My Words Are Very Easy to Understand
The Text
吾言甚易知，甚易行。天下莫能知，莫能行。言有宗，事有君。夫唯无知，是以不我知。知我者希，则我者贵。是以圣人被褐而怀玉。
My words are very easy to understand, very easy to practise — yet none under heaven can understand, none can practise. Words have ancestry; affairs have masters. It is because of not knowing these that no one knows me. Few know me — that is my value. So the sage wears coarse cloth and carries jade within.
Reading it
The book’s own afterword. The difficulty was never the words — it is that the teaching contradicts every operating assumption of the audience. Coarse cloth and inner jade is the social diagnosis and the dignity in one image: undervalued outside, intact inside.
全书自带的跋。难的从来不是话——是这番话与听众的每一条运行假设相反。「被褐怀玉」一句话里装着社会诊断与尊严：外面被低估，里面完好无损。
Say one plain true thing this week that everyone already knows and no one says. Notice the cloth and the jade.
这周说出一件人人都知道、却没人说的平平常常的真话。看看褐衣与玉。