Can You Be Like a Newborn Babe
Holds up an infant's supple, breath-centered body as a model of aliveness untouched by the tension and self-consciousness that accumulate with age.
Among chapter 10's cluster of questions to the practitioner, one stands out for its physical specificity: "can you concentrate your breath and achieve the softness of a newborn babe?" A baby's body is famously loose and flexible in a way adult bodies, tightened by years of habit and effort, no longer are — the image works because it's observably true, not just poetic. Taoist internal-cultivation traditions later took this line as an instruction toward actual practice: breathing deep and low, releasing chronic tension, returning the body toward its original suppleness rather than its habituated rigidity. The infant also stands in for a mind not yet split by comparison, ambition, or self-image — the newborn simply is, without performing a role. Later chapters of the text return to this same image with even more physiological detail, suggesting how central it was to the text's picture of vitality.
Can you concentrate your breath and achieve the softness of a newborn babe?
Tao Te Ching