Knowing Sickness
Read the full text in our reader
知不知上，不知知病。夫唯病病，是以不病聖人不病，以其病病，是以不病。
To know and say you don’t know is best; not to know and say you know is a sickness. Now, only because you are sick of the sickness are you not sick. The sage is not sick, because he is sick of the sickness; so he is not sick.
A short chapter on the difference between admitting you do not know something and pretending that you do.
To be “sick of the sickness” is to treat false certainty as a real flaw, and only that frees a person, or a ruler, from it.
The wordplay carries the argument. The same characters, 知 “know” and 不知 “not know”, run in mirror order across the two halves, so the sentence about wisdom and the sentence about sickness answer each other exactly.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Tao Te Ching 71 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 71 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/tao/71/