Chapter Three: "Guard What Is Good and Do Not Let It Go; Expel Excess and Let Shallow Attachments Thin Away. Once You Have Understood the Ultimate, Return to the Dao and Its Virtue." -- The Essentials of Cultivating the Way

I. "Guard What Is Good and Do Not Let It Go"

"Good" (shan) here does not carry the moral sense of "kind" or "virtuous" but rather means the state that accords with the Dao. Chapter 8 of the Laozi says: "The highest good is like water. Water excels at benefiting all things without contending." Here shan means "excelling at," "in accord with." "Guard what is good and do not let it go" means to hold fast to the state that accords with the Dao and not abandon it.

Why the particular emphasis on "do not let it go"$29 Because the greatest obstacle to cultivating the Dao is not ignorance but knowing yet being unable to hold fast. Chapter 70 of the Laozi states: "My words are very easy to understand and very easy to practice, yet no one in the world can understand them, and no one can practice them." And Guanzi, "Xinshu Xia": "Everyone desires knowledge, yet no one seeks within. What they wish to know is the external; that by which they know is the internal. Without cultivating the internal, how can one know the external$30" Everyone wants to know the principles of outer things but neglects inner cultivation. Knowing is easy; doing is hard; guarding the good is harder still.

II. "Expel Excess and Let Shallow Attachments Thin Away"

Yin means excess, overflowing. Ze means moisture or saturation, here understood as "clinging to" or "being mired in." Bo means thin, shallow, insubstantial. "Expel excess and let shallow attachments thin away" should be understood as: drive out excessive desires and distance oneself from superficial entanglements.

An alternative reading takes the phrase as a warning: "If one pursues excess, one's store of moral virtue (ze) becomes thin (bo)." Under this reading, it is an admonition: if instead of guarding the good one chases after excess, one's inner substance will be impoverished.

Regardless of which reading one prefers, the core meaning is the same: the cultivator must stay far from all that is excessive, superficial, and overflowing, and maintain inner purity and depth.

Chapter 12 of the Laozi says: "The five colors blind the eye; the five tones deafen the ear; the five flavors dull the palate; the chase and the hunt madden the heart; goods hard to come by impede one's progress. Therefore the sage is for the belly and not for the eye, and so rejects that and takes this." "For the belly and not for the eye" is a vivid expression of "guard what is good and do not let it go; expel excess and let shallow attachments thin away" -- nourish the inner (for the belly) and keep far from the seductions of external sights and sounds (not for the eye).

III. "Once You Have Understood the Ultimate, Return to the Dao and Its Virtue"

These two phrases are pivotal. Ji means the ultimate, the fundamental, the root. Fan means to return, to go back. "Dao and Virtue" (daode) here is not the later ethical sense of "morality" but the compound of Dao and De -- the Dao being the ultimate ground of all that is so about all things, and De being the concrete manifestation of the Dao in the individual (what one has "obtained" from the Dao is one's De).

"Once you have understood the ultimate, return to the Dao and its Virtue" means: once you have recognized the root and ground of things, return to the Dao and its Virtue.

The pairing of ji (ultimate) and fan (return) constitutes an important pattern of thought -- knowing the ultimate, one returns. This is a recurring theme in pre-Qin thought:

Chapter 25 of the Laozi: "Being great, it flows ever onward; flowing onward, it reaches afar; reaching afar, it returns." The movement of the Dao is "return" -- things pushed to the extreme reverse; what goes far comes back.

The Zhouyi, Hexagram Fu (Return), Tuan Commentary: "Its Dao returns and revolves; in seven days it comes back again. Such is the movement of Heaven." Fu (return) is fan (reversal); the movement of the Way of Heaven is a ceaseless process of returning.

Guanzi, "Xinshu Shang": "Empty your desires, and the spirit will enter and dwell. Sweep away impurities, and the spirit will remain." The practice of cultivation is likewise a "return" -- from the distractions of the external world, one returns to the inner stillness.

Thus, "once you have understood the ultimate, return to the Dao and its Virtue" is at once an epistemological proposition (recognizing the ultimate ground) and a practical proposition (returning to the cultivation of Dao and De). Knowledge and action are here unified.

IV. Why "Return" Rather Than "Advance"$31

This question deserves deep reflection. In the pre-Qin Daoist mode of thought, cultivating the Dao is not a matter of pressing forward or seeking outward, but of drawing back and returning inward.

Why$32 Because the Dao is not elsewhere; it is within oneself. The Guanzi "Neiye" itself says: "When the whole heart abides at the center, it cannot be veiled or hidden." The Dao is right there in the heart-mind; there is no need to seek it externally. One need only remove the coverings and return to one's original nature.

This accords perfectly with chapter 48 of the Laozi: "In the pursuit of learning, one gains daily; in the pursuit of the Dao, one loses daily." Learning is continual accumulation (seeking outward); cultivating the Dao is continual diminishment (returning inward). What is diminished$33 The desires, preconceptions, and attachments that obscure the original heart-mind.

In the Zhuangzi, "The Great Ancestral Teacher" (Da Zong Shi), there is the story of Yan Hui, disciple of the Master (Confucius), and his "sitting in forgetfulness" (zuowang): "I let fall my limbs and body, dismiss hearing and sight, part from form and abandon knowledge, and merge with the Great Thoroughfare. This is what I call sitting in forgetfulness." Sitting in forgetfulness is a kind of "return" -- from the state of having form and knowledge, one returns to the state of formless, unknowing Great Thoroughfare.

From the vantage of high antiquity, this mode of "return" may well originate in the observation of natural cycles: the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, the moon waxes and wanes, the four seasons revolve through spring, summer, autumn, and winter, and all things grow, flourish, are harvested, and are stored. The movement of Heaven and Earth is an unending cycle, an unending return. The ancients drew the insight from this that human cultivation, too, should emulate Heaven and Earth: an unceasing return to the primordial, the original state.