"The man of superior te does not strive for te, and so has te." That's the opening line of Chapter 38 of the Daode Jing in Wing-tsit Chan's 1963 translation, and it's the most quoted sentence ever written about the Taoist idea of virtue. Te (德, dé) comes from an old graph meaning "to obtain," and what you obtain, in Wang Bi's reading, is the natural power that arrives the moment you stop reaching for it. The title Daode Jing literally means "Classic of the Way and Virtue," and the second half of the text is called the Book of Te. Wang Bi, the prodigy commentator who died at twenty-three in 249 CE, spent more ink on Chapter 38 than on almost any other passage in the book. There's a reason.

The Cascade Chapter 38 Describes

Superior te doesn't try to be te, and inferior te can't stop trying. Paul Carus's 1913 translation of the same chapter puts the contrast plainer than Chan does: "Superior virtue is unvirtue. Therefore it has virtue. Inferior virtue never loses sight of virtue. Therefore it has no virtue." Carus rendered dé as "virtue" and Tao as "Reason," his own idiosyncratic choice of words, but the shape of the argument survives every translation. Goddard's 1919 version, less literal and more interpretive, opens the same line as "Essential teh makes no show of virtue, and therefore it is really virtuous." Whichever wording you read, the point repeats: virtue you have to hold onto by effort isn't the real thing.

The chapter keeps building after that opening contrast. It runs the same test against benevolence (仁, rén), righteousness (義, yì), and ritual propriety (禮, lǐ), three virtues Confucian tradition ranked in descending order of how much they depend on conscious effort. Superior benevolence acts without pretension. Superior righteousness acts, and does pretend. Superior ritual acts, gets no response, and then, in Carus's phrase, "stretches its arm and enforces its rules." Then comes the line Wang Bi built much of his commentary around: "one loses Reason and then virtue appears. One loses virtue and then benevolence appears. One loses benevolence and then justice appears. One loses justice and then propriety appears." Ritual, the last and most forced of the four, is what's left once "loyalty and faith" have already worn thin, the chapter says, calling it "the beginning of disorder."

That's a striking claim for a text usually dated somewhere between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE (scholars still argue over which) to make about ritual, the thing Confucian tradition treated as civilization's floor. Chapter 38 treats ritual as a symptom, not a cure. It only shows up after Tao, then te, then benevolence, then righteousness have each in turn failed to hold a person or a society together without being enforced from outside.

Confucius's own school didn't treat li that way. In the Analects (12.1), when his student Yan Hui asks about ren, Confucius answers with keji fuli, restraining the self and returning to ritual, treating li as the practical training ground where benevolence gets built, not a fallback position after everything else has failed. Chapter 38 reads like a direct answer to that view rather than an agreement with it. Whether the two texts were written in conversation with each other or arrived at opposite conclusions independently is a question historians of the Warring States period still debate.

Wang Bi and the Logic of Nothingness

Wang Bi wrote his commentary in the 240s CE, during the political instability of the late Wei dynasty, and died of illness in 249, not long after a shift in court leadership cost him his official post. He was twenty-three. In that short span he produced commentaries on both the Yijing and the Daode Jing that later readers, for close to two thousand years, treated as close to the default lens for reading either book.

His central move, worked out across the whole commentary and not just Chapter 38, reads the Daode Jing through wú (無), nothingness or non-being, as the root that makes yǒu (有), being, or any particular thing, possible at all. Historians of Chinese philosophy group Wang Bi with the Xuanxue (玄學, "Learning of the Mysterious") thinkers of the third century, a movement that read Confucian and Daoist texts against each other rather than as rivals. Applied to Chapter 38, that framework explains why superior te works only as long as it stays formless. The moment virtue becomes a thing you can name, point to, and hold onto, it has already become the inferior kind, propped up by effort instead of arising on its own.

Wang Bi's version of the text, with his commentary attached, became what scholars now call the received text or vulgate Daode Jing, the base version nearly every translator from the Song dynasty onward worked from, including all the English translators quoted in this piece. That matters more than it sounds like it should, because for most of the twentieth century it was the only version anyone had.

Which Came First, Tao or Te?

Chan, Carus, and Goddard, the translations quoted so far, all follow the same chapter order: the Tao chapters first, the Te chapters second, Chapter 38 opening the second half. That order comes from Wang Bi's received text. It isn't the only order the book has ever existed in.

In 1973, archaeologists excavating Mawangdui Tomb 3 near Changsha, in Hunan province, found two silk manuscripts of the Daode Jing buried with a Han dynasty official, copied sometime before 168 BCE. Both put the Te chapters first and the Tao chapters second, De Dao Jing rather than Dao De Jing. Robert Henricks built his 1989 translation directly from these manuscripts and titled it Te-Tao Ching for exactly that reason, restoring an order that predates Wang Bi's version by roughly four centuries. Twenty years later, in 1993, an even older cache turned up at Guodian, in Hubei province: bamboo slips buried around 300 BCE, containing partial, non-sequential material from the book, the oldest physical Laozi text known to exist.

None of the pre-20th-century translations could have known about either discovery. Chalmers (1868), Legge (1891), Balfour (1884), Heysinger (1903), Carus (1913), Mears (1916), and Goddard (1919) all published decades before Mawangdui came out of the ground and nearly a full century before Guodian. Every one of them necessarily worked from Wang Bi's ordering, because it was the only ordering that existed yet. Most translators since, with a few exceptions like Henricks, have stuck with it anyway. Whether Te or Tao came first in the book's own history is still an open question. What isn't in question is that the two halves were never meant to be read as separable, whichever one leads.

Te Before and After Chapter 38

Chapter 38 isn't the only place the text defines te. It's the most direct, but three earlier chapters build the same idea through image rather than argument, and all three land on the same phrase: xuándé (玄德), "profound virtue" or "mysterious virtue."

Chapter 10 describes a ruler who, in Carus's translation, "quickens them and feeds them," then repeats the pattern three times over: "He quickens but owns not. He acts but claims not. He excels but rules not. This is called profound virtue." Chapter 51 splits Tao and te into a division of labor: "Reason quickens all creatures. Virtue feeds them. Reality shapes them. The forces complete them." It closes on the identical line, "this is called profound virtue." Chapter 65 reaches for the same phrase again, this time for a ruler who governs without leaning on cleverness, and calls that governing "profound" and "far-reaching."

Chapter 55 doesn't use xuande by name, but it makes the same argument as an image instead of a claim. In Carus's translation: "He who possesses virtue in all its solidity is like unto a little child," untouched by venomous animals, able to cry all day without going hoarse. An infant doesn't hold onto anything and doesn't try to be strong. That's Chapter 38's whole argument, restated as a picture instead of a syllogism.

Read together, these four chapters treat te less as a moral quality you cultivate through discipline and more as a description of what happens once something, a ruler, a person, a natural process, stops interfering with its own unforced capacity.

What the Character Is Doing

德's history as a graph is debated among paleographers working from oracle bone and bronze inscriptions, and later dictionary traditions read different components into it. What's less disputed is the semantic range: an old core sense close to "to obtain" or "what one has gotten," widening over the course of the Zhou dynasty into something closer to "moral force" or "character." By the time the Daode Jing took shape, te already carried both senses at once, the getting and the having-become, which is part of why no single English word covers it cleanly.

Modern Mandarin still runs both meanings through the same root. 道德 (dàodé) is the ordinary word for morality or ethics. 品德 (pǐndé) means moral character. 德育 (déyù) is moral education in a school curriculum. Translators split over how to carry that range into English. Wing-tsit Chan kept the pinyin, te, and let the chapter's own argument define it. Carus went the opposite direction and translated it flatly as "virtue" throughout, which reads cleanly but imports a rule-following connotation the Chinese term doesn't automatically carry. Neither choice is wrong. It's the same problem every translator of this book runs into: how much interpretation to do on the reader's behalf before the reader even reaches the sentence.

Why Chapter 38 Resists Being a Technique

There's an obvious irony in a chapter that argues the harder you reach for virtue, the further it moves away, showing up in a book people now read looking for something to practice. Chapter 38 doesn't offer a technique. It offers a description and a warning: build a self or a society around explicit rules for benevolence, righteousness, or ritual, and you've already conceded that the more direct thing, whatever produced those behaviors without being asked, is gone.

That's a hard claim to act on directly, which is probably why Wang Bi spent so much commentary working out its logic rather than its application. The surrounding chapters give a slightly more workable picture. Te shows up as quickening without owning, feeding without ruling, holding on the way an infant's fist holds, firmly, without any idea that it's doing so.

Zhuangzi picks up the same thread in his own book, in the chapter Burton Watson titled "The Sign of Virtue Complete" (德充符, Dé Chōng Fú). Several of its central figures are disfigured or mutilated by punishment, and Zhuangzi's point is that they carry more te than the whole-bodied people around them, precisely because nothing about how they look gives them anything left to perform. Te, across both books, keeps showing up in the same place: wherever there's nothing left to reach for. That's the whole claim buried in Chan's opening line, and the reason Wang Bi, dying at twenty-three with barely enough time to finish the argument, thought it was worth the ink he gave it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does "te" (德) mean in Taoism?

Te (德, dé) is usually translated "virtue" or "power." The character's old core sense is close to "to obtain" or "what one has gotten," widening over the Zhou dynasty into something closer to "moral force" or "character." In the Daode Jing it describes the natural power that arrives once a person or thing stops reaching for it, not a rule to follow but a capacity that shows up unforced.

What is Chapter 38 of the Daode Jing about?

Chapter 38 contrasts superior te, which doesn't strive to be te and therefore has it, with inferior te, which never stops trying and therefore lacks it. It runs the same test against benevolence, righteousness, and ritual propriety, arguing each one appears only after the one before it has already failed, with ritual as the last and most forced of the four.

Who was Wang Bi, and why does his commentary on Chapter 38 matter?

Wang Bi was a Chinese philosopher who wrote his commentary on the Daode Jing in the 240s CE and died in 249 at the age of twenty-three. His edited version of the text, with commentary attached, became the received or vulgate Daode Jing, the base version nearly every translator from the Song dynasty onward worked from for close to two thousand years.

Did the Mawangdui manuscripts change how scholars understand Tao and Te's order?

Yes. Silk manuscripts excavated at Mawangdui in 1973, copied before 168 BCE, place the Te chapters before the Tao chapters, the reverse of Wang Bi's received ordering. Robert Henricks based his 1989 translation directly on these manuscripts and titled it Te-Tao Ching for that reason. Whether Te or Tao came first in the book's own history remains an open question among scholars.

How does Confucius's view of ritual differ from Chapter 38's?

In the Analects (12.1), Confucius treats li (ritual propriety) as the practical training ground where benevolence gets built, not a fallback position. Chapter 38 reads the opposite way, treating ritual as a symptom that only appears after Tao, te, benevolence, and righteousness have each already failed to hold a person or society together without being enforced from outside.

What is xuande (玄德), "profound virtue"?

Xuande is a phrase that appears in Chapters 10, 51, and 65 of the Daode Jing, describing a ruler or force that quickens, feeds, or governs without owning, claiming credit, or ruling over the outcome. It's the same argument Chapter 38 makes about te, restated across several chapters as a description of unforced capacity rather than a technique to practice.