text
The Tao Te Ching
One of the most translated books in the world, and a large proportion of those translations are not translations — made by authors who cannot read the original, from earlier English versions.
What it is
Eighty-one short chapters, around five thousand Chinese characters — a book you can read in an hour and not finish in a lifetime.
Its opening line announces the problem: the dao that can be spoken is not the constant dao; the name that can be named is not the constant name. Everything after that is written in the knowledge that it cannot say what it is about.
Its recurring images: water, which yields and wears away stone; the uncarved block, pu, simplicity before it is worked into something; the valley and the female, which receive rather than assert; and the usefulness of emptiness — the hub is useful because of the hole, the vessel because of the space inside, the room because of the door and windows.
Where it came from
Traditionally written by Laozi at a frontier gate. Almost certainly compiled over time from circulating material, probably reaching something like its present form in the fourth or third century BCE.
The manuscript evidence is unusually good. The Mawangdui silk texts (168 BCE) contain two nearly complete copies — with the two halves in the reverse order, De before Dao, which is why some scholars call it the Dedaojing. The Guodian bamboo slips (c. 300 BCE) contain only about a third of the text in three separate bundles, strong evidence of gradual assembly rather than single authorship.
How it is read
As philosophy, for wu wei — non-forcing — and the paradoxes of yielding strength.
As political theory, which is systematically omitted in Western spiritual readings. A large part of the book is addressed to rulers. It advises governing by not interfering, keeping the people simple and well-fed rather than clever and ambitious, avoiding war and taking no pride in victory, and — in chapter eighty — a small state whose people can hear the neighbouring village's dogs and never go there. It is also pointedly anti-Confucian: when the great Dao is abandoned, benevolence and righteousness appear; when family relations are not harmonious, filial piety is praised. The virtues Confucianism cultivates are, on this reading, symptoms of decline.
As a religious text, within Daoism, where it is scripture with a commentarial tradition and liturgical use.
What we can and cannot say
We can say the translation situation is a genuine problem and readers should know about it.
There are well over two hundred English versions, and the Daodejing is sometimes described as the most translated book after the Bible. A substantial proportion of them are not translations. They are rewritings, produced by authors who do not read classical Chinese, working from earlier English versions — a practice that is not always disclosed and is sometimes disclosed and ignored.
Stephen Mitchell's popular version is the best-known example; he does not read Chinese and has been open that it is an interpretation rather than a translation. Ursula Le Guin, working with a sinologist, called hers a rendition and was similarly clear. Many others are neither clear nor careful.
The consistent effect is the one documented for Rūmī: the specific becomes the general. The political advice to rulers softens into personal counsel. The anti-Confucian polemic, which requires knowing what it is arguing against, disappears. The cosmological terms become metaphors. What emerges is a book of gentle aphorisms about flow and balance — which sells extremely well and is not the text.
We can say the difficulty is real and translators are not merely being lazy. Classical Chinese lacks explicit subjects, tenses and number; the text is deliberately paradoxical; and key terms — dao, de, ziran, pu — have no English equivalents. Competent scholarly translations disagree with each other substantially, including about the first line.
We can say the honest approach is to read a scholarly translation alongside whichever popular version you already know, and notice what is different. It is a short book. Doing this takes an afternoon and is more instructive than any commentary.
We cannot say what it means. Two and a half thousand years of Chinese commentary have not settled it, and the text's own first line suggests the difficulty is intended.
Further reading
- D.C. Lau, Philip Ivanhoe or Moss Roberts for scholarly translations.
- Robert Henricks's editions of the Mawangdui (1989) and Guodian (2000) manuscripts.
- Any popular version you already own, read next to one of the above.