Dao De Jing 5

Dao De Jing 5

Heaven & earth lack sentiment & treat the ten thousand things like straw dogs;

The sage lacks sentiment & treats the people like straw dogs.

The space between heaven & earth is like a bellows:

Empty yet unyielding.

The more it is worked the more it sends forth.

Much discussion impoverishes it:

Instead conserve the core 

Laozi, 道德經

Translation by John Hayes

The translation is is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. 

Unlike with my original poetry & poetry translations, I don’t asset a copyright claim on my translation of the Dao De Jing. It may be freely used under the terms of the Creative Commons license.

Image links to its source on Wiki Commons:

Tourists at Longhu Shan; photo by Tyler from Shanghai, China who makes the image available under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.