Rule a big country the way you cook a small fish.

If you keep control by following the Way, troubled spirits won’t act up. They won’t lose their immaterial strength, but they won’t harm people with it, nor will wise souls come to harm. And so, neither harming the other, these powers will come together in unity.

Note UKLG: Thomas Jefferson would have liked the first stanza. “Troubled spirits” are kwei, ghosts, not bad in themselves but dangerous if they possess you. Waley reads the second stanza as a warning to believers in Realpolitik: a ruler “possessed” by power harms both the people and his own soul. Taking it as counsel to the individual, it might mean that wise souls neither indulge nor repress the troubled spirits that may haunt them; rather, they let those spiritual energies be part of the power they find along the way.