The Tao Te Ching by Laozi (-600)

The book opens by warning you off itself. The Way that can be spoken is not the eternal Way, the name that can be named not the eternal name. From that single refusal Laozi builds 81 short verses that keep circling a thing they admit language cannot hold, the Tao, the current running under everything that is. He never argues so much as shows. A wheel is useful for the empty hole at its hub, a cup for the hollow it cups, a room for the space the walls leave alone; water, the softest thing there is, wears the hardest stone away by yielding rather than striving. The Classical Chinese is so spare that each line can be turned a dozen ways, and read slowly the paradoxes stop sounding like riddles and start sounding like the truest account of how things actually move. Nothing in it raises its voice, and that is the point: it persuades the way water does, by going low and outlasting everything harder. Few books ask so little of you and rearrange so much.