Guarding the Small
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其安易持，其未兆易謀。其脆易破，其微易散。為之於未有，治之於未亂。合抱之木，生於毫末；九層之臺，起於累土；千里之行，始於足下。為者敗之，執者失之。聖人無為故無敗，無執故無失。民之從事，常於幾成而敗之。慎終如始，則無敗事。是以聖人欲不欲，不貴難得之貨；學不學，復眾人之所過。以輔萬物之自然，而不敢為。
What is at peace is easy to hold; what has not yet shown a sign is easy to plan for. What is brittle is easy to break; what is tiny is easy to scatter. Deal with it while it does not yet exist; put it in order while it is not yet in disorder. A tree that takes both arms to embrace grows from a hair’s tip; a tower of nine stories rises from heaped-up earth; a journey of a thousand miles begins from beneath your feet. Whoever acts ruins it; whoever grasps loses it. The sage does not act, so there is no ruin; he does not grasp, so there is no loss. When people go about their work, they often ruin it when it is almost done. Be as careful at the end as at the beginning; then there is no ruined work. So the sage desires what others do not desire, and does not prize goods that are hard to get; he learns what others do not learn, and brings back what most people have gone past. so as to help the natural way of the ten thousand things, and he does not dare to act.
Practical advice for catching failure early: hold things while they are still calm, and stay as careful at the end as at the start.
The chapter is a set of instructions for catching things early and staying careful to the very end, because most work is ruined right at the point it is nearly finished.
The last lines turn the method into a paradox about desire and learning. The sage wants and learns what others pass over, doubling back to correct the crowd’s own excesses, so that everything can be what it already naturally is. This text also reads one character differently in the couplet about brittleness: where a more familiar version has brittle things “melt” like ice, here they simply “break”, a harder edge on the same warning.
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