Tao Te Ching

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The Tao Te Ching — also written Daodejing, and in James Legge’s version the Tao Teh King — is the short classic at the foundation of Taoism: roughly five thousand characters, arranged in eighty-one brief chapters, half of them in verse. Its title is usually rendered “the classic of the Way and its power” or “its virtue,” from dao (the Way), de (power, virtue, the way a thing comes into its own), and jing (a canonical book). For more than two thousand years it has been among the most translated and most commented texts in the world.

The title and its three words

Each word of the title carries more than the translations let through. Dao began as an ordinary noun — a road, a path, and by extension a method or a way of doing a thing — before this book and its kin gave it the weight of the ground of everything, the source and underlying pattern from which the ten thousand things issue and to which they return. De, conventionally “virtue,” holds at once the moral sense of integrity and an older, almost physical one: the inherent potency by which a thing is fully and effortlessly itself, the way water is wet or a seed unfolds — the power proper to each existence when it is not forced against its grain. Jing originally named the warp threads strung lengthwise on a loom, the fixed lines through which the weft is woven; from that it came to mean a norm, a constant, and so a canonical text, a “classic.” The book wears, then, a title that promises a warp for the whole fabric of things: the Way, and the power that follows from keeping to it. The work circulated under other names — the Daode zhenjing, “true classic of the Way and its power,” once Taoist religion canonized it, and informally the Wuqian wen, the “five-thousand-character” text, after the round figure of its length. The eighty-one-chapter received form divides into two parts: the Dao jing, chapters one through thirty-seven, opening on the unnameable Way, and the De jing, chapters thirty-eight through eighty-one, opening on the highest de. The numbering is editorial, not original; the chapter breaks fall in different places across the surviving manuscripts.

Laozi and the legend of the pass

Tradition assigns the book to Laozi — “the Old Master” — a sage held to have been an older contemporary of Confucius and keeper of the Zhou royal archives, who, leaving civilization in disgust, set the work down at a frontier guard’s request before vanishing west. The earliest connected account is the brief life in Sima Qian’s Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian), compiled around 100 BCE. There the Old Master is named Li Er, styled Dan — Lao Dan, “Old Dan” — a man of Chu, archivist (shi) at the court of the Zhou, to whom the young Confucius is said to have come for instruction in ritual and left as if having met a dragon. Foreseeing the dynasty’s decay, Laozi rode west; at the pass the keeper of the frontier, Yin Xi, would not let him through until he wrote down his teaching, whereupon he composed a book in two parts on the Way and its power, some five thousand words, and departed, and no one knew where he ended. Sima Qian himself records the uncertainty — he reports three candidates for the figure and confesses that the world cannot say which is true. Later Taoist devotion would elaborate the western journey into the conversion of the barbarians and the deification of Laozi as Lord Lao, a cosmic deity rather than a court clerk; the historian’s notice already carries the seam between a man and a myth.

Scholarship treats that life as legend and the text as a compilation: an anthology of sayings from differing hands, drawn together probably in the fourth or third century BCE, its named author a figure around whom the material gathered rather than its single composer. The verses are uneven in voice and sometimes in argument; rhymed proverbs sit beside prose glosses, and the same images recur with variation, as in a tradition of oral wisdom set down over time. The book bears no internal date and names no events, which has let estimates of its formation range across two centuries; the consensus places the received whole near the third century BCE, after the Zhuangzi’s core and in dialogue with the contending schools of the Warring States — the Confucians above all, whose program of cultivated virtue, ritual propriety, and active governance the Tao Te Ching answers point for point with its counsel of emptiness and restraint.

The manuscripts and a text in flux

Manuscripts recovered in the twentieth century, at Mawangdui and Guodian, show the collection still in flux at an early date, its two halves once ordered the other way around. In 1973, in a Han tomb at Mawangdui near Changsha, two silk manuscripts of the text came to light, copies “A” and “B,” datable to about 200 BCE — older by more than a millennium than any version then known. Both place the De part before the Dao part, the reverse of the order the tradition settled into, so that the book the world reads as opening on the unnameable Way once opened on the highest virtue. In 1993, bamboo slips from a tomb at Guodian, copied around 300 BCE, pushed the witness back another century. The Guodian material holds only about two-fifths of the received text, distributed across three bundles in sequences unlike anything later, with passages that elsewhere read as polemic against Confucian values appearing in milder form or absent altogether. Together the two finds reframed the question of the book’s making: not a single sage’s testament copied faithfully down the centuries, but a body of sayings that was still being selected, arranged, and rebalanced as late as 300 BCE — a classic caught in the act of becoming one.

The version the world inherited was fixed later still, by commentators. Two early readings, in particular, shaped every line. The Heshang Gong commentary — ascribed to a “Riverside Elder” of the Han and steeped in the cosmological self-cultivation of the Huang-Lao current — became the text Taoist religion read, ranking, in its own estimate, second only to the scripture it explained. The other was the work of Wang Bi (226–249 CE), a philosopher of extraordinary precision who died at twenty-three; his edition and commentary, read through the lens of xuanxue, the “dark learning” that took the Way as a fertile nothing underlying all being, became the standard recension — the basis of nearly every Western translation and of the chapter order and divisions the text now wears. What “the Tao Te Ching says,” for most readers in most languages, is in no small part what Wang Bi found it to say.

How the text speaks

What the text says it says obliquely, by paradox and reversal. The Way that can be spoken is not the constant Way; the supple outlasts the rigid; the empty hub is what makes the wheel useful. In Legge’s rendering the figure runs: “The thirty spokes unite in the one nave; but it is on the empty space (for the axle), that the use of the wheel depends.” The book reasons throughout by this move — locating efficacy in what is absent, low, or yielding: the hollow of a vessel that makes it a vessel, the cut doors and windows that make a room usable, the valley that holds because it lies beneath. Its political and ethical counsel turns on wu wei — commonly translated “non-action,” better understood as action without strain, the ruler who governs least and the person who, like water, prevails by yielding and seeking the low place. Water is the recurring emblem: nothing under heaven is softer, yet nothing better wears down the hard and strong, precisely because it does not contend. Beside it stands the image of the pu, the uncarved block — the wholeness of a thing before the chisel of distinction and ambition has worked on it, the simplicity the sage and the well-governed people are urged back toward. The work neither argues nor exhorts so much as it states and lets the statement stand. Where the Confucian classics build, the Tao Te Ching subtracts; its sage diminishes himself until he is hard to see, and accomplishes without claiming, so that when the work is done the people say they did it of themselves.

From poem to scripture

Taoists received it as scripture. By the second century CE it anchored organized Taoist religion: the Xiang’er commentary, associated with the early Celestial Masters and dated to the late second century, reads the verses no longer as a sage’s counsel but as the direct precepts of a divine Dao, binding on a covenanted community — the moment the poem becomes a holy book. From there it was given liturgical and meditative uses far from anything the verses plainly propose, recited and visualized within the body, and folded into the Daoist canon, where it and its kindred philosophical texts formed one of the supplements to the Three Caverns. Its language of essence and reversal, of returning to the root and the prenatal simplicity, supplied a vocabulary that the inner alchemists of later centuries would draw on for neidan, the work of refining the body’s vital forces toward an undying self. Throughout, it was read alongside the Zhuangzi as the canon of the tradition’s contemplative wing — the two together standing, within Chinese culture, as the great counter-voice to the Confucian order, the literature of withdrawal, spontaneity, and the natural against ritual, hierarchy, and the duties of office. Its companions among the old classics included the divination manual the I Ching, whose cosmology of paired and shifting forces the later tradition wove together with the Way; the resonance between the two became a staple of Chinese metaphysics and, later, of Neo-Confucian cosmology in turn.

The text and its scholarship

The textual history of the Tao Te Ching is now among the best-documented of any ancient book, precisely because the ground has shifted so often beneath it. Robert Henricks’s Lao-tzu: Te-Tao Ching (Ballantine, 1989) was the first full English translation built on the Mawangdui silk manuscripts, and restores the De-before-Dao order they preserve; its title deliberately inverts the familiar one. D. C. Lau’s Tao Te Ching (Penguin, 1963; revised with a Mawangdui appendix, Chinese University Press, 1982) remains a standard scholarly rendering of the received text, set out chapter by chapter with the translator’s analytic introduction on the book’s composite character. Rudolf Wagner’s A Chinese Reading of the Daodejing (SUNY Press, 2003) gives the critical text of Wang Bi’s recension with his commentary in parallel, the fullest account in English of how the standard version was made. For the classical philosophical setting, Angus C. Graham’s Disputers of the Tao (Open Court, 1989) places the book among the contending schools of the Warring States. The article “Laozi” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, by Alan Chan, surveys the authorship problem, the manuscript finds, and the commentarial traditions with full references; the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Wang Bi treats the commentator (Wang Bi) whose edition became the received text. The text in Chinese, in its received and excavated recensions side by side, is gathered at the Chinese Text Project, the standard open digital corpus for early Chinese literature.

In the public domain, the spine is Legge: his complete Tao Teh King of 1891 is hosted here at /library/daoism/tao-teh-king/, drawn from the same translator’s two-volume The Texts of Tâoism (Sacred Books of the East, volumes 39 and 40), which bundles the complete Tao Te Ching, the complete Zhuangzi, and a cluster of minor scriptures in a single set. Legge’s rendering is careful and woodenly literal where later versions are fluent, and its Tao is half-shaped to the categories of a Christian Orientalist science of religion; it is indispensable as the foundation of the English reception and dated in equal measure, as the manuscript and commentarial revolutions of the last century have moved well past it.

The book in the West

In the West it arrived through translators like Legge, whose 1891 rendering placed it in the Sacred Books of the East beside the scriptures of other faiths and did much to install the Tao Te Ching, in the European imagination, as the single essential book of a “world religion” called Taoism. Later readers, often with no interest in its Chinese setting, took it up as a manual of quietism, ecology, or management. It became, by some counts, the most-translated text after the Bible, rendered into English alone scores of times — a record that owes as much to the verses’ openness as to any fidelity, since their compression and paradox leave room for each age to find its own counsel in them: the contemplative drawn to its quietism, the environmental reader to its deference to the natural, the executive to its art of governing by not interfering. Within the perennialist current, René Guénon and his successors read it as one expression of a single primordial metaphysics underlying the great traditions — a reading the broader Western reception only amplified. That reach is part of its history, though it tells little about what the book was for. The text keeps its reticence: it commends the Way precisely as the thing that withdraws from being named.

→ In the library: Legge — The Tao Teh King (1891) · Legge — The Texts of Tâoism (SBE 39 & 40, 1891)

→ Related: Taoism · Confucianism · Daoist Canon Daozang · Daoist Neidan · I Ching · Zhou Dynasty · Quietism · Meditation · China · Neo Confucianism Song Lixue