The way is empty, used, but not used up. Deep, yes! ancestral to the ten thousand things.

Blunting edge, loosing bond, dimming light, the way is the dust of the way.

Quiet, yes, and likely to endure. Whose child? born before the gods.

Note UKLG: Everything Lao Tzu says is elusive. The temptation is to grasp at something tangible in the endlessly deceptive simplicity of the words. Even some of his finest scholarly translators focus on positive ethical or political values in the text, as if those were what’s important in it. And of course the religion called Taoism is full of gods, saints, miracles, prayers, rules, methods for securing riches, power, longevity, and so forth — all the stuff that Lao Tzu says leads us away from the way. In passages such as this one, I think it is the profound modesty of the language that offers what so many people for so many centuries have found in this book: a pure apprehension of the mystery of which we are part.