Tao Te Ching
In what may be the most faithful translation of the Tao Te Ching, the translators have captured the terse, enigmatic beauty of the original masterpiece without embellishing it with personal interpretation or bogging it down with explanatory notes. By stepping out of the way and letting the original text speak for itself, they deliver a powerfully direct experience of the Tao Te Ching that is a joy to come back to again and again. And for the first time in any translation of the Tao Te Ching, now you can interact with the text to experience for yourself the nuanced art of translating. In each of the eighty-one chapters, one significant line has been highlighted and alongside it are the original Chinese characters with their transliteration. You can then turn to the glossary and translate this line on your own, thereby deepening your understanding of the original text and of the myriad ways it can be translated into English. Complementing the text are twenty-three striking ink paintings brushed by Stephen Addiss and an introduction by the esteemed Asia scholar Burton Watson.
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Community Reviews
A very short, but insightful book on the "Ways of the Tao" and how living a life around it can bring a new fulfillment in peoples lives. Lessons that have a major impact on todays climate and the world we live in.
Some parts of this are very good and reminded me of guided meditations about mindfulness. However, there are a lot of parts about politics and about not traveling that I just can't get behind.
The Tao is about wisdom in action. It teaches how to work for the good with the effortless skill that comes from being in accord with the Tao (the basic principle of the universe). The Tao applies equally to good government, sexual love, childbearing, business, and ecology. The Tao the Chung is more folk wisdom than a religious treatise. Nevertheless, it can be more practical than a million sermons. Taoism seeks harmony by freeing the individual from the caustic effects of judgmental thinking, desire, and greed, and the fulcrum is the concept of non-action or doing not doing. Non-action is not the act of doing nothing, the purest form of action; the game plays the game; the poem writes the poem; we cannot tell the dancer from the dance. There is more to the book than philosophical abstraction. Common sense pervades the Tao the Chung. These lines discuss the roots of crime. If you overvalue possessions, people begin to steal. If you do not trust people, you make them untrustworthy, which describes the toll of illusory thought; there is good when the Tao is lost. When goodness is lost, there is morality. When morality is lost, there is a ritual. Ritual is the husk of true faith, the beginning of chaos. Therefore, the Master concerns himself with the depths, not the surface, the fruit, and the flower. He has no will of his own. He dwells and lets all illusions go.
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