throughout her works … and there are compositions of the same strain to be found in the books of all ages.” His own observation suggests that an Emersonian rendition of the Tao Te Ching might have a special resonance for the modern reader.
The Tao Te Ching—pronounced
dow
as in
dowel, der
, as in the slightly slurred last syllable of
under
, and
jing
, as in
jingo
—is a short and simple book filled with aphorisms, epigrams, folk wisdom, and what one writer has called “polemic proverbs,” all concerned with the mystery and beauty of the universe, accompanied by profound advice on how human beings might negotiate that universe in a fruitful, peaceful, and ultimately transcendent way.
With the Holy Bible and the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching is one of the three most translated books in all of human history, despite the fact that its authorship, its date, and the circumstances of its original publication are still debated among scholars worldwide. There is, however, no argument that it
was
published in ancient China, around 571 B.C., a fact confirmed as recently as 1993, when fourteen inscribed strips of bamboo containing about 40 percent of the known text (to which two translators, Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall, have given the title
The Great One Gives Birth to the Waters)
were discovered in a royal tutor’s tomb at Guodian, near the city of Ying, once the capital of the southern kingdom of Chu.
What is also as certain as the physical history of the Tao Te Ching—a title that is generally taken to mean “The Classic Book of the Way and Its Power,” or “The Classic Book of the Ultimate Reality and Its Ideal Manifestation”—is the universal magnetism it has exerted on readers for centuries. Whatever historical arguments surround its roots, the little more than five thousand words of its text have been consistently recognized as among the most provocative and inspiring mystic teachings ever written. Whether rendered as rhyming verses 4 or short chapters of prose, the cryptic, paradoxical, and yet simple and powerful text sets forth the central themes of Taoist thought as the British philosopher Bertrand Russell saw and admired them: “Production without possession, action without self-assertion, and development without domination.” In our current age of spiritual questing, religious revisionism, and political and military conflicts, the Tao Te Ching continues to offer seekers a fascinating framework in which to pursue the paths to peaceful prosperity, the possibility of reincarnation, the confirmation (or disconfirmation) of the existence of the soul, the right way to govern with “a light hand,” the “moral equivalent to war,” and other eternal questions of life’s meaning.
This great work continues to be a beacon for the modern reader even though the Tao Te Ching was written in an ancient Mandarin dialect that is no longer spoken, and the text arose in a cultural background even more different from our modern Western environment than contemporary China is. The thoughts of Lao Tse remain influential around the world, as witnessed, for example, by the continuing spread of interest in and practice of Zen Buddhism, which owes much of its groundwork to Taoist principles as offered in the Tao Te Ching. Likewise, millions of unaffiliated men and women who pursue a spiritual search for a deeper meaning to the human condition turn to the eighty-one verses or chapters that make up this classic.
The original text was divided into two parts, the first thirty-seven chapters being considered the “Upper” part, devoted to
Tao
, which is the supreme, cosmic, indestructible energy or universal force (or what, in theistic systems, is suggested by the word
God)
. The second, or “Lower,” part of forty-four verses deals with
Te
, the manifestation, the behavior, the shape and the power of the
Tao
. In purely
Western, modem terms we might say that
Tao
is what we call Nature, and
Te
is the way Nature works
The Tao Te Ching—pronounced
dow
as in
dowel, der
, as in the slightly slurred last syllable of
under
, and
jing
, as in
jingo
—is a short and simple book filled with aphorisms, epigrams, folk wisdom, and what one writer has called “polemic proverbs,” all concerned with the mystery and beauty of the universe, accompanied by profound advice on how human beings might negotiate that universe in a fruitful, peaceful, and ultimately transcendent way.
With the Holy Bible and the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching is one of the three most translated books in all of human history, despite the fact that its authorship, its date, and the circumstances of its original publication are still debated among scholars worldwide. There is, however, no argument that it
was
published in ancient China, around 571 B.C., a fact confirmed as recently as 1993, when fourteen inscribed strips of bamboo containing about 40 percent of the known text (to which two translators, Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall, have given the title
The Great One Gives Birth to the Waters)
were discovered in a royal tutor’s tomb at Guodian, near the city of Ying, once the capital of the southern kingdom of Chu.
What is also as certain as the physical history of the Tao Te Ching—a title that is generally taken to mean “The Classic Book of the Way and Its Power,” or “The Classic Book of the Ultimate Reality and Its Ideal Manifestation”—is the universal magnetism it has exerted on readers for centuries. Whatever historical arguments surround its roots, the little more than five thousand words of its text have been consistently recognized as among the most provocative and inspiring mystic teachings ever written. Whether rendered as rhyming verses 4 or short chapters of prose, the cryptic, paradoxical, and yet simple and powerful text sets forth the central themes of Taoist thought as the British philosopher Bertrand Russell saw and admired them: “Production without possession, action without self-assertion, and development without domination.” In our current age of spiritual questing, religious revisionism, and political and military conflicts, the Tao Te Ching continues to offer seekers a fascinating framework in which to pursue the paths to peaceful prosperity, the possibility of reincarnation, the confirmation (or disconfirmation) of the existence of the soul, the right way to govern with “a light hand,” the “moral equivalent to war,” and other eternal questions of life’s meaning.
This great work continues to be a beacon for the modern reader even though the Tao Te Ching was written in an ancient Mandarin dialect that is no longer spoken, and the text arose in a cultural background even more different from our modern Western environment than contemporary China is. The thoughts of Lao Tse remain influential around the world, as witnessed, for example, by the continuing spread of interest in and practice of Zen Buddhism, which owes much of its groundwork to Taoist principles as offered in the Tao Te Ching. Likewise, millions of unaffiliated men and women who pursue a spiritual search for a deeper meaning to the human condition turn to the eighty-one verses or chapters that make up this classic.
The original text was divided into two parts, the first thirty-seven chapters being considered the “Upper” part, devoted to
Tao
, which is the supreme, cosmic, indestructible energy or universal force (or what, in theistic systems, is suggested by the word
God)
. The second, or “Lower,” part of forty-four verses deals with
Te
, the manifestation, the behavior, the shape and the power of the
Tao
. In purely
Western, modem terms we might say that
Tao
is what we call Nature, and
Te
is the way Nature works
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