”—shows wisdom is an inward possession that ordinary appetite and ignorance cannot reach.

This chapter treats knowing as an inward alignment rather than mere intellectual assent: those who truly know embody the principle and are therefore few and precious. Chuang Tzu makes the same point in his chapter on knowing and not knowing, where true wisdom looks like seeming ignorance and false knowing is the real disease.

Guide is the guide inside the Gnosis app, where every book on these shelves is free to read. Guide is the part you pay for — your guide has read all of them, and answers about the passage you’re actually on. Ask your guide your own question.

Echoes elsewhere

Chuang Tzu · Taoism71. 1. To know and yet (think) we do not know is the highest (attainment); not to know (and yet think) we do know is a disease. 2. It is simply by being pained at (the thought of) The Quimby Manuscripts · New Thoughtknowledge to me is truth, and to know it is life, and this knowledge the patient does not possess. He knows he has a pain and this to him is a truth, but this life is in his belief The Sayings of Lao Tzu · Taoismknows what is in him, but makes no display; he respects himself, but seeks not honour for himself. To know, but to be as though not knowing, is the height of wisdom. Not to know, a