Planning the Hard in Its Easy Stage (Daodejing 63)
Annotated translation of ch. 63: the three inverted practices, the debt repaid with de, and the book's doctrine of beginnings — plus the promise it refuses to make.
Chinese text
为无为，事无事，味无味。大小多少，报怨以德。图难于其易，为大于其细；天下难事，必作于易；天下大事，必作于细。是以圣人终不为大，故能成其大。夫轻诺必寡信，多易必多难。是以圣人犹难之，故终无难矣。
Pinyin
Wéi wúwéi, shì wúshì, wèi wúwèi. Dà xiǎo duō shǎo, bào yuàn yǐ dé. Tú nán yú qí yì, wéi dà yú qí xì; tiānxià nán shì, bì zuò yú yì; tiānxià dà shì, bì zuò yú xì. Shì yǐ shèngrén zhōng bù wéi dà, gù néng chéng qí dà. Fū qīng nuò bì guǎ xìn, duō yì bì duō nán. Shì yǐ shèngrén yóu nán zhī, gù zhōng wú nán yǐ.
Literal rendering
Act the non-acting; work the non-working; taste the tasteless. Great and small, many and few — repay resentment with de. Plan the hard in its easy stage; do the great in its fine stage. The world’s hard tasks surely arise from the easy; the world’s great tasks surely arise from the fine. So the sage never does the great — and therefore can complete the great. Light promises, surely little trust; much easy-taking, surely much hard. So the sage treats things as hard — and therefore in the end has nothing hard.
Term-by-term notes
- The three inverted practices. 为无为，事无事，味无味 — nine characters, three verbs each taking its own negation as its object: do the not-doing, work the not-working, taste the not-tasting. The wuwei concept page holds the grammar: this is not the absence of action but action’s inversion — the practice is named by its object. The chapter is the book’s method-chapter: it says what the sage actually does all day, and what he does is the negations.
- 报怨以德 — repay resentment with de. The editions themselves are uneasy with this line (parenthesized in some, absent in others — recorded, not adjudicated), and the tradition’s other half is the Confucian objection preserved in the Analects (Xian wen): asked “what about repaying resentment with de?”, Confucius answers — repay de with de, and resentment with straightness (以直报怨). The site records both because the phrase is one of the tradition’s genuine fork-points: the Daoist chapter puts it forward as the inverted practice applied to grievances; the Confucian objection is that it devalues de to spend it on resentment. The de concept page holds both sides.
- The doctrine of beginnings. 图难于其易，为大于其细 — plan the hard while it is easy, do the great while it is fine. The book’s most practical sentence: difficulty is a late stage, not a kind of thing; the hard was once easy, the great was once small. This is the same arithmetic as the ch. 22 reversals (the weak pole yields the strong result), applied to time instead of position: arrive before the name.
- 终不为大，故能成其大 — never do the great, and complete it. The sage refuses the great as a task (the great cannot be done; it can only be arrived at through the fine), and the refusal is what completes it. The ch. 17 translation’s invisible ruler is the same figure: the best doer is the one who was never seen doing the great.
- The promise it refuses to make. 轻诺必寡信 — light promises, little trust — and the chapter’s close: the sage treats things as hard, 犹难之, and so ends with nothing hard. The site keeps the close because it is the book’s anti-hack: ch. 63 is not a productivity tip (do small things and the big thing comes); it is a discipline of not promising, and the “in the end, nothing hard” is not a guarantee — it is what the non-promiser is left holding.
Where this passage sits
Ch. 63 is the method-chapter the site’s practice pages draw their pacing from: the sitting is planned in its easy stage, done in its fine stage, and never promised. With ch. 17 (the invisible best) and ch. 22 (the reversals), it completes the book’s practical trilogy.
Sources
- Daodejing ch. 63, received text, verified against the Sreading full-text edition and a second full-text reproduction (mindiver.se); the editions' treatment of 报怨以德 (parenthesized in some, absent in others) is recorded from the comparison, without adjudication