My Words Are Easy to Understand, Yet No One Understands Them
Laozi voices open frustration that a teaching he considers simple has found almost no one willing to actually practice it, and explains why.
Laozi states outright that his words are very easy to understand and very easy to practice, yet no one under heaven, he says, is able to understand or practice them. He locates the reason not in the difficulty of the ideas but in the fact that they run against ordinary priorities — his words have a governing source and his actions have a guiding principle, and it is precisely because people don't recognize this underlying source that they fail to recognize him. The chapter accepts a kind of obscurity as the price of this position: those who know me are few, and this is what makes me valuable, treating rarity of recognition as confirmation rather than failure. Its closing image, the sage who wears coarse cloth while carrying jade within, captures the idea in one figure: real worth kept beneath a plain exterior, unrecognized by people who judge only by what is displayed.
My words are easy to understand, easy to practice.
Tao Te Ching
Written about in
- What Taoism says about what to say and what to leave unsaid
Laozi says his words are very easy to understand and very easy to practice, and that no one under heaven understands or practices them. The contradiction sits on the surface: a book arguing that those who know do not speak runs to eighty-one chapters. Taoism does not resolve this, it lives with it, and its image for the position is jade carried under coarse cloth.