What Is Well Planted Cannot Be Uprooted
This chapter uses agricultural imagery of planting and holding to argue that virtue cultivated with sufficient depth becomes self-sustaining across generations, and gives a method for judging that cultivation at every scale from the individual to the whole world.
Laozi opens with a pair of images drawn from planting and embracing: what is well planted (善建者) cannot be uprooted, and what is well embraced (善抱者) cannot slip away — and from this draws a striking consequence, that descendants will continue the ancestral sacrifices without end, meaning genuinely rooted virtue perpetuates itself across generations rather than requiring constant re-establishment. The chapter then scales the same cultivation outward through five nested levels: cultivated in the person, virtue becomes genuine; in the family, abundant; in the village, enduring; in the state, prosperous; in the world, universal — each level built from the last, not separate from it. Laozi's closing instruction gives a method for assessment that matches this same logic: observe the person by the person, the family by the family, the world by the world — meaning each unit should be judged by its own internal standard of cultivated virtue rather than an external, imposed one. The chapter ends by asking how he knows the world is this way, and answering simply, "by this" (以此) — pointing back to the method of observation just described as its own justification.
What is well planted cannot be uprooted; what is well embraced cannot slip away.
Tao Te Ching