lumen

Situations concordance: Tao Te Ching

This exhibit’s situations index. Each entry starts from a moment in a human life and points to the passage or passages in this exhibit’s corpus, the Tao Te Ching in James Legge’s translation, that speak to that moment. The passages are not summarized into a new teaching, reordered inside themselves, or used to explain another exhibit’s text. The order and voice of the text are left untouched.

References are to units in corpus.json. Where a quoted answer contains words in parentheses, those parenthetical glosses are James Legge’s own additions in this edition. They are kept because they are part of the edition, and they are Legge’s, not the received text standing alone.

The situations

When what matters most will not hold a name. Tao Te Ching 1.1.
When the deepest things stay mysterious however long they are considered. Tao Te Ching 1.4.
When rivals and opposites define each other. Tao Te Ching 2.2.
When leading, teaching, or parenting without forcing. Tao Te Ching 2.3, 57.3.
When governing people without breeding rivalry or theft. Tao Te Ching 3.3.
When wanting the low place instead of the high one. Tao Te Ching 8.1, 66.1.
When the useful part of a thing is its empty space. Tao Te Ching 11.1.
When needing stillness, and watching things return to their root. Tao Te Ching 16.1.
When cleverness and display have made life worse. Tao Te Ching 19.1.
When feeling partial, crooked, empty, or worn out. Tao Te Ching 22.1.
When keeping from self-display and self-assertion. Tao Te Ching 22.2.
When wondering what was there before everything. Tao Te Ching 25.1.
When facing war, weapons, and grief for the killed. Tao Te Ching 31.1.
When weighing knowing others against knowing yourself. Tao Te Ching 33.1.
When fame is set against life, or wealth against life. Tao Te Ching 44.1-3.
When ambition turns to discontent, and always wanting to be getting. Tao Te Ching 46.2.
When restless and seeking far from home. Tao Te Ching 47.1.
When learning crowds out living. Tao Te Ching 48.1.
When holding your tongue because you know, and listening because you do not. Tao Te Ching 56.1.
When having much while others do not have enough. Tao Te Ching 77.1.
When being soft in a hard conflict. Tao Te Ching 43.1, 78.1.
When holding three treasures in hard times: gentleness, economy, and shrinking from taking precedence of others. Tao Te Ching 67.2.
When thinking you know what you do not know. Tao Te Ching 71.1.
When speaking sincerely. Tao Te Ching 81.1.
When doing the work without resting in it as an achievement. Tao Te Ching 2.3, 37.1.

Usefulness, measured within this exhibit only

These measures describe this exhibit alone. They are never used to compare it with another exhibit.

Coverage: 25 situation entries, drawn from 28 of the 30 units in this exhibit’s corpus. The two units not placed above are Tao Te Ching 40.1-2 and 60.1. They are recorded as unplaced rather than forced into a situation they do not plainly fit.
One-sitting use: whether a person entering through one of these situations can reach the cited passage and read it in one sitting. This has not yet been observed with a reader, so no result is claimed.
Evidenced use: only a report of real use, logged with its source and date, counts. No evidenced use is claimed yet.

Gaps in this selection, named

The full text speaks of situations this selection does not stage:

Death, and the fear of it (chapters 50 and 74).
Anger at injustice and at heavy taxes (chapter 75).
Old age and the body’s weakening, beyond the softness of chapter 76’s opening section.
Reconciliation after a great quarrel (chapter 79).

A reader whose moment is one of these will find no answer here. That is the selection’s limit, stated rather than hidden.

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