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.

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. 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. 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.

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. 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. The work neither argues nor exhorts so much as it states and lets the statement stand.

Taoists received it as scripture. By the second century CE it anchored organized Taoist religion, was given liturgical and meditative uses far from anything the verses plainly propose, and was read alongside the Zhuangzi as the canon of the tradition’s contemplative wing. 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; later readers, often with no interest in its Chinese setting, took it up as a manual of quietism, ecology, or management. 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