What Isn't There
Thirty spokes unite in one hub; it is the center hole that makes the cart useful. Clay is molded into a vessel; it is the space within that makes the vessel useful. Doors and windows are cut for a house; it is the holes that make the house useful. Thus we gain by what is, but we use what is not.
, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 11
The teaching is deceptively simple: usefulness comes from what isn’t there. The wheel needs its empty hub to turn. The vessel needs its hollow center to hold. The room needs openings to be entered at all.
We tend to think of making as adding—clay to the wheel, words to the page, paint to the canvas. And it is that. But this ancient passage points to something easily overlooked: the clay becomes a vessel only because of the space it shapes around. Without the emptiness at its center, it would just be a lump of fired earth, beautiful perhaps, but unable to receive anything.
In an age when generation grows abundant—when filling space with content becomes trivially easy—this teaching seems to ask a quiet question. Not “what can you produce?” but “what space can you shape?” The spokes matter, yes. But the wheel turns on its empty center.
Perhaps making has always been this negotiation between substance and space, between what we add and what we preserve as openness. The vessel’s gift isn’t the clay itself, but the emptiness the clay makes available—the room it holds for something else to enter.