A Note on the Translation

This is a complete translation of the eighty-one chapters of the Daodejing, made directly from the Classical Chinese. No earlier English version was used as its basis. The source is a public-domain digital transcription of the received text, which belongs to the family of the version annotated by Wang Bi (226–249), the text on which nearly all later readers have relied. In a few places it has readings found in the Heshang Gong text and elsewhere. James Legge’s translation of 1891 was opened only to check the sense of doubtful passages, and none of its wording is kept. Tao Te Ching is the older English spelling of Daodejing, “the classic of the Way and of virtue,” and we keep it as the title by which the book is known in English. Every other Chinese word, the author’s name Laozi (once spelled Lao Tzu) among them, is given in pinyin.

Each chapter prints the Chinese first, broken into its clauses, one to a line, and then the English, one line for each line of the Chinese, so that the original of any English line can be found by counting. The transcription has some characters wrongly restored from simplified forms, two characters left blank in chapter 20, and two misprints in chapter 64; these are corrected in the Chinese as printed here. Where our source differs from Wang Bi’s text in a way that changes the sense, the Chinese is printed as our source has it, the English follows it, and a note gives Wang Bi’s reading (chapters 1, 15, 17, 25, 28, and 39). The two parts keep their old names, the Book of the Way (chapters 1 to 37) and the Book of Virtue (38 to 81). The chapters have numbers only.

Laozi speaks briefly and turns his sayings over: great skill seems clumsy, the soft overcomes the hard. The English keeps his clauses short, repeats his parallel frames with the same words, and leaves his paradoxes unresolved. The words the book turns on are rendered the same way throughout. Dao is “the Way.” De is “virtue,” in the old sense of the power a thing has by its nature, as when one speaks of the virtue of a healing herb; it is not moral merit, but no other English word keeps the turn of chapter 38, where high virtue does not count itself virtue. Wuwei is “non-action” or “doing nothing.” Ziran, literally “self-so,” is “so of itself,” and never “nature.” Chang is “the abiding,” pu “the uncarved block,” and xuan, the color of deep water and the night sky, is “dark,” meaning hidden, never evil. The book never addresses a reader as “you,” and nothing from the commentators has been folded into it.

The seventeen notes are the translator’s. They explain a few old objects and customs and give the readings of Wang Bi where our source departs from them. Spelling and punctuation are American.