Those Who Assist Rulers With the Tao Do Not Dominate Through Force
This chapter treats military conquest as an economic and ecological catastrophe first and a moral failing second, advising results without domination and warning that force always rebounds on the one who uses it.
Laozi tells an adviser who serves a ruler by means of the Tao not to use soldiers to coerce the world, because such actions have a way of returning (好還) — where armies camp, thorns and brambles grow, and after a great war there are always bad harvest years. The chapter praises achieving a result and stopping there — accomplishing without boasting, without attacking, without arrogance — treating success as something attained only because it could not be avoided, never as grounds for domination. This qualification matters: the chapter does not forbid all use of force, but rejects the compulsion to press an advantage into supremacy. It closes with a maxim recurring across the text: things that grow strong then grow old, which is called "not the Tao" — whatever is not the Tao comes to an early end, applying the wilting-flower logic of the natural world directly to military overreach.
Where troops have camped, thorns and brambles grow.
Tao Te Ching