Guarding Against Strength
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人之生也柔弱，其死也堅強。萬物草木之生也柔脆，其死也枯槁。故堅強者死之徒，柔弱者生之徒。是以兵強則不勝，木強則共強大處下，柔弱處上。
When a person is alive, he is soft and supple; when he is dead, he is hard and stiff. When the ten thousand things, grass and trees, are alive, they are soft and tender; when they are dead, they are withered and dry. So the hard and stiff are the companions of death; the soft and supple are the companions of life. So when an army is strong, it does not win; when a tree is strong, weaker growth grows together on it. The strong and great occupy the lower place; the soft and supple occupy the upper.
The hardness of death versus the softness of life, argued from the body and from plants, ending in a genuine four-way textual crux.
The chapter argues from what anyone can see in bodies and plants, then turns it on armies and trees. In Heshang Gong’s reading a large, strong tree simply gathers weaker growth on top of itself.
Wang Bi’s commentary resolves the last line as tree anatomy: the strong and great below are the trunk and root, and the soft and supple above are the branches. The line about the strong tree is a genuine four-way crux, with four different readings across the witnesses.
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