The Tao Gives Birth, Virtue Nourishes
This chapter describes a four-stage process by which things come into being and reach maturity, and names the culminating quality — the Tao's power that creates without possessing — as "mysterious virtue."
Laozi lays out a sequence: the Tao gives birth to things (道生之), virtue nurtures them, matter or circumstance gives them form, and their environment or momentum brings them to completion — a four-part account of development running from a formless origin down to a specific, finished thing. He notes that all the ten thousand things, without exception, honor the Tao and prize virtue, and that this honor is not commanded by anyone but occurs constantly and of its own accord — reinforcing the chapter 25 principle that the Tao's authority rests on spontaneity rather than decree. The chapter then defines the Tao's specific mode of action in terms that recur closely from chapters 2 and 10: it gives birth without possessing, acts without depending on the result, and matures things without dominating them (生而不有，為而不恃，長而不宰). Laozi names this combination "mysterious" or "profound virtue" (玄德, xuándé) — power that creates and sustains precisely by declining to claim ownership over what it creates.
It gives birth without possessing, acts without depending, matures without dominating.
The term "xuande" (mysterious virtue) recurs at several points across the Tao Te Ching and became an important concept in later Daoist thought for describing power exercised without possessiveness.
Tao Te Ching