joining issue; The best user of men acts as though he were their inferior. This is called the power that comes of not contending, Is called the capacity to use men, The secret of being mated to heaven, to what was of old. (68, tr. Waley) Mair interprets these de occurrences. As it is used in the Tao Te Ching, te signifies the personal qualities or strengths of the individual, one's personhood. Te is determined by the sum total of one's actions, good and bad. Therefore it is possible to speak of "cultivating one's te." Like karma, te is the moral weight of a person, which may be either positive or negative. In short, te is what you are. Te represents self-nature or self-realization, only in relation to the cosmos. It is in fact the actualization of the cosmic principle in the self. Te is the embodiment of the Way and is the character of all entities in the universe. Each creature, each object has a te which is its own manifestation of the Tao. The Zhuangzi The Zhuangzi uses de 191 times. Many contexts praise Daoist "integrity; inner power", some mock Confucianist and Mohist "virtue", and others make de wordplays. One of the chapter titles is "De chong fu" (5, , "The Sign of Complete Virtue"). Several of the Zhuangzi translators (listed here) explain the difficulties of rendering de into English. Frederic H. Balfour (1881:xxxvii) succinctly glosses de with Greek and Chinese. . In ethics, Virtue — [areté "excellence"]; in physics, Energy — [dunamis "potential power; force"]. ["The Tao"] is the ["body; embodiment"] of which is the ["use; function"]. James Legge (1891:81) gives this footnote to the "De Chapter". , 'About the Attributes;' of Tâo, that is. It is not easy to render here by any other English term than 'virtue,' and yet there would be a danger of its thus misleading us in the interpretations of the chapter. The 'virtue,' is the activity or operation of the Tâo, which is supposed to have come out of its absoluteness. Even Han Fei so defines it here, — 'Teh is the meritorious work of the Tâo.' cites two examples. Next, we come to the conception of Tê, or virtue. Lao Tzŭ said: "Tao produces a thing; Tê maintains it." – "Tao Tê Ching," 51. Chuang Tzŭ said: "That which things get in order to live is called Tê." – Chapter