和 · how to be in a fight
The Sorrow of Force
Takes the glamour out. Weapons are things of ill omen, and a victorious army is told to observe the order of a funeral. Whoever takes joy in bloodshed, the verse says, is not fit to govern.
The One Who Grieves Prevails
Where reluctance becomes a tactic — the warrior who would rather be the guest than the host, and would rather retire a foot than advance an inch. It ends by saying that the one who feels the pity of it is the one who wins.
The Power of Not Contending
Separates skill from heat. The one who is good at fighting is not angry, and the one who is good at defeating an enemy does not strive.
Force Rebounds
Force as something that reacts, with the evidence on the ground: where the camps stood, briers and thorns grow. Even the capable are told to do what is needed and nothing beyond it.
Holding the Left Tally
About the ending. A compromise that leaves one side with a grudge is not a good settlement; the advice is to take your own part of the agreement and not press the other person for theirs.
The Sage Does Not Compete
The attitude underneath all of it: the man of Tao does not dispute, and acts without striving. It is the last verse in the book.
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Other people have said useful things about conflict. These talks are theirs, not ours: we did not make them, and we do not agree with every word in them. They are here because a second person explaining the same thing a different way is often what makes it land.
Be Water, My Friend
Bruce Lee
Bruce Lee's phrase for this was "be water": water takes the shape of whatever it is put into, and it gets past an obstacle by going around it rather than through it. That is close to what verse 69 says on this page, where the fighter would rather give ground than push forward. He is worth hearing here because he is talking about real fights rather than about ideas, and he arrives at the same advice.
How to Disagree Productively and Find Common Ground
Julia Dhar · TED Podcasts
Dhar was a competitive debater, which means she spent years arguing positions she had been assigned rather than ones she held. That turns out to be the useful part: it separates the idea being argued from the identity of the person arguing it. Verse 68 makes the same separation from the other end — the one who is good at fighting is not angry. Heat and skill are not the same thing, and the heat is usually what makes an argument unwinnable.
The Walk from "No" to "Yes"
William Ury · TED-Ed
Verse 79 is unusual among advice about conflict because it is about the ending: a settlement that leaves one side holding a grudge does not count as a settlement. Ury spent a career on that problem, and two of his moves are worth the time — stepping back far enough to see the whole situation rather than only the person opposite you, and paying attention to the people around a conflict who are affected by it without being in it.
The Tao Te Ching does not tell you to avoid conflict, and it does not pretend conflict can always be avoided. Several of these verses are addressed to someone already in one, including the armed kind. What they are about is how to be in a fight without turning into the kind of person who fights.
The first thing the book does is take the glamour out. Verse 31 says a victorious army should observe the order of a funeral, and that anyone who takes joy in bloodshed is not fit to govern. This is not squeamishness. The book is consistent that force produces a reaction in kind, so a win bought with force carries the next fight inside it.
Its least obvious claim is that reluctance is an advantage. Verse 69 says the one who feels the pity of it is the one who wins. Wanting the fight is treated as a weakness in the fighter, because it narrows the judgement and commits force early, which the book names as how you lose the thing that was most worth keeping.
It also pays attention to the ending, which advice about conflict usually skips. Verse 79 says that a compromise which leaves one party holding a grudge is not a good settlement at all.