Weapons Are Instruments of Ill Omen
This chapter gives the Tao Te Ching's most direct statement of anti-militarism, treating weapons as objects a cultivated person handles only with reluctance and mourns rather than celebrates.
The chapter opens by naming fine weapons instruments of ill omen (不祥之器) that all creatures seem to hate, so a person who possesses the Tao does not dwell among them. It goes further into etiquette: the superior man ordinarily honors the left side but in war honors the right, because weapons are not the tools of the superior man, to be used only when it cannot be avoided, and even then with calm restraint rather than relish (恬淡為上). Someone who finds weapons beautiful, Laozi says bluntly, delights in killing people, and one who delights in killing people cannot get his will of the world — a rare unambiguous moral claim in a text usually built on paradox. The chapter ends by prescribing funeral rites, not celebration, for military victory: the multitudes killed should be mourned with grief, and a victory should be observed as a funeral is observed, inverting the honor typically paid to conquest.
One who delights in killing people cannot get his will of the world.
Chapter 31 is unusual in the Tao Te Ching for its comparatively direct, unparadoxical moral language, which has led some scholars to treat it as a later addition to the text.
Tao Te Ching