Indian stream·Tao Te Ching·Chapter 74 — When People Do Not Fear Death
What use is the threat of death?
When the people do not fear death, what use is the threat of death? If they did fear death and one could seize wrongdoers and execute them, who would dare? There is a master executioner (heaven). To execute in his place is to hew wood in the master carpenter's place — few escape injury to their hands.
Source context
- Theme
- futility of state-administered death as a deterrent against the fear of natural mortality
Steiner
not engaged in the GA corpus
Cross-tradition
- Stoic philosophy (Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius)Stoic ethics likewise holds that the fear of death, not death itself, is the operative disorder in human conduct, and that coercive punishment presupposes a misunderstanding of where genuine harm originates.
- Advaita VedantaThe Vedantic teaching that ultimate authority over life and death belongs to the cosmic order (rita / karma), not to any human agent, exhibits cross-tradition congruence with the Daoist refusal to assign the executor's role to political power.
- Biblical wisdom literature (Ecclesiastes)Qohelet's insistence that no human sovereign controls the moment of death (Eccl. 8:8) runs structurally parallel to Laozi's argument that the state usurps a function belonging to an order beyond human jurisdiction.
Chapter 74
The people do not fear death; to what purpose is it to (try to) frighten them with death? If the people were always in awe of death, and I could always seize those who do wrong, and put them to death, who would dare to do wrong?
There is always One who presides over the infliction death. He who would inflict death in the room of him who so presides over it may be described as hewing wood instead of a great carpenter. Seldom is it that he who undertakes the hewing, instead of the great carpenter, does not cut his own hands!