67: Three Treasures
Introduction
Once again, a very different architecture emerged from working closely with the oldest extant manuscripts and refusing to follow later commentaries as doctrinal norms.
Rather than teaching compassion, frugality, and humility as personal virtues—as most inherited versions suggest—this verse reveals a structural manual for maintaining Integrity (德, dé) within the field of lived experience. It critiques the superficial markers of greatness, warns of pettiness becoming fine-grained and hard to detect, and offers three interwoven treasures—not as ideals, but as structural disciplines we must embody to stabilize Weaving the Way within us.
Translation
The World says,
“I’m great! Great and not petty.”
Greatness is possible,
just by not being petty?
Should pettiness endure,
it becomes hard to detect.
I always have three treasures
protected in the marketplace.
Presence,
Restraint,
Not daring to act before The World.
Consider this,
Presence enables courage;
Restraint enables expansiveness;
Not daring to act before The World,
allows one to become an enduring and mature vessel.
Now,
Abandoning their presence,
even while courageously engaging;
Abandoning their restraint,
yet still trying to expand;
Abandoning what follows,
and still acting first.
Thus they die!
Consider,
Presence in its simplicity,
reveals early signs.
Preserved, it strengthens.
Heaven builds me,
as presence encloses me.
Commentary
The World says,
“I’m great! Great and not petty.”
Greatness is possible,
just by not being petty?
This verse begins with a critique of how people frequently position themselves, “Well, I’m not doing anything that bad. So I’m good, right?” It’s a subtle trap that comes in many variations. It’s so much easier to let ourselves do things that “aren’t that bad” than it is to hold ourselves to constant growth.
Should pettiness endure,
it becomes hard to detect.
There’s a very real danger in cutting ourselves slack. Whatever we don’t hold ourselves accountable to, even “normal” and “totally OK” things that only we know we did, becomes our new benchmark. Then, the next thing that “isn’t so bad” is easier to do. Which becomes our new benchmark. Even if we avoid the slippery slope of increasingly poor decisions, normalizing micro-moments of misalignment makes them increasingly more challenging to see.
In my work, the relationship we take to honesty is the most common place where this principle shows up with negative consequences. In extreme cases, we may feel our survival depends on telling ourselves or others a lie. Then we have to live that lie to keep surviving. That lie builds a patchwork of altered reality that becomes the basis for interpreting events and making decisions, which are now considered “true” because of that foundation, but fundamentally lack integrity. These don’t have to be big lies. They don’t even have to be true survivor moments. They can be little white lies that protect our sense of identity. They can be little white lies to protect someone else’s feelings. Each one of them distorts our vision just a little bit and as they add up, the whole picture can change dramatically.
I think the most insidious and widespread version of this is some version of, “I’m OK. I’ve let that go. There’s nothing I need to do about that.” This type of pettiness, characterized by trivializing futility, places us firmly, if quietly, in the victim’s chair. We are not victims of our reality, we are Weavers of it. Whether we are conscious of it or not, every thought, word, and deed directly impacts the Way we Weave. Taking responsibility for that power means wielding the ability to respond with the knowledge that everything we do matters. Every thought you have shapes the way you see the world. That way of relating to the world shapes what you say and do. The world provides feedback on that, and you get to choose how to process that information.
Whatever you let by unexamined becomes finer and finer, until it becomes an invisible filament binding you to a Way that you didn’t consciously choose for yourself. According to this teaching, no matter how benign it may appear, it is an unacceptable circumstance. This is why the text demands Integrity (德, dé)—the internal alignment that makes responsiveness possible—rather than the hollow performance of virtue in order to Weave the Way.
I always have three treasures
protected in the marketplace.
Presence,
Restraint,
Not daring to act before The World.
This phrase marks a transition in the verse to what it takes to prevent pettiness from enduring. There are three fundamental principles (treasures) that we must cultivate. Unfortunately, we must safeguard these treasures in our day-to-day lives and resist the temptation to treat them as optional or give in to social demands that undermine them.
Presence is a quality of being that is absolutely committed to radically accepting whatever is happening in the present moment. A great presence is one of immediacy and intimacy, free from the distortions that arise from thoughts based on wishing, hoping, shoulding, preferring, or any other non-real condition. Importantly, it doesn’t demand that we don’t have wishes, hopes, shoulds, or preferences; only that we recognize them as an overlay influencing our experience as part of the present moment.
Restraint is maintaining self-control through self-knowledge. Being aware of our patterns and preferences, conditioned reactions, and tendencies to make things either harder or easier than they need to be enables us to experience a different quality of self-discipline than many of us associate with restraint. This isn’t a white-knuckle affair; it’s a profound form of self-stabilization.
Not daring to act before The World is very compact and precise in Chinese. It points back to (y)in-action (acting from the arising order, not from imposed will); being first, then becoming. We must maintain an awareness that our existence is on the tip of the needle between past and future. When we can do this, The World (our entire experience) is available to us as a basis of information, which I call What Is. Based on What Is we very clearly know What Must Be and can take resolute action. Should we dare to act before we are clear on What Is, then our action will invariably be misaligned. This process is always occurring. The only difference is the clarity with which it is engaged. In other words, a significant difference between a “master” Weaver of the Way and others is the amount of penetrating clarity brought to knowing What Is.
These treasures are not static qualities. Each one unfolds into a functional capacity, strengthening our Integrity with the Way exactly when we are most likely to send ripples of disharmony through it.
Consider this,
Presence enables courage;
Restraint enables expansiveness;
Not daring to act before The World,
allows one to become an enduring and mature vessel.
Now,
Abandoning their presence,
even while courageously engaging;
Abandoning their restraint,
yet still trying to expand;
Abandoning what follows,
and still acting first.
Thus they die!
The above movement walks us through how these three treasures serve our capacity for Integrity. It’s easy to turn these into “shoulds” that we artificially impose on ourselves, which is precisely not the point. Instead, let’s examine their function so we can recognize the necessity of authentically cultivating them.
Presence is undistorted intimacy with the present moment. How does this enable courage? It enables what appears courageous because fears, personal preferences, and wishful thinking are contextually taken into account. The way we make meaning, the emotions we experience, and the thoughts we have are all treated as information in Presence. This removes all compulsion and enables clear, responsive action. When we abandon our capacity for undistorted intimacy with the present moment, we act from a place that assumes our thoughts, emotions, identity, fears, preferences, and wishes have a prioritized validity over the rest of what is happening. That distorted lens results in actions that lead to “death.” Death more often means negative consequences for ourselves and others than biological death.
Restraint is self-stabilization through self-knowledge. How does this enable expansion? Because we are highly internally stabilized, there is nothing to protect. Having become fully internally referenced and aligned in body, heart, and mind, we can be authentically vast, compassionate, caring, and wise. Additionally, through our stability and self-awareness, whatever anyone brings to us can be held, because we intimately understand the human experience. When we abandon our self-examined basis for restraint, we step out of Presence and consequently further away from What Is. We find ourselves overextending our bodies, hearts, and minds, and thus we die (i.e., experience disharmonious circumstances).
The text reframes Not daring to act before The World as “abandoning what follows.” This draws our attention to the relationship between What is and What Must Be. By acting before we know What Is, we move forward with a lack of clarity regarding the consequences of our actions. All behaviors have consequences; this is an inevitable fact. When we “leap before we look,” we die.
When these treasures are fully embodied, they do not demand attention or recognition. As was made explicit in verse 17, “The ultimate Weavers of the Way? No one even knows they’re here.”
Consider,
Presence in its simplicity,
reveals early signs.
Preserved, it strengthens.
Presence is simple. It is precisely what happens before anything else that happens. Big emotional reactions? They happen after we have been present in an experience. Anxious thoughts, depressive moods, anger, lust, greed, spite, resentment. They all happen after the fact. If we choose to be immediately aware of our lived experience, we will see all the signs of disharmony before they arise. The more faithfully we preserve Presence, the more it becomes an unshakable foundation.
Heaven builds me,
as presence encloses me.
Being wrapped in the unshakable foundation of true Presence, we get out of the way. Wrapped in the bare fullness of this moment, we abide in a state of “not-knowing” and self-realization, enabling a return to Great Harmony (verse 66). Such harmony is the natural and inevitable result of these three treasures, which are, in reality, one: Presence.