The Three Treasures of Taoism

The chapter begins with a surprising claim. Laozi says that all the world calls his Tao great — but because it is great, it resembles nothing. If it resembled anything, he says, it would long since have become small. This is his way of warning against the kind of system-building that reduces living wisdom to a checklist. And then, immediately after that warning, he offers what is the closest thing to a checklist in the entire book. The three things he holds dear, he says, are ci, jian, and not daring to be first in the world. This tension — between the book's resistance to formulas and this moment of unusual directness — is worth holding onto as you read what follows. These are not rules. They are orientations. Laozi is not prescribing behavior; he is pointing at something.

The Three Treasures

Chapter 67 of the Tao Te Ching is the only place Laozi uses the language of "treasures" (bao, 寶) for his own teachings. He names them and then immediately explains why they matter in practice — which is itself unusual for a text that often refuses to explain itself. The three are:

The first treasure is ci (慈) — compassion, loving-kindness, mercy. The character originally depicts a mother's care for her children, and that image is important. It is not the abstract love of a principle but the concrete, attentive love of someone who notices and responds to particular need.

The second treasure is jian (儉) — frugality, conservation, thrift. Not miserliness, but the quality of not using more than is needed, of preserving rather than depleting. Laozi will tell us this extends well beyond the material.

The third treasure is harder to translate because it is expressed as an action: bu gan wei tianxia xian (不敢為天下先) — literally "not daring to be first under heaven." This is often rendered as humility, or as yielding, or as not competing for the front position. It is the quality of stepping back, of not needing to lead, of letting others go first.

Compassion (Ci)

Laozi's compassion is not sentimental. He is not calling for a warm glow of goodwill or the performance of sympathy. The character ci implies something more active and more costly: being genuinely moved by the condition of others, to the point where it changes how you act. He connects it directly to courage — "from compassion comes courage," he writes in Chapter 67. This is the opposite of what we might expect. We tend to think of courage as a self-directed quality, something you summon for your own purposes. Laozi suggests that the deepest courage comes from caring about something beyond yourself.

I have three treasures which I hold and keep. The first is mercy; the second is economy; the third is daring not to be ahead of others. From mercy comes courage; from economy comes generosity; from humility comes leadership.

— Laozi, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 67 (James Legge, trans.)

There is a Taoist metaphysical dimension to ci as well. In the Taoist view, all things emerge from the same source — the Tao gives rise to the ten thousand things, and in some sense they all share a fundamental nature. If you understand this at anything more than an intellectual level, compassion is not an achievement or a moral discipline; it is a natural response to the recognition that the suffering person in front of you is made of the same stuff you are. The distance between you and them is a useful practical fiction; at root, there is no separation. Laozi's compassion is grounded in this metaphysical reality, not in moral obligation.

In daily life, ci shows up as the quality of actually paying attention to people — not managing them, not helping them in ways that serve your need to be helpful, but meeting them where they are with genuine attention. This is harder than it sounds. Much of what passes for compassion is really a performance of compassion — the behavior without the underlying orientation. Laozi, characteristically, is interested in the orientation, not the behavior.

Frugality (Jian)

The second treasure, jian, is among the most misunderstood of Laozi's concepts. The word is often translated as "frugality" or "thrift," which sounds like it belongs in a household budget. But Laozi's jian extends to everything. It is, at its core, the principle of not depleting — of knowing the difference between enough and too much, and stopping at enough.

Chapter 67 says that "from frugality comes generosity" — from jian comes capacity to give. This seems paradoxical until you think about it. The person who uses only what they need retains surplus. The person who consumes compulsively — attention, resources, social capital, emotional energy — is perpetually depleted and has nothing left to offer. True generosity, Laozi implies, is impossible without jian. You cannot give from an empty container.

This applies to far more than money. Consider words: the person who speaks only when they have something genuine to say is listened to when they speak. The person who fills every silence — who reaches for words the way a nervous person reaches for a drink — depletes the currency of language until even their important words carry little weight. Laozi, who wrote an entire philosophy in five thousand words and then apparently disappeared into the wilderness, clearly understood this. The Tao Te Ching is itself an act of jian.

It applies to attention as well. To give someone your full, undivided attention is one of the rarest and most valuable things you can offer. It requires that you haven't already scattered your attention in seventeen directions, that you have something left in reserve. Jian, in this sense, is not about deprivation. It is about having the discipline to preserve what matters so that it remains available when it is truly needed.

Humility: Not Daring to Be First

The third treasure is the most counterintuitive, and Laozi knows it. He returns to it throughout the Tao Te Ching with what seems like genuine relish for the paradox. Chapter 67 states: "From humility comes the ability to lead." Chapter 8 uses water as the image — water benefits all things and does not compete; it goes to the low places that people disdain, and therefore it is close to the Tao. Chapter 22 says: "Yield and overcome." Chapter 68: "The best leader is not warlike." And perhaps most strikingly, Chapter 66: "The reason the river and sea are able to be lords of a hundred valley streams is that they are good at staying low."

What Laozi is describing is not the false modesty of someone who pretends to think less of themselves than they do. That is performance, and performance is exactly what Taoism opposes. He is describing something more radical: the genuine willingness to let others go first, to not compete for position, to not need to be seen as the one who knows most or leads best or achieves most. Because he doesn't compete, he writes, no one can compete with him. This is not a strategic calculation — "be humble and you'll get more in the end." It is a description of what happens naturally when you stop needing to be first: the struggle dissolves, and something more genuine and more durable takes its place.

In leadership terms — and the Tao Te Ching is partly a manual for leadership — this means the leader who does not need credit can accomplish more than the one who does. Chapter 17 describes the ideal ruler as one under whom the people complete their work and then say, "We did it ourselves." The ruler who needs to take credit introduces distortion into the whole system; his people manage him rather than managing the work. Laozi's humility is not weakness but a specific kind of strength that comes from having nothing to defend.

How the Three Relate

Laozi presents the three treasures as a whole, and they function as one. Each enables the others; each is diminished without the others.

Compassion makes genuine humility possible, because when you genuinely care about others, the question of your own position becomes less urgent. The parent does not wonder whether the child is getting more credit than she deserves; she is too busy caring about the child. That is the same relational orientation that allows the Taoist to step back from competition — not because she is suppressing her ego, but because her attention has genuinely moved elsewhere.

Frugality creates the conditions for compassion to become real. Compassion that has been depleted — by stress, by overcommitment, by a life structured around constant activity and stimulation — is compassion in theory only. The person who is genuinely present with others, who has the inner resources to actually be moved by their situation, is the person who has not exhausted themselves. Jian, understood as conservation of self, is what makes ci possible in a sustained way.

And humility, the third treasure, is what prevents compassion from curdling into manipulation and frugality from hardening into miserliness. Without humility — without the genuine willingness to step back and let things be as they are — both compassion and frugality can become tools of the ego: "I am helping because it confirms who I am" or "I am preserving because I am afraid of loss." The third treasure keeps the other two honest.

The Three Treasures in Modern Life

It would be easy to treat the three treasures as ancient wisdom that is difficult to translate into contemporary life. In fact, they are unusually applicable — perhaps more obviously needed now than in Laozi's time, precisely because the pressures pulling in the opposite direction are so intense.

Everything about the contemporary attention economy runs against jian. The systems we live within are specifically designed to extract maximal use of attention, time, and cognitive resources — to ensure that no margin remains, that the cup is always drained. A person practicing jian in this environment is not being austere; they are being quietly subversive. Choosing not to consume, not to fill every quiet moment, not to speak every half-formed thought — this is a genuine act of resistance in a culture built on depletion.

Humility, in a social media environment that rewards self-promotion as a survival skill, requires deliberate counter-cultural commitment. The incentive structure is designed to reward those who push to the front. And yet most of us have noticed that the people we find most genuinely admirable — the ones whose influence actually lasts — are not generally the loudest or most self-promotional. Laozi's paradox, that the one who does not compete cannot be competed with, still holds. It simply requires the patience to live it out over a longer timeframe than the one the algorithm rewards.

As for compassion: in an era of increasing tribalism and distance from one another's lived experience, the quality of genuine attention — the willingness to be actually moved by another person's situation — is both increasingly rare and increasingly necessary. It doesn't require any special spiritual achievement. It requires, mostly, slowing down enough to notice, and being secure enough in your own position to let their reality actually land.