Tao Te Ching

Introduction

The Tao Te Ching — the "Classic of the Way and of Virtue" — is the founding book of Taoism and one of the most translated books in the world. In some five thousand Chinese characters, arranged in eighty-one short chapters, it speaks of the Way (Tao), the nameless source from which all things arise and to which they return, and of Virtue (Te), the power a person gains by living in accord with it.

Tradition ascribes the book to Laozi, the "Old Master", said to have kept the archives at the royal court of Zhou in the sixth century BC and to have been an older contemporary of Confucius. The text as we have it took shape over the following centuries; manuscripts on silk and bamboo, recovered from tombs in the twentieth century, show that it was already widely read in the third century BC.

Its teaching is at once paradoxical and practical: the soft overcomes the hard, the low is the root of the high, emptiness is what makes a thing useful, and the best ruler is one whose people hardly know he exists. Against ambition, display and force it sets non-action — acting without forcing, as water acts — and the simplicity of the uncarved block. Rulers and generals, poets and painters in East Asia have drawn on it for two thousand years, and readers all over the world still find in it a way of seeing that is calm, clear and deeply humane.

This translation follows the received text in the recension of Wang Bi (226–249), the version read and commented on in China since the third century. The chapters keep their traditional numbering: chapters 1–37 form the Book of the Way, chapters 38–81 the Book of Virtue.