XII. So Tê is what an individual thing receives from Tao. The total spontaneity of all things is Tao. The spontaneity that an individual thing receives from Tao is Tê. As some commentator said, the relation between Tê and Tao is just like that between the water in a river or lake, and water in general. Burton , whose translation will be cited below, describes the subtle connotations. In nearly all cases I have rendered te as "virtue" except where it has the meaning of a favor or good deed done for someone, This word presents certain difficulties in Chuang Tzu. Sometimes he employs it to mean conventional virtue — that is, virtue in the Confucian or Mo-ist sense — in which case it has bad connotations; at other times he employs it in a good sense to mean the true virtue or vital power that belongs to the man of Tao. (Compare Waley's rendering of the title Tao-te-ching as The Way and Its Power.) I prefer not to try to distinguish these two usages in the translation because I do not wish to impose upon the English a distinction that is not explicit in the original. The reader should keep in mind, incidentally, that the words "virtue" (te) and "gain" or "to get" (te) are homophones, and this fact is the basis of frequent puns and word plays — that is, the man of true Taoist virtue is one who, as we would say in English, has "got it." Victor H. differentiates Zhuangzi'''s contextual usages of de. In Confucian or conventional contexts, te is translated as "virtue." In Taoist or unconventional contexts, it is translated as "integrity." The most etymologically precise equivalent in English is the archaic word "dough[tiness]." De was central in Daoist cosmology, and the Zhuangzi frequently explains it with dao "the Way" and tian "heaven; god". Chapter 12, "Heaven and Earth", has two good illustrations. In the Great Beginning, there was nonbeing; there was no being, no name. Out of it arose One; there was One, but it had no form. Things got hold of it and came to life, and it was called Virtue. Before things had forms, they had their allotments; these were of many kinds, but not cut off from one another, and they were called fates. Out of the flow and flux, things were born, and as they grew they developed distinctive