The Tao Is Empty Yet Inexhaustible
Describes the Tao as a container that can never be filled or used up, older and deeper than any of the named gods or ancestors of Chinese religion.
Chapter 4 opens by calling the Tao "empty," yet immediately adds that using it never exhausts it — a direct pairing of emptiness with inexhaustibility that recurs across the text. The chapter piles up dissolving images to describe how the Tao operates: it "blunts the sharp, unties the tangled, softens the glare, and settles the dust," each phrase describing a smoothing-out rather than a building-up. Then comes one of the boldest claims in the whole work: the Tao seems to have existed "before the Lord," a term referring to the high ancestral deity of early Chinese religion — meaning the Tao precedes even the highest gods worshipped at the time. Chapter 4 doesn't argue for this claim; it simply asserts an unfathomable depth, "deep, it seems the ancestor of the ten thousand things," that the rest of the text spends dozens more chapters trying to characterize indirectly.
Empty, yet use will not exhaust it.
The reference to preceding "the Lord" is often read by scholars as a deliberate subordination of the Tao Te Ching's Tao to the ancestral high god of Shang and early Zhou religion.
Tao Te Ching