Seeing Far
Read the full text in our reader
不出戶，知天下；不窺牖，見天道。其出彌遠，其知彌少。是以聖人不行而知，不見而名，無為而成。
Without going out the door, you know the world. Without peeping through the window, you see the Way of Heaven. The farther you go out, the less you know. So the sage does not go, yet he knows; does not see, yet he names things; does nothing, yet it is done.
Why leaving your own door might teach you less about the world, not more, and how the sage knows, names and finishes things without doing any of the ordinary work.
This is an unusually bold claim about knowledge. Heshang Gong reads it through the old idea of correspondence between the person and the cosmos: knowing your own body and household is already knowing other bodies and households, because the same pattern runs through both.
The sage’s closing three-part line is one of the tightest summaries in the book of what non-doing looks like in practice. This text’s last clause reads 無為而成, tying it to the book’s own central term for effortless action, where Wang Bi’s plainer wording says only “accomplishes without acting”.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Tao Te Ching 47 in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the Tao Te Ching — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Tao Te Ching 47 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/tao/47/