Returning to Simplicity
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絕聖棄智，民利百倍；絕仁棄義，民復孝慈；絕巧棄利，盜賊無有。此三者以為文不足，故令有所屬：見素抱樸，少私寡欲。
Cut off sageliness, throw away cleverness, and the people will benefit a hundred times over; cut off benevolence, throw away righteousness, and the people will return to filial piety and parental love; cut off cunning, throw away profit, and there will be no thieves and robbers. These three, taken as outward show, are not enough; so let there be something to hold on to: Show plainness, embrace the uncarved block; have little self-interest and few desires.
Three provocative commands to cut off received virtues, followed by what to hold onto instead: plainness and the uncarved block.
The three cuts are blunt, and the chapter itself admits they are only slogans, not enough on their own. So it ends by giving you something to actually hold on to.
This is one of the textually calmest of chapters 11 to 20: Heshang Gong's text and Wang Bi's agree character for character, once the print's own variant graphs are set to their standard forms. The one real interpretive turn is 見 in 見素抱樸, read here as “to display” rather than “to see”, the same special reading already used in chapter 3's 不見可欲.
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