Four characters, usually in running script, usually framed in dark wood. Behind the till in a Chinese restaurant, on the wall of an accountant’s meeting room in Chatswood, in the display kitchen of a renovation company. I have seen one in the waiting area of a mechanic’s shop, better framed than anything else in the building.
If a customer who doesn’t read Chinese asks what it says, the answer is usually “the highest good is like water,” followed by something about not fighting, letting things go, going with the flow, and that last part is where it comes apart.
The sentence is longer than the scroll
Chapter 8 opens like this:
上善若水。水善利万物而不争，处众人之所恶，故几于道。
The highest good is like water. Water is good at benefiting the ten thousand things and does not contend; it dwells in the places people find repellent, and so it is close to the Dao.
Three claims, and all three have to stand up. The scroll carries the first four characters. The other eighteen don’t fit on a square of paper.
Water works
水善利万物. It irrigates, it carries boats, it scours channels, it mixes mortar, it doesn’t stop.
Take that clause out and “does not contend” collapses into “does nothing.” A rock doesn’t contend either, and nobody frames a rock.
English translations are gentle here. “Water benefits all things” sounds like a passive property, the way water is wet. 利 in classical Chinese is closer to makes useful to, does good for, profits. It’s transitive and it’s something water is doing.
Water goes where nobody wants to be
处众人之所恶. The character 恶 has two readings. As è it means evil. As wù it means to loathe or dislike, and that is the reading here. So the line has nothing to do with dwelling in wickedness. It says water goes to the spot everyone else avoids.
Which concretely means downward. Drains, basements, the bottom of the fall.
When I read a house I want to know where the water ends up. A lot of older Sydney houses on clay sit level with or slightly below the ground around them, the downpipes discharge half a metre from the wall, and after a wet fortnight you can smell the subfloor from the hallway. The water didn’t compete with anybody for that position. It took the position nobody wanted, and it has been there ever since.
What “does not contend” actually declines
不争. Contend for what? For rank. For name, for credit, for who is upstream of whom.
Water never declines the work. That distinction is what disappears when the line gets quoted at somebody in a meeting.
The seven clauses nobody reads
居善地，心善渊，与善仁，言善信，正善治，事善能，动善时。
In dwelling, be good at ground. In mind, be good at depth. In dealing with people, be good at benevolence. In speech, be good at keeping your word. In governing, be good at order. In handling affairs, be good at competence. In movement, be good at timing.
Worth watching what 善 does across the chapter. In 上善 it’s a noun, the good. In 水善利万物 and in all seven clauses it’s adverbial: good at, skilled at. So the chapter is a list of competences, things you have to get good at doing. 事善能 is the blunt one. You need to actually be able to do the job; being pleasant about it doesn’t count.
动善时 is the hardest of the seven. You only ever see the timing afterwards.
与善仁 gives me trouble and always has. 与 can be read as giving, or as associating with, dealing with people. Both fit the sentence. I lean toward the second, because the other clauses all name a domain of conduct rather than a transaction, but I can’t defend that properly and I wouldn’t argue with someone who reads it the other way. It has been sitting unresolved for me for years.
Close to the Dao
故几于道. 几 means nearly, approaching. Water gets close.
Laozi doesn’t say water is the Dao, and translations almost always drop the qualifier because it reads awkwardly in English. My own guess at why it’s there is that water has its direction imposed on it by whatever ground it’s on. It doesn’t choose. That is a guess. The text doesn’t explain itself.
The chapter closes 夫唯不争，故无尤. Because it doesn’t contend, there is 无尤: no fault, nothing to be held against it. People misremember this as 无忧, no worries, which is a much larger promise and a different one. What’s on offer is the absence of blame, and nothing at all about whether you’re anxious.
Why it reads backwards so easily
Two reasons, I think.
The first is calligraphic. Four characters fill a square nicely, twenty-two don’t. Once the four have been on a wall long enough they stop being a fragment and become a sentence in their own right, and the sentence they become means relax.
The second is that the misreading is useful. Telling somebody to stop pushing carries more weight with an ancient author behind it. Nobody in that conversation is going to go and check the rest of the chapter.
Among the people who come to me about work, the ones who describe themselves as non-competitive are, six or seven times in ten, people who are frightened to open their mouths, quote a price, or say in front of the client which part of the job was theirs. Chapter 8 isn’t describing that. Water earns the low position by having already been useful to everything above it.
The scroll in the mechanic’s shop is probably still up, and I never asked anyone there whether they could get past the first four characters. Probably not.