Tao Te Ching
SynopsisPlot
The Tao Te Ching is a series of meditations on the mysterious nature of the Tao--the Way, the Light, the very Source of all existence. According to Lao Tzu (a name meaning "the old master"), the Tao is found where we would least expect it
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About this book
The Tao Te Ching is a short philosophical text compiled in China roughly 2,500 years ago. It is attributed to Lao Tzu, a name usually understood as the old master. Its brief chapters meditate on the Tao, often rendered in English as the Way, and consider how this underlying principle works in nature, in governance, and in ordinary life, frequently through paradox and reversal.
In classical Chinese, a single character can carry a wide and sometimes contradictory range of meanings, and many of the book's terms have no exact English counterpart. Jonathan Star's edition responds to this by pairing an English translation with a verbatim, character-by-character rendering of the original, so that readers can see the possible senses held inside each line.
That second layer also allows comparison between modern translators, whose versions of the same passage often diverge widely. Only the Bible is said to have been translated more often than this text, yet its language keeps resisting simple equivalence in English, and the question of what Lao Tzu meant stays open across schools and centuries.
