樸 · subtracting, not adding
Renounce Cleverness
Names what to drop first, and it is the performances: the show of saintliness, conspicuous righteousness, cleverness. Its positive instruction is short — recognise simplicity, cherish purity, reduce your possessions, want less.
The Mysterious Excellence
Complication named as the real difficulty in governing. Governing by policy is called a scourge; governing without it is called a blessing.
The Nameless Simplicity
Holds the line the whole subject turns on: once there were names it became important to know where to stop, and once that was known, the danger stopped.
Less and Less
Simplicity as a direction rather than a state: decrease upon decrease, set deliberately against the daily increase of study.
Return to the Uncarved Block
Built as a series of returns. Stay in obscurity while you are in the light and you become a model, and you come back to what this translation calls the first essence.
The Small Contented Land
What it looks like from outside: records kept on knotted cords, people enjoying their food and content with their houses, with boats and carts available and never needed.
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Other people have said useful things about simplicity. 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.
The Paradox of Choice
Barry Schwartz · TED
Verse 32 says that once there were names, it became important to know where to stop. Schwartz makes that point about choice: past a certain number of options, more of them stops helping and starts to cost. The deciding gets harder, and whatever is finally picked is enjoyed less because of everything that was not picked. It is this page's argument that complication produces the trouble it was meant to solve, at the scale of one person in a shop.
Why I Became an Extreme Minimalist
Aki · Samurai Matcha
This page says simplicity is something a person does rather than a style they adopt, and this is someone explaining what he actually removed and why. Aki is a village schoolteacher in Japan who got rid of nearly everything he owned. What makes it useful here is that he gives reasons instead of a look — which is the distinction verse 19 is drawing when it puts the performances first on the list of things to drop.
Simplicity in the Tao Te Ching is something you do, not a style you adopt. It is what is left after removing things, and the book is specific about what goes first: display, then cleverness, then policy.
The removals are not presented as sacrifices. They are presented as getting rid of causes. Showy virtue goes because it produces the counterfeit of virtue. Cleverness goes because it produces the very thing it was brought in to prevent. Verse 65 calls elaborate governing a scourge and plain governing a blessing, on the grounds that complication creates the disorder it then has to manage.
One line in verse 32 carries most of the weight: once there were names, it became important to know where to stop. Naming things and dividing them up is not condemned. It is described as the start of a process with no natural end, which is why a stopping point has to be put in on purpose.
What is left is described in the language of going back rather than getting ahead — back to a first essence, back to being a child, back to something nobody had to be taught.