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The Tao Te Ching can be seen as advocating mostly "female" (or Yin) values, emphasising "water" fluidity and softness (instead of the solid and stable "mountain"), choosing the obscure and mysterious aspect of things in order to be able to rule-without-ruling them. In this respect, this book can be understood as challenging "male" (or Yang) values such as clarity, stability, positive action, and domination of nature, values often also referred to as Confucian.
When he is born, man is soft and weak; in death he becomes stiff and hard... the hard and mighty are cast down; the soft and weak set on high. (ch. 76) shows again this focus on the softness but in another dialectic : the newborn baby and the old man. Rigidity is the attribute of the death, while weakness is the attribute of life. When things or beings are at their beginning, everything is possible. When things have not developed yet it is the right time to act on them with better chances to have a good result. So a kind of "return" to the beginings of thing, or to one's own childhood, is required. (Note that this idea is close to some assumptions of Psychoanalysis.)
The naturalistic aspect of this book is also a social concern. As in the theory of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Tao Te Ching assumes that ancient times were those of happiness, purity of intentions, full communion with nature, "the times when anyone could look inside the nests of all the birds". Problems arose when humanity "invented" culture and civilisation. In an idealistic state as described in chapter 80, the people should "come back to the usage of knotted ropes" (in place of any other form of writing.)
However, the "Return" shouldn't be understood as a simple (and reactionary) way back to the past, but as a "contraction", a "reduction", a "withdrawal" or even a "retreat" in oneself, like in this anti-confucianist saying: Learning consists in adding to one's stock day by day; the practice of Tao consists in subtracting day by day (ch. 48) or in this strategy advice I dare not advance an inch but retreat a foot instead. (ch. 69) Diminish one's ego instead of improve it by the mean of studies brings to real wisdom. Let the enemy do the first step (thus reducing its range of possiblities) is the way to get power on him.
Although this idea of a "Return", in its psychological side, is close to some modern pratices like introspection, what is to be reached is not the self but emptiness.
Search of Vacuity is a common concern for many different Asian wisdoms like Taoism, Buddhism, and some aspects of Confucianism. In the Tao Te Ching, emptiness is the theme of many chapters and one could see the entire book as a suite of variations on "the Powers of Emptiness". An explanation on how emptiness has power is to be found in chapter 11:
Looking at a Chinese landscape painting , one could understand also how emptiness (the unpainted parts) has the power of giving life to the beings (trees, mountains, rivers...) it surrounds. Being empty for a man means having no heart on his own, having no fixed preconceptions on how things should be, having no intentions, no agenda. For the ruler's point of view, emptiness is not far from the liberal laisser-faire: let things happen by themselves is the best way to help them growing.
There are many possible translations of the book's title, as the meaning of the Chinese characters is somewhat wide.
Thus, 道德經 could be translated as "The Scripture of the Way and the Virtue", "The Great Book of the Way and its Power", "The Doctrine of The Path and its Virtues", etc.
Though commonly referred to as the 道德經, the title is probably a fusion of the two books of scriptures, namely 道經 and 德經, and the latter has been found in first place in some recent discoveries. It is likely that the combined name of both books has no real intended meaning, though this is at present impossible to ascertain given the numerous revisions of the scriptures.
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