The Bellows of Heaven and Earth (Daodejing 5)
Annotated translation of the straw-dogs chapter: the bellows that is empty yet inexhaustible, and the last line the whole sitting tradition inherits — 'rather guard the center.'
Chinese text
天地不仁，以万物为刍狗；圣人不仁，以百姓为刍狗。天地之间，其犹橐籥乎？虚而不屈，动而愈出。多言数穷，不如守中。
Pinyin
Tiāndì bù rén, yǐ wànwù wéi chúgǒu; shèngrén bù rén, yǐ bǎixìng wéi chúgǒu. Tiāndì zhī jiān, qí yóu tuóyuè hū? Xū ér bù qū, dòng ér yù chū. Duō yán shuò qióng, bùrú shǒu zhōng.
Literal rendering
Heaven and earth are not benevolent — they treat the ten thousand things as straw dogs. The sage is not benevolent — he treats the hundred surnames as straw dogs. The space between heaven and earth — is it not like a bellows? Empty, and not exhausted; set in motion, and more comes out. Much speech runs out quickly — it is better to guard the center.
Term-by-term notes
- 刍狗 (chúgǒu, “straw dogs”): the sacrifice-object made of woven straw, honored while the rite lasts and discarded after — Wu Cheng’s gloss, preserved in the commentaries, is the standard reading: the heaven-and-earth does not cling to what it makes, and neither should the sage. 不仁 here is the chapter’s hardest word: not cruelty but the absence of favoritism — 天地无心于爱物, “heaven and earth have no heart set on loving things.” The ziran concept page keeps this as the tradition’s anti-favoritism claim: the world runs on its own, and the sage’s indifference is the correctness of scale, not coldness.
- 橐籥 (tuóyuè, “bellows”): the site’s tuoyue glossary gives the full term (the leather bag and the blow-pipe); here the verse does its work: 虚而不屈 — empty, yet never used up — and 动而愈出 — the more it moves, the more comes out. Wang Bi’s commentary draws the parallel to the Dao: the bellows has nothing of its own, so it can never be exhausted. This is the xu concept page’s founding image: emptiness as capacity, not absence.
- 多言数穷 (duō yán shuò qióng, “much speech quickly exhausts”): the warning against the storehouse-mind’s opposite — the mouth and the policy that never stop issuing. The variant 多闻 (“much learning”) appears in some editions, and the page keeps both; either way, the contrast is with the center that follows.
- 守中 (shǒu zhōng, “guard the center”): the line the whole sitting tradition inherits. The commentaries are explicit that this 中 is not the Confucian “middle way” — it writes through to 冲, the empty: 守中 = 守住虚静, “guard the empty stillness.” The state’s own study column records the same reading: 中通”冲”，指内心的虚静，不是儒家所谓的中庸. What is guarded is the bellows’s interior — the empty center from which the motion comes.
Where this passage sits
Chapter 5 is the book’s physics of emptiness, and its last line is the site’s shortest bridge from the Daodejing to the sitting manuals: “guard the center” is what the sitting protocol operationalizes, and “empty yet inexhaustible” is what the stillness question answers with. Paired with ch. 25 (the cosmology: the self-so order) and ch. 16 (the practice: empty to the utmost), the three translations together hold the site’s DDJ spine.
Sources
- Daodejing ch. 5, received text, verified against multiple editions (Daodejing.org with Wang Bi's and Su Zhe's commentaries; the Gushiwen teaching edition; the CCDI study column). Note the variant: most received texts read 多言数穷; some editions read 多闻数穷