Indian stream·Tao Te Ching·Chapter 63 — Acting Without Acting
Plan the difficult while it is easy
Act without acting; do without doing; taste the tasteless. Magnify the small; multiply the few; repay grudges with virtue. Plan the difficult while it is easy; tackle the great while it is small. The sage does not strive for greatness and so accomplishes the great.
Source context
- Theme
- effortless action, smallness as method, and the dissolution of difficulty through anticipatory simplicity
- Soul-faculty
- Consciousness Soul
Steiner
not engaged in the GA corpus
Cross-tradition
- Daoist wu-wei doctrineChapter 63's injunction to 'act without acting' (wei wu-wei) and to 'taste the tasteless' articulates the core Daoist principle that the sage operates from a mode of non-forcing that matches the natural movement of the Tao, structurally parallel to the chapter's theme of pre-emptive dissolution of difficulty before it arises.
- Advaita Vedanta — nishkama karmaThe Bhagavad Gita's teaching of action without attachment to fruits (nishkama karma) presents a cross-tradition congruence with Chapter 63's prescription of undertaking the great through accumulated small acts, both pointing to a mode of agency that bypasses ego-driven striving.
- Buddhist upaya (skillful means)The Mahayana concept of upaya — responding to conditions with the minimal, precisely calibrated intervention — shares structural congruence with Chapter 63's method of attending to the difficult while it is still easy.
Chapter 63
(It is the way of the Tao) to act without (thinking of) acting; to conduct affairs without (feeling the) trouble of them; to taste without discerning any flavour; to consider what is small as great, and a few as many; and to recompense injury with kindness.
(The master of it) anticipates things that are difficult while they are easy, and does things that would become great while they are small. All difficult things in the world are sure to arise from a previous state in which they were easy, and all great things from one in which they were small. Therefore the sage, while he never does what is great, is able on that account to accomplish the greatest things.
He who lightly promises is sure to keep but little faith; he who is continually thinking things easy is sure to find them difficult. Therefore the sage sees difficulty even in what seems easy, and so never has any difficulties.