The Great Tao Flows Everywhere, Claiming Nothing
This chapter pictures the Tao as something that saturates all things and sustains them completely while behaving, paradoxically, like the least significant thing in existence.
Laozi describes the great Tao as flooding everywhere (氾兮), able to go left or right without preference, so that the ten thousand things rely on it for life and it never turns any of them away. It accomplishes its work and claims no credit, clothes and feeds all things without acting as their master — and on this basis, the chapter says, it could be named among the small, since it desires nothing for itself. Yet in the same breath the chapter reverses direction: because all things return to it without it acting as their ruler, it could equally be named among the great. The final move is characteristic of the whole text — because the sage never claims greatness, he is able to achieve greatness — making self-effacement not a limitation on power but the actual mechanism by which durable greatness is produced.
It clothes and feeds all things but does not claim to be master.
Tao Te Ching