Perceive Beauty
Translation by Tree Buffalo
Once you perceive beauty you perceive ugliness.
Once you perceive virtue you perceive non-virtue.
And so it goes with everything you perceive:
difficult and easy;
long and short;
high and low;
harmony and dissonance;
before and after.
Therefore, knowing that action must be taken, the wise person acts without acting;
and knowing that teaching must take place, teaches without teaching.
They attend to everything by rejecting nothing.
They produce but do not possess.
They achieve but do not take credit.
It is precisely this reason that the wise person never commits, and as a natural result commits forever.
Read some of the first English translations of Chapter 2 here.
