Hard to Be Known
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吾言甚易知，甚易行。天下莫能知，莫能行。言有宗，事有君。夫唯無知，是以不我知。知我者希，則我者貴。是以聖人被褐懷玉。
My words are very easy to know and very easy to practice. No one in the world can know them; no one can practice them. Words have a root; affairs have a master. Now, it is only because there is nothing to know that they do not know me. Those who know me are few; those who follow me are precious. So the sage wears coarse cloth and carries jade inside.
Why Laozi's plainest chapter argues that being easy to understand doesn't mean being understood.
The teaching is easy, and still almost no one manages it, because words and affairs both have a root and an organizing principle that people overlook. Heshang Gong explains the “nothing to know”: Laozi’s virtue stays hidden and shows nothing on the outside, like jade carried under coarse cloth.
The line about why people fail to know him keeps a small fossil of grammar older than the plain vocabulary makes it feel: in a negative sentence like this one, the pronoun object is pulled in front of its verb, so the text literally reads “not me understand” instead of “not understand me”.
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