The chapter, in full: “Knowing others is wisdom. Knowing yourself is enlightenment. Mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is true power. Knowing you have enough is wealth. Forcing your way is to be on the right path. To keep what you have is to be preserved. To die and not be forgotten is to live long.” (知人者智，自知者明。胜人者有力，自胜者强。知足者富。强行者有志。不失其所者久。死而不亡者寿。)
The four ranks of strength
- Wisdom — knowing others. Useful, admired, and the lowest of the four: reading people is a skill, not a self.
- Enlightenment (明, clarity) — knowing yourself. The tradition’s highest kind of knowing: the person who sees their own patterns is harder to fool, and harder to rule.
- Strength — mastering others. Visible, impressive, fragile: every empire built on mastering others ends in revolt or exhaustion.
- True power (强) — mastering yourself. The only victory that costs no enemy: when your habits, impulses and fears follow your aim, you are strong in the only place that matters.
The practical core
- Prefer self-knowledge to people-reading — the clever analyst of others who cannot see their own pattern is, by this chapter’s standard, not even halfway up the ladder.
- Win against yourself, not against others — the one competition with no downside: today’s self, outperformed by tomorrow’s, quietly, without an audience.
- Know enough — “knowing you have enough is wealth”: the richest person in the room is the one who has stopped wanting the room. This is the same teaching as the paradox chapter’s hollow basin: the satisfied person cannot be robbed.
The last line
The chapter ends with its strangest claim: “To die and not be forgotten is to live long.” The teaching is that longevity is not the number of years — it is the reach of what you leave: the work, the kindness, the teaching that outlives the body. The chapter’s whole ladder, from knowing others to being remembered, is one staircase: the strength that lasts is the strength turned inward first.
Practise the chapter with the letting-go method, which is self-knowledge as a five-minute habit.
Dig deeper: the Taoism page and Chan meditation — free, deterministic and in plain English.