The text's true authorship and date of composition or compilation are still debated, although the oldest excavated text dates back to the late 4th century BC. According to tradition, it was written around 6th century BC by the sage Laozi, a record-keeper at the Zhou dynasty court, by whose name the text is known in China. And there’s a fairly new reprinting, which means it’s pretty easy to find.The Tao Te Ching, Daodejing, Dao De Jing, or Daode jing, also simply referred to as the Laozi, is a Chinese classic text. Le Guin’s version of the Tao Te Ching (more excerpts over at Brain Pickings) was a great solace to me for the past four years, so much so that I put it in the recommended reading for Keep Going. “The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.” “To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.” This sentence from The Left Hand of Darkness, for example: If you read Le Guin after reading this translation, you realize how many lines from her books could’ve been lifted from Lao Tzu. To me, it is also the deepest spring.”Įvery poem seems to me a subtweet of our crooked world and our lousy, corrupt leaders. Of all the deep springs, this is the purest water. “Funny, keen, kind, modest, indestructibly outrageous, and inexhaustibly refreshing. “It is the most lovable of all the great religious texts,” Le Guin writes. At one point she recited some Robert Frost and some Basho:Įventually we said our goodbyes. I think of this woman now when I pick up the Tao Te Ching, and I wonder how she’s doing. We walked together from section to section. She said a lot of people in her life were dying so she was reading Lao Tzu.

We got to talking and discovered we both enjoyed poetry. “Well, you’re in the right place,” I said. He said he was marking which chapters he’d like to have read at his funeral.Ī few years ago, when you could actually shop in a bookstore and talk to strangers, an elderly woman walked up to me in a Half Price Books and said she had nothing to read. Once I saw him making notes from it and asked what he was doing. The book was my father’s he read in it often. It was a venerable object of mystery, which I soon investigated, and found more fascinating inside than out. The first Tao Te Ching I ever saw was the Paul Carus edition of 1898, bound in yellow clothe stamped with blue and red Chinese designs and characters. In the introduction to her translation of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, Ursula K.

Tao te ching